- “Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.”
- “It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly…
Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.” - “we have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like. This is what we mean by optimal experience. It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair”
- “Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.
Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue—yet these could have been the best moments of his life. Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life—that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine“ - “The primary reason it is so difficult to achieve happiness centers on the fact that, contrary to the myths mankind has developed to reassure itself, the universe was not created to answer our needs. Frustration is deeply woven into the fabric of life. And whenever some of our needs are temporarily met, we immediately start wishing for more. This chronic dissatisfaction is the second obstacle that stands in the way of contentment”
- “When people try to achieve happiness on their own, without the support of a faith, they usually seek to maximize pleasures that are either biologically programmed in their genes or are out as attractive by the society in which they live. Wealth, power, and sex become the chief goals that give direction to their strivings. But the quality of life cannot be improved this way. Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome obstacles to fulfillment”
- “This paradox of rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.”
- “As people move through life, passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they sooner or later face an increasingly nagging question: “Is this all there is?” Childhood can be painful, adolescence confusing, but for most people, behind it all there is the expectation that after one grows up, things will get better. During the years of early adulthood the future still looks promising, the hope remains that one’s goals will be realized. But inevitably the bathroom mirror shows the first white hairs, and confirms the fact that those extra pounds are not about to leave; inevitably eyesight begins to fail and mysterious pains begin to shoot through the body. Like waiters in a restaurant starting to place breakfast settings on the surrounding tables while one is still having dinner, these intimations of mortality plainly communicate the message: Your time is up, it’s time to move on. When this happens, few people are ready. “Wait a minute, this can’t be happening to me. I haven’t even begun to live. Where’s all that money I was supposed to have made? Where are all the good times I was going to have?””
- “Why is it that, despite having achieved previously undreamed-of miracles of progress, we seem more helpless in facing life than our less privileged ancestors were? The answer seems clear: while humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.”
- “To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances. This challenge is both easier and more difficult than it sounds: easier because the ability to do so is entirely within each person’s hands; difficult because it requires a discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present. And before all else, achieving control over experience requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important and what is not.”
- “As Freud and many others before and after him have noted, civilization is built on the repression of individual desires. It would be impossible to maintain any kind of social order, any complex division of labor, unless society’s members were forced to take on the habits and skills that the culture required, whether the individuals liked it or not. Socialization, or the transformation of a human organism into a person who functions successfully within a particular social system, cannot be avoided.”
- “The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one’s shoulders.”
- “The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body. In this sense, it functions as a clearinghouse for sensations, perceptions, feelings, and ideas, establishing priorities among all the diverse information. Without consciousness we would still “know” what is going on, but we would have to react to it in a reflexive, instinctive way. With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly. And we can also invent information that did not exist before: it is because we have consciousness that we can daydream, make up lies, and write beautiful poems and scientific theories.”
- “The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.”
- “The structure of consciousness is beginning to emerge, but so far we have a rather static picture, one that has sketched out the various elements, but not the processes through which they interact. We need now consider what follows whenever attention brings a new bit of information into awareness. Only then will we be ready to get a thorough sense of how experience can be controlled, and hence changed for the better.”
- “One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder—that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy.”
- “The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience. When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly. There is no need to worry, no reason to question one’s adequacy. But whenever one does stop to think about oneself, the evidence is encouraging: “You are doing all right.” The positive feedback strengthens the self, and more attention is freed to deal with the outer and the inner environment.”
- “The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in front of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform—the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day. Most people would grow tired of such work very soon. But Rico has been at this job for over five years, and he still enjoys it. The reason is that he approaches his task in the same way an Olympic athlete approaches his event: How can I beat my record? Like the runner who trains for years to shave a few seconds off his best performance on the track, Rico has trained himself to better his time on the assembly line. With the painstaking care of a surgeon, he has worked out a private routine for how to use his tools, how to do his moves.”
- “These examples illustrate what we mean by optimal experience. They are situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve a person’s goals, because there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat for the self to defend against. We have called this state the flow experience, because this is the term many of the people we interviewed had used in their descriptions of how it felt to be in top form: “It was like floating,” “I was carried on by the flow.” It is the opposite of psychic entropy—in fact, it is sometimes called negentropy—and those who attain it develop a stronger, more confident self, because more of their psychic energy has been invested successfully in goals they themselves had chosen to pursue.”
- “Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies. The self becomes more differentiated as a result of flow because overcoming a challenge inevitably leaves a person feeling more capable, more skilled. As the rock climber said, “You look back in awe at the self, at what you’ve done, it just blows your mind.” After each episode of flow a person becomes more of a unique individual, less predictable, possessed of rarer skills. Complexity is often thought to have a negative meaning, synonymous with difficulty and confusion. That may be true, but only if we equate it with differentiation alone. Yet complexity also involves a second dimension—the integration of autonomous parts. A complex engine, for instance, not only has many separate components, each performing a different function, but also demonstrates a high sensitivity because each of the components is in touch with all the others. Without integration, a differentiated system would be a confusing mess. Flow helps to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all the senses are focused on the same goal. Experience is in harmony. And when the flow episode is over, one feels more “together” than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people and to the world in general. In the words of the climber whom we quoted earlier: “[There’s] no place that more draws the best from human beings…[than] a mountaineering situation. Nobody hassles you to put your mind and body under tremendous stress to get to the top…. Your comrades are there, but you all feel the same way anyway, you’re all in it together. Who can you trust more in the twentieth century than these people? People after the same self-discipline as yourself, following the deeper commitment…. A bond like that with other people is in itself an ecstasy.” A self that is only differentiated—not integrated—may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person whose self is based exclusively on integration will be connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity. The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow. Paradoxically, it is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.”
- “Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.”
- “THERE ARE TWO MAIN STRATEGIES we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better. For instance, feeling secure is an important component of happiness. The sense of security can be improved by buying a gun, installing strong locks on the front door..
The other method by which we can feel more secure involves modifying what we mean by security. If one does not expect perfect safety, recognizes that risks are inevitable, and succeeds in enjoying a less than ideally predictable world, the threat of insecurity will not have as great a chance of marring happiness. Neither of these strategies is effective when used alone. Changing external conditions might seem to work at first, but if a person is not in control of his consciousness, the old fears or desires will soon return, reviving previous anxieties. One cannot create a complete sense of inner security even by buying one’s own Caribbean island and surrounding it with armed bodyguards and attack dogs.” - “Yet people keep hoping that changing the external conditions of their lives will provide a solution. If only they could earn more money, be in better physical shape, or have a more understanding partner, they would really have it made. Even though we recognize that material success may not bring happiness, we engage in an endless struggle to reach external goals, expecting that they will improve life.”
- “But symbols can be deceptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent. And the reality is that the quality of life does not depend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and about what happens to us. To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.”
- “This is not to say that money, physical fitness, or fame are irrelevant to happiness. They can be genuine blessings, but only if they help to make us feel better. Otherwise they are at best neutral, at worst obstacles to a rewarding life. Research on happiness and life satisfaction suggests that in general there is a mild correlation between wealth and well-being.”
- “Given these observations, instead of worrying about how to make a million dollars or how to win friends and influence people, it seems more beneficial to find out how everyday life can be made more harmonious and more satisfying, and thus achieve by a direct route what cannot be reached through the pursuit of symbolic goals.”
- “When considering the kind of experience that makes life better, most people first think that happiness consists in experiencing pleasure: good food, good sex, all the comforts that money can buy. We imagine the satisfaction of traveling to exotic places or being surrounded by interesting company and expensive gadgets. If we cannot afford those goals that slick commercials and colorful ads keep reminding us to pursue, then we are happy to settle for a quiet evening in front of the television set with a glass of liquor close by. Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met. The taste of food when we are hungry is pleasant because it reduces a physiological imbalance. Resting in the evening while passively absorbing information from the media, with alcohol or drugs to dull the mind overexcited by the demands of work, is pleasantly relaxing. Traveling to Acapulco is pleasant because the stimulating novelty restores our palate jaded by the repetitive routines of everyday life, and because we know that this is how the “beautiful people” also spend their time. Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Sleep, rest, food, and sex provide restorative homeostatic experiences that return consciousness to order after the needs of the body intrude and cause psychic entropy to occur. But they do not produce psychological growth. They do not add complexity to the self. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness. When people ponder further about what makes their lives rewarding, they tend to move beyond pleasant memories and begin to remember other events, other experiences that overlap with pleasurable ones but fall into a category that deserves a separate name: enjoyment. Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before. Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment. Playing a close game of tennis that stretches one’s ability is enjoyable, as is reading a book that reveals things in a new light,”
- “Experiences that give pleasure can also give enjoyment, but the two sensations are quite different. For instance, everybody takes pleasure in eating. To enjoy food, however, is more difficult. A gourmet enjoys eating, as does anyone who pays enough attention to a meal so as to discriminate the various sensations provided by it. As this example suggests, we can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention. A person can feel pleasure without any effort, if the appropriate centers in his brain are electrically stimulated, or as a result of the chemical stimulation of drugs. But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity. It is for this reason that pleasure is so evanescent, and that the self does not grow as a consequence of pleasurable experiences. Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging. It is easy to see this process in children: During the first few years of life every child is a little “learning machine” trying out new movements, new words daily.”
- “Unfortunately, this natural connection between growth and enjoyment tends to disappear with time. Perhaps because “learning” becomes an external imposition when schooling starts, the excitement of mastering new skills gradually wears out. It becomes all too easy to settle down within the narrow boundaries of the self developed in adolescence. But if one gets to be too complacent, feeling that psychic energy invested in new directions is wasted unless there is a good chance of reaping extrinsic rewards for it, one may end up no longer enjoying life, and pleasure becomes the only source of positive experience.”
- “Without enjoyment life can be endured, and it can even be pleasant. But it can be so only precariously, depending on luck and the cooperation of the external environment. To gain personal control over the quality of experience, however, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.”
- “The first surprise we encountered in our study was how similarly very different activities were described when they were going especially well. Apparently the way a long-distance swimmer felt when crossing the English Channel was almost identical to the way a chess player felt during a tournament or a climber progressing up a difficult rock face.”
- “The second surprise was that, regardless of culture, stage of modernization, social class, age, or gender, the respondents described enjoyment in very much the same way.”
- “the phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components…First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.”
- “Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.”
- “When all a person’s relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person’s attention is completely absorbed by the activity. There is no excess psychic energy left over to process any information but what the activity offers. All the attention is concentrated on the relevant stimuli.”
- “The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing; you move up to keep the flow going. There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself; it is a self-communication.”
- “Although the flow experience appears to be effortless, it is far from being so. It often requires strenuous physical exertion, or highly disciplined mental activity. It does not happen without the application of skilled performance. Any lapse in concentration will erase it. And yet while it lasts consciousness works smoothly, action follows action seamlessly. In normal life, we keep interrupting what we do with doubts and questions. “Why am I doing this? Should I perhaps be doing something else?” Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.”
- “What makes this information valuable is the symbolic message it contains: that I have succeeded in my goal. Such knowledge creates order in consciousness, and strengthens the structure of the self. Almost any kind of feedback can be enjoyable, provided it is logically related to a goal in which one has invested psychic energy.”
- Ability to receive feedback on the quality of action performed is an essential condition to experiencing flow. That is because the feedback acts as the parometer that helps us measure our success in achieving the goals we intended when we performed the action.
- “This is one reason why flow improves the quality of experience: the clearly structured demands of the activity impose order, and exclude the interference of disorder in consciousness.”
- “The concentration of the flow experience—together with clear goals and immediate feedback—provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic negentropy.”
- “the flow experience is typically described as involving a sense of control—or, more precisely, as lacking the sense of worry about losing control that is typical in many situations of normal life. Here is how a dancer expresses this dimension of the flow experience: “A strong relaxation and calmness comes over me. I have no worries of failure. What a powerful and warm feeling it is! I want to expand, to hug the world. I feel enormous power to effect something of grace and beauty.”
- “Activities that produce flow experiences, even the seemingly most risky ones, are so constructed as to allow the practitioner to develop sufficient skills to reduce the margin of error to as close to zero as possible.”
- “what people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations. It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and one is able to influence that outcome, can a person really know whether she is in control.”
- “enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative aspect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life.”
- “in flow there is no room for self-scrutiny. Because enjoyable activities have clear goals, stable rules, and challenges well matched to skills, there is little opportunity for the self to be threatened. When a climber is making a difficult ascent, he is totally taken up in the mountaineering role. He is 100 percent a climber, or he would not survive.”
- “When not preoccupied with our selves, we actually have a chance to expand the concept of who we are. Loss of self-consciousness can lead to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of our being have been pushed forward.”
- “Fundamentalist religions, mass movements, and extremist political parties also offer opportunities for self-transcendence that millions are eager to accept. They also provide a welcome extension of the boundaries of the self, a feeling that one is involved in something great and powerful.”
- “Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person’s skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding. An autotelic experience is very different from the feelings we typically have in the course of life. So much of what we ordinarily do has no value in itself, and we do it only because we have to do it, or because we expect some future benefit from it. Many people feel that the time they spend at work is essentially wasted—they are alienated from it, and the psychic energy invested in the job does nothing to strengthen their self. For quite a few people free time is also wasted. Leisure provides a relaxing respite from work, but it generally consists of passively absorbing information, without using any skills or exploring new opportunities for action. As a result life passes in a sequence of boring and anxious experiences over which a person has little control. The autotelic experience, or flow, lifts the course of life to a different level. Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control, and psychic energy works to reinforce the sense of self, instead of being lost in the service of external goals. When experience is intrinsically rewarding life is justified in the present, instead of being held hostage to a hypothetical future gain.”
- “We should reconcile ourselves to the fact that nothing in the world is entirely positive; every power can be misused. Love may lead to cruelty, science can create destruction, technology unchecked produces pollution. Optimal experience is a form of energy, and energy can be used either to help or to destroy.”
- “A particular religious belief may benefit a person or a group, but repress many others. Christianity helped to integrate the decaying ethnic communities of the Roman Empire, but it was instrumental in dissolving many cultures with which it later came into contact.”
- “It would be senseless, however, to ignore a source of energy because it can be misused. If mankind had tried to ban fire because it could be used to burn things down, we would not have grown to be very different from the great apes.”
- “”Water can be both good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim.” To swim in this case involves learning to distinguish the useful and the harmful forms of flow, and then making the most of the former while placing limits on the latter. The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people’s chances to enjoy theirs.”
- Part of the answer probably has to do with innate genetic causes. Some people are just temperamentally less able to concentrate their psychic energy than others. Among schoolchildren, a great variety of learning disabilities have been reclassified under the heading of “attentional disorders,” because what they have in common is lack of control over attention.”
- “A less drastic obstacle to experiencing flow is excessive self-consciousness. A person who is constantly worried about how others will perceive her, who is afraid of creating the wrong impression, or of doing something inappropriate, is also condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment. So are people who are excessively self-centered. A self-centered individual is usually not self-conscious, but instead evaluates every bit of information only in terms of how it relates to her desires. For such a person everything is valueless in itself. A flower is not worth a second look unless it can be used; a man or a woman who cannot advance one’s interests does not deserve further attention. Consciousness is structured entirely in terms of its own ends, and nothing is allowed to exist in it that does not conform to those ends.”
- “Alienation is in many ways the opposite: it is a condition in which people are constrained by the social system to act in ways that go against their goals. A worker who in order to feed himself and his family must perform the same meaningless task hundreds of times on an assembly line is likely to be alienated. In socialist countries one of the most irritating sources of alienation is the necessity to spend much of one’s free time waiting in line for food, for clothing, for entertainment, or for endless bureaucratic clearances. When a society suffers from anomie, flow is made difficult because it is not clear what is worth investing psychic energy in; when it suffers from alienation the problem is that one cannot invest psychic energy in what is clearly desirable.”
- “It is interesting to note that these two societal obstacles to flow, anomie andalienation, are functionally equivalent to the two personal pathologies, attentional disorders and self-centeredness. At both levels, the individual and the collective, what prevents flow from occurring is either the fragmentation of attentional processes (as in anomie and attentional disorders), or their excessive rigidity (as in alienation and self-centeredness). At the individual level anomie corresponds to anxiety, while alienation corresponds to boredom.”
- “Just as some people are born with better muscular coordination, it is possible that there are individuals with a genetic advantage in controlling consciousness. Such people might be less prone to suffer from attentional disorders, and they may experience flow more easily.”
- “subjects who reported only rarely experiencing flow behaved as expected: when responding to the flashing stimuli their activation went up significantly above their baseline level. But the results from subjects who reported flow frequently were very surprising: activation decreased when they were concentrating. Instead of requiring more effort, investment of attention actually seemed to decrease mental effort. A separate behavioral measure of attention confirmed that this group was also more accurate in a sustained attentional task. The most likely explanation for this unusual finding seems to be that the group reporting more flow was able to reduce mental activity in every information channel but the one involved in concentrating on the flashing stimuli. This in turn suggests that people who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant for the moment. While paying attention ordinarily involves an additional burden of information processing above the usual baseline effort, for people who have learned to control consciousness focusing attention is relatively effortless, because they can shut off all mental processes but the relevant ones.”
- “Early childhood influences are also very likely factors in determining whether a person will or will not easily experience flow. There is ample evidence to suggest that how parents interact with a child will have a lasting effect on the kind of person that child grows up to be. In one of our studies conducted at the University of Chicago, for example, Kevin Rathunde observed that teenagers who had certain types of relationship with their parents were significantly more happy, satisfied, and strong in most life situations than their peers who did not have such a relationship. The family context promoting optimal experience could be described as having five characteristics. The first one is clarity: the teenagers feel that they know what their parents expect from them—goals and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous. The second is centering, or the children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be getting into a good college or obtaining a well-paying job. Next is the issue of choice: children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules—as long as they are prepared to face the consequences. The fourth differentiating characteristic is commitment, or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defenses, and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever he is interested in. And finally there is challenge, or the parents’ dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children.”
- “Children who grow up in family situations that facilitate clarity of goals, feedback, feeling of control, concentration on the task at hand, intrinsic motivation, and challenge will generally have a better chance to order their lives so as to make flow possible. Moreover, families that provide an autotelic context conserve a great deal of psychic energy for their individual members, thus making it possible to increase enjoyment all around. Children who know what they can and cannot do, who do not have to constantly argue about rules and controls, who are not worried about their parents’ expectations for future success always hanging over their heads, are released from many of the attentional demands that more chaotic households generate. They are free to develop interests in activities that will expand their selves. In less well-ordered families a great deal of energy is expended in constant negotiations and strife, and in the children’s attempts to protect their fragile selves from being overwhelmed by other people’s goals. Not surprisingly, the differences between teenagers whose families provided an autotelic context and those whose families did not were strongest when the children were at home with the family: here those from an autotelic context were much more happy, strong, cheerful, and satisfied than their less fortunate peers. But the differences were also present when the teenagers were alone studying, or in school: here, too, optimal experience wasmore accessible to children from autotelic families. Only when teenagers were with their friends did the differences disappear: with friends both groups felt equally positive, regardless of whether the families were autotelic or not.”
- “The traits that mark an autotelic personality are most clearly revealed by people who seem to enjoy situations that ordinary persons would find unbearable. Lost in Antarctica or confined to a prison cell, some individuals succeed in transforming their harrowing conditions into a manageable and even enjoyable struggle, whereas most others would succumb to the ordeal. Richard Logan, who has studied the accounts of many people in difficult situations, concludes that they survived by finding ways to turn the bleak objective conditions into subjectively controllable experience. They followed the blueprint of flow activities. First, they paid close attention to the most minute details of their environment, discovering in it hidden opportunities for action that matched what little they were capable of doing, given the circumstances. Then they set goals appropriate to their precarious situation, and closely monitored progress through the feedback they received. Whenever they reached their goal, they upped the ante, setting increasingly complex challenges for themselves.”
- “Christopher Burney, a prisoner of the Nazis who had spent a long time in solitary confinement during World War II, gives a fairly typical example of this process: If the reach of experience is suddenly confined, and we are left with only a little food for thought or feeling, we are apt to take the few objects that offer themselves and ask a whole catalogue of often absurd questions about them. Does it work? How? Who made it and of what? And, in parallel, when and where did I last see something like it and what else does it remind me of?…So we set in train a wonderful flow of combinations and associations in our minds, the length and complexity of which soon obscures its humble starting-point…. My bed, for example, could be measured and roughly classified with school beds or army beds…. When I had done with the bed, which was too simple to intrigue me long, I felt the blankets, estimated their warmth, examined the precise mechanics of the window, the discomfort of the toilet…computed the length and breadth, the orientation and elevation of the cell”
- “Even the simplest physical act becomes enjoyable when it is transformed so as to produce flow. The essential steps in this process are: (a) to set an overall goal, and as many subgoals as are realistically feasible; (b) to find ways of measuring progress in terms of the goals chosen; (c) to keep concentrating on what one is doing, and to keep making finer and finer distinctions in the challenges involved in the activity; (d) to develop the skills necessary to interact with the opportunities available; and (e) to keep raising the stakes if the activity becomes boring.”
- “Even the simplest physical act becomes enjoyable when it is transformed so as to produce flow. The essential steps in this process are: (a) to set an overall goal, and as many subgoals as are realistically feasible;(b) to find ways of measuring progress in terms of the goals chosen; (c) to keep concentrating on what one is doing, and to keep making finer and finer distinctions in the challenges involved in the activity; (d) to develop the skills necessary to interact with the opportunities available; and (e) to keep raising the stakes if the activity becomes boring.”
- “Gioacchino Rossini, the composer of William Tell and many other operas, had a good grasp of the relationship between music and food: “What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions.” If music modulates our feelings, so does food; and all the fine cuisines of the world are based on that knowledge. The musical metaphor is echoed by Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, the German physicist who has recently written several cookbooks: “The joy of cooking at home,” he says, “compared to eating in one of the best restaurants, is like playing a string quartet in the living room as compared to a great concert.””
- “It is astonishing—as well as discouraging—when guests swallow lovingly prepared food without any sign of having noticed its virtues. What a waste of rare experience is reflected in that insensitivity! Developing a discriminating palate, like any other skill, requires the investment of psychic energy. But the energy invested is returned many times over in a more complex experience. The individuals who really enjoy eating develop with time an interest in a particular cuisine, and get to know its history and its peculiarities. They learn to cook in that idiom, not just single dishes, but entire meals that reproduce the culinary ambience of the region. If they specialize in Middle Eastern food, they know how to make the best hummus, where to find the best tahini or the freshest eggplant.”
- “To realize the body’s potential for flow is relatively easy. It does not require special talents or great expenditures of money. Everyone can greatly improve the quality of life by exploring one or more previously ignored dimensions of physical abilities. Of course, it is difficult for any one person to reach high levels of complexity in more than one physical domain. “
- “Reading is currently perhaps the most often mentioned flow activity around the world. Solving mental puzzles is one of the oldest forms of enjoyable activity, the precursor of philosophy and modern science. Some individuals have become so skilled at interpreting musical notation that they no longer need to listen to the actual notes to enjoy a piece of music, and prefer reading the score of a symphony to hearing it. The imaginary sounds dancing in their minds are more perfect than any actual performance could be. Similarly, people who spend much time with art come to appreciate increasingly the affective, historical, and cultural aspects of the work they are viewing, occasionally more than they enjoy its purely visual aspects. As one professional involved in the arts expressed it: “[Works of] art that I personally respond to…have behind them a lot of conceptual, political, and intellectual activity”
- “The better route for avoiding chaos in consciousness, of course, is through habits that give control over mental processes to the individual, rather than to some external source of stimulation, such as the programs of network TV. To acquire such habits requires practice, however, and the kind of goals and rules that are inherent in flow activities. For instance, one of the simplest ways to use the mind is daydreaming: playing out some sequence of events as mental images. But even this apparently easy way to order thought is beyond the range of many people. Jerome Singer, the Yale psychologist who has studied daydreaming and mental imagery more than perhaps any other scientist, has shown that daydreaming is a skill that many children never learn to use. Yet daydreaming not only helps create emotional order by compensating in imagination for unpleasant reality—as when a person can reduce frustration and aggression against someone who has caused injury by visualizing a situation in which the aggressor is punished—but it also allows children (and adults) to rehearse imaginary situations so that the best strategy forconfronting them may be adopted, alternative options considered, unanticipated consequences discovered—all results that help increase the complexity of consciousness. And, of course, when used with skill, daydreaming can be very enjoyable.”
- “It is valid to consider memory the oldest mental skill, from which all others derive, for, if we weren’t able to remember, we couldn’t follow the rules that make other mental operations possible. Neither logic nor poetry could exist, and the rudiments of science would have to be rediscovered with each new generation. The primacy of memory is true first of all in terms of the history of the species.”
- “Remembering is enjoyable because it entails fulfilling a goal and so brings order to consciousness. We all know the little spark of satisfaction that comes when we remember where we put the car keys, or any other object that has been temporarily misplaced.”
- “A person who can remember stories, poems, lyrics of songs, baseball statistics, chemical formulas, mathematical operations, historical dates, biblical passages, and wise quotations has many advantages over one who has not cultivated such a skill. The consciousness of such a person is independent of the order that may or may not be provided by the environment. She can always amuse herself, and find meaning in the contents of her mind. While others need external stimulation—television, reading, conversation, or drugs—to keep their minds from drifting into chaos, the person whose memory is stocked with patterns of information is autonomous and self-contained. Additionally, such a person is also a much more cherished companion, because she can share the information in her mind, and thus help bring order into the consciousness of those with whom she interacts.”
- “How can one find more value in memory? The most natural way to begin is to decide what subject one is really interested in—poetry, fine cuisine, the history of the Civil War, or baseball—and then start paying attention to key facts and figures in that chosen area. With a good grasp of the subject will come the knowledge of what is worth remembering and what is not. The important thing to recognize here is that you should not feel that you have to absorb a string of facts, that there is a right list you must memorize. If you decide what you would like to have in memory, the information will be under your control, and the whole process of learning by heart will become a pleasant task, instead of a chore imposed from outside.”
- “To write down one’s insights expecting that someday they will be read with awe by posterity would be in most cases an act of hubris, that “overweening presumption” that has caused so much mischief in human affairs. But if one records ideas in response to an inner challenge to express clearly the major questions by which one feels confronted, and tries to sketch out answers that will help make sense of one’s experiences, then the amateur philosopher will have learned to derive enjoyment from one of the most difficult and rewarding tasks of life.”
- “There was a time when it was admirable to be an amateur poet or a dilettante scientist, because it meant that the quality of life could be improved by engaging in such activities. But increasingly the emphasis has been to value behavior over subjective states; what is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance rather than the quality of experience. Consequently it has become embarrassing to be called a dilettante, even though to be a dilettante is to achieve what counts most—the enjoyment one’s actions provide.”
- “Sigmund Freud amplified somewhat on this simple advice. When asked for his recipe for happiness, he gave a very short but sensible answer: “Work and love.” It is true that if one finds flow in work, and in relations with other people, one is well on the way toward improving the quality of life as a whole.”
- “when one understands that enjoyment depends on increasing complexity, it is no longer possible to take such radical relativism seriously. The quality of experience of people who play with and transform the opportunities in their surroundings, as Joe did, is clearly more developed as well as more enjoyable than that of people who resign themselves to live within the constraints of the barren reality they feel they cannot alter.”
- “The old woman who farms in the Alps, the welder in South Chicago, and the mythical cook from ancient China have this in common: their work is hard and unglamorous, and most people would find it boring, repetitive, and meaningless. Yet these individuals transformed the jobs they had to do into complex activities. They did this by recognizing opportunities for action where others did not, by developing skills, by focusing on the activity at hand, and allowing themselves to be lost in the interaction so that their selves could emerge stronger afterward. Thus transformed, work becomes enjoyable, and as the result of a personal investment of psychic energy, it feels as if it were freely chosen, as well.”
- “The more a job inherently resembles a game—with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback—the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development.”
- “To improve the quality of life through work, two complementary strategies are necessary. On the one hand jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities—as do hunting, cottage weaving, and surgery. But it will also be necessary to help people develop autotelic personalities like those of Serafina, Joe, and Ting, by training them to recognize opportunities for action, to hone their skills, to set reachable goals. Neither one of these strategies is likely to make work much more enjoyable by itself; in combination, they should contribute enormously to optimal experience.”
- “It could be argued that although flow at work is enjoyable, people cannot stand high levels of challenge all the time. They need to recover at home, to turn into couch potatoes for a few hours each day even though they don’t enjoy it. But comparative examples seem to contradict this argument. For instance the farmers of Pont Trentaz work much harder, and for longer hours, than the average American, and the challenges they face in their daily round require at leastas high levels of concentration and involvement. Yet they don’t wish to be doing something else while working, and afterward, instead of relaxing, they fill their free time with demanding leisure activities. As these findings suggest, the apathy of many of the people around us is not due to their being physically or mentally exhausted. The problem seems to lie more in the modern worker’s relation to his job, with the way he perceives his goals in relation to it. When we feel that we are investing attention in a task against our will, it is as if our psychic energy is being wasted. Instead of helping us reach our own goals, it is called upon to make someone else’s come true. The time channeled into such a task is perceived as time subtracted from the total available for our life. Many people consider their jobs as something they have to do, a burden imposed from the outside, an effort that takes life away from the ledger of their existence. So even though the momentary on-the-job experience may be positive, they tend to discount it, because it does not contribute to their own long-range goals.”
- “Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks. But like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs. People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. “The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.””
- “STUDIES ON FLOW have demonstrated repeatedly that more than anything else, the quality of life depends on two factors: how we experience work, and our relations with other people. The most detailed information about who we are as individuals comes from those we communicate with, and from the way we accomplish our jobs.”
- “Yet unless one learns to tolerate and even enjoy being alone, it is very difficult to accomplish any task that requires undivided concentration. For this reason, it is essential to find ways to control our consciousness even when we are left to our own devices.”
- “Like anything else that really matters, relationships make us extremely happy when they go well, and very depressed when they don’t work out. People are the most flexible, the most changeable aspect of the environment we have to deal with. The same person can make the morning wonderful and the evening miserable. Because we depend so much on the affection and approval of others, we are extremely vulnerable to how we are treated by them. Therefore a person who learns to get along with others is going to make a tremendous change for the better in the quality of life as a whole.”
- “a social situation has the potential to be transformed by redefining its rules. By not taking on the role of the “victim” that had been imposed on him, and by not treating his assailants as “robbers,” but as reasonable people who might be expected to empathize with a son’s attachment to a family keepsake, Mark was able to change the encounter from a holdup to one that involved, at least to some degree, a rational democratic decision. In this case his success was largely dependent on luck: the robbers could have been drunk, or alienated beyond the reach of reason, and then he might have been seriously hurt. But the point is still valid: human relations are malleable, and if a person has the appropriate skills their rules can be transformed.”
- “Why is solitude such a negative experience? The bottom-line answer is that keeping order in the mind from within is very difficult. We need external goals, external stimulation, external feedback to keep attention directed. And when external input is lacking, attention begins to wander, and thoughts become chaotic—resulting in the state we have called “psychic entropy””
- “The danger is that in becoming dependent on chemicals for patterning the mind, he risks losing the ability to control it by himself.”
- “The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention. It is relatively easy to become involved with a job, to enjoy the company of friends, to be entertained in a theater or at a concert. But what happens when we are left to our own devices? Alone, when the dark night of the soul descends, are we forced into frantic attempts to distract the mind from its coming? Or are we able to take on activities that are not only enjoyable, but make the self grow?”
- “With every passing decade our culture becomes more dependent on information technology. To survive in such an environment, a person must become familiar with abstract symbolic languages. A few generations ago someone who did not know how to read and write could still have found a job that provided a good income and reasonable dignity. A farmer, a blacksmith, a small merchant could learn the skills required for his vocation as an apprentice to older experts and do well without mastering a symbolic system. Nowadays even the simplest jobs rely on written instructions, and more complex occupations require specialized knowledge that one must learn the hard way—alone.”
- “Adolescents who never learn to control their consciousness grow up to be adults without a “discipline.” They lack the complex skills that will help them survive in a competitive, information-intensive environment. And what is even more important, they never learn how to enjoy living. They do not acquire the habit of finding challenges that bring out hidden potentials for growth.”
- “The way to grow while enjoying life is to create a higher form of order out of the entropy that is an inevitable condition of living. This means taking each new challenge not as something to be repressed or avoided, but as an opportunity for learning and for improving skills. When physical vigor fails with age, for example, it means that one will be ready to turn one’s energies from the mastery of the external world to a deeper exploration of inner reality. It means that one can finally read Proust, take up chess, grow orchids, help one’s neighbors,”
- “Breeding furry dogs and racing sleds through arctic forests might seem like a rather primitive endeavor, compared to the glamorous antics of playboys or cocaine users. Yet in terms of psychic organization the former is infinitely more complex than the latter. Life-styles built on pleasure survive only in symbiosis with complex cultures based on hard work and enjoyment. But when the culture is no longer able or willing to support unproductive hedonists, those addicted to pleasure, lacking skills and discipline and therefore unable to fend for themselves, find themselves lost and helpless. This is not to imply that the only way to achieve control over consciousness is to move to Alaska and hunt moose. A person can master flow activities in almost any environment. A few will need to live in the wilderness, or to spend long periods of time alone at sea. Most people will prefer to be surrounded by the reassuring hustle and bustle of human interaction. However, solitude is a problem that must be confronted whether one lives in southern Manhattan or the northern reaches of Alaska.”
- “Until a few decades ago, families tended to stay together because parents and children were forced to continue the relationship for extrinsic reasons. If divorces were rare in the past, it wasn’t because husbands and wives loved each other more in the old times, but because husbands needed someone to cook and keep house, wives needed someone to bring home the bacon, and children needed both parents in order to eat, sleep, and get a start in the world. The “family values” that the elders spent so much effort inculcating in the young were a reflection of this simple necessity, even when it was cloaked in religious and moral considerations. Of course, once family values were taught as being important, people learned to take them seriously, and they helped keep families from disintegrating. All too often, however, the moral rules were seen as an outside imposition, an external constraint under which husbands, wives, and children chafed.”
- “But extrinsic reasons are not the only ones for staying married and for living together in families. There are great opportunities for joy and for growth that can only be experienced in family life, and these intrinsic rewards are no less present now than they were in the past; in fact, they are probably much more readily available today than they have been at any previous time. If the trend of traditional families keeping together mainly as a convenience is on the wane, the number of families that endure because their members enjoy each other may be increasing.”
- “The only way to restore flow to the relationship is by finding new challenges in it. These might involve steps as simple as varying the routines of eating, sleeping, or shopping. They might involve making an effort to talk together about new topics of conversation, visiting new places, making new friends. More than anything else they involve paying attention to the partner’s own complexity, getting to know her at deeper levels than were necessary in the earlier days of the relationship, supporting him with sympathy and compassion during the inevitable changes that the years bring. A complex relationship sooner or later faces the big question: whether the two partners are ready to make a lifelong commitment. At that point, a whole new set of challenges presents itself: raising a family together,getting involved in broader community affairs when the children have grown up, working alongside one another. Of course, these things cannot happen without extensive inputs of energy and time; but the payoff in terms of the quality of experience is usually more than worth it.”
- “The same need to constantly increase challenges and skills applies to one’s relationship with children. During the course of infancy and early childhood most parents spontaneously enjoy the unfolding of their babies’ growth: the first smile, the first word, the first few steps, the first scribbles. Each of these quantum jumps in the child’s skills becomes a new joyful challenge, to which parents respond by enriching the child’s opportunities to act. From the cradle to the playpen to the playground to kindergarten, the parents keep adjusting the balance of challenges and skills between the child and her environment. But by early adolescence, many teenagers get to be too much to handle. What most parents do at that point is to politely ignore their children’s lives, pretending that everything is all right”
- “Teenagers are physiologically mature beings, ripe for sexual reproduction; in most societies (and in ours too, a century or so ago) they are considered ready for adult responsibilities and appropriate recognition. Because our present social arrangements, however, do not provide adequate challenges for the skills teenagers have, they must discover opportunities for action outside those sanctioned by adults. The only outlets they find, all too often, are vandalism, delinquency, drugs, and recreational sex. Under existing conditions, it is very difficult for parents to compensate for the poverty of opportunities in the culture at large. In this respect, families living in the richest suburbs are barely better off than families living in the slums. What can a strong, vital, intelligent fifteen-year-old do in your typical suburb? If you consider that question you will probably conclude that what is available is either too artificial, or too simple, or not exciting enough to catch a teenager’s imagination. It is not surprising that athletics are so important in suburban schools”
- “What meaningful challenges can be found for young people that age? The situation is much easier when the parents themselves are involved in understandable and complex activities at home. If the parents enjoy playing music, cooking, reading, gardening, carpentry, or fixing engines in the garage, then it is more likely that their children will find similar activities challenging, and invest enough attention in them to begin enjoy doing something that will help them grow.”
- “If nothing else, discussing one’s job or the thoughts and events of the day, and treating children as young adults, as friends, help to socialize them into thoughtful adults. But if the father spends all his free time at home vegetating in front of the TV set with a glass of alcohol in his hand, children will naturally assume that adults are boring people who don’t know how to have fun, and will turn to the peer group for enjoyment.”
- “How to restructure such an environment so as to make it sufficiently challenging is certainly one of the most pressing tasks parents of teenagers face. And it is of no value simply to tell one’s strapping adolescent children to shape up and do something useful. What does help are living examples and concrete opportunities. If these are not available, one cannot blame the young for taking their own counsel. Some of the tensions of teenage life can be eased if the family provides a sense of acceptance, control, and self-confidence to the adolescent. A relationship that has these dimensions is one in which people trust one another, and feel totally accepted. One does not have to worry constantly about being liked, being popular, or living up to others’ expectations. As the popular sayings go, “Love means never having to say ‘I’m sorry,’””
- “Unconditional acceptance is especially important to children. If parents threaten to withdraw their love from a child when he fails to measure up, the child’s natural playfulness will be gradually replaced by chronic anxiety. However, if the child feels that his parents are unconditionally committed to his welfare, he can then relax and explore the world without fear; otherwise he has to allocate psychic energy to his own protection, thereby reducing the amount he can freely dispose of. Early emotional security may well be one of the conditions that helps develop an autotelic personality in children. Without this, it is difficult to let go of the self long enough to experience flow.”
- “Unconditional acceptance, the complete trust family members ought to have for one another, is meaningful only when it is accompanied by an unstinting investment of attention. Otherwise it is just an empty gesture, a hypocritical pretense indistinguishable from disinterest.”
- “If the young person feels accepted and cared for at home, however, dependence on the group is lessened, and the teenager can learn to be in control of his relationships with peers.”
- “Friendships allow us to express parts of our beings that we seldom have the opportunity to act out otherwise. One way to describe the skills that every man and woman has is to divide them in two classes: the instrumental and the expressive. Instrumental skills are the ones we learn so that we can cope effectively with the environment. They are basic survival tools, like the cunning of the hunter or the craft of the workman, or intellectual tools, like reading and writing and the specialized knowledge of the professional in our technological society. People who have not learned to find flow in most of the things they undertake generally experience instrumental tasks as extrinsic—requirements imposed from the outside. Expressive skills, on the other hand, refer to actions that attempt to externalize our subjective experiences. Singing a song that reflects how we feel, translating our moods into a dance, painting a picture that represents our feelings, telling a joke we like, and going bowling if that is what makes us feel good are forms of expression in this sense. When involved in an expressive activity we feel in touch with our real self. A person who lives only by instrumental actions without experiencing the spontaneous flow of expressivity eventually becomes indistinguishable from a robot who has been programmed by aliens to mimic human behavior.”
- “If a person surrounds himself with “friends” who simply reaffirm his public persona, who never question his dreams and desires, who never force him to try out new ways of being, he misses out on the opportunities friendship presents. A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. It is someone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails. While families provide primarily emotional protection, friendships usually involve mysterious novelty. When people are asked about their warmest memories, they usually remember holidays and vacations spent with relatives. Friends are mentioned more often in contexts of excitement, discovery, and adventure.”
- “Just as with the family, people believe that friendships happen naturally, and if they fail, there is nothing to be done about it but feel sorry for oneself. In adolescence, when so many interests are shared with others and one has great stretches of free time to invest in a relationship, making friends might seem like a spontaneous process. But later in life friendships rarely happen by chance: one must cultivate them as assiduously as one must cultivate a job or a family”
- “It does not matter whether one starts to work with the Cub Scouts or with a group exploring the Great Books, or trying to preserve a clean environment, or supporting the local union. What counts is to set a goal, to concentrate one’s psychic energy, to pay attention to the feedback, and to make certain that the challenge is appropriate to one’s skill. Sooner or later the interaction will begin to hum, and the flow experience follows.”
- “no social change can come about until the consciousness of individuals is changed first. When a young man asked Carlyle how he should go about reforming the world, Carlyle answered, “Reform yourself. That way there will be one less rascal in the world.” The advice is still valid. Those who try to make life better for everyone without having learned to control their own lives first usually end up making things worse all around.”
- “Optimal experience, in other words, should be regarded as the frosting on a cake made with solid ingredients like health and wealth; by itself it is a flimsy decoration. Only with a solid base of these more real advantages does it help make the subjective aspects of life satisfying. Needless to say, the whole thesis of this book argues against such a conclusion. Subjective experience is not just one of the dimensions of life, it is life itself. Material conditions are secondary: they only affect us indirectly, by way of experience. Flow, and even pleasure, on the other hand, benefit the quality of life directly. Health, money, and other material advantages may or may not improve life. Unless a person has learned to control psychic energy, chances are such advantages will be useless. Conversely, many individuals who have suffered harshly end up not only surviving, but also thoroughly enjoying their lives.”
- “A large proportion of the victims mentioned the accident that caused paraplegia as both one of the most negative and one of the most positive events in their lives. The reason tragic events were seen as positive was that they presented the victim with very clear goals while reducing contradictory and inessential choices. The patients who learned to master the new challenges of their impaired situation felt a clarity of purpose they had lacked before.”
- “In trying to sort out what accounts for a person’s ability to cope with stress, it is useful to distinguish three different kinds of resources. The first is the external support available, and especially the network of social supports. A major illness, for instance, will be mitigated to a certain extent if one has good insurance and a loving family. The second bulwark against stress includes a person’s psychological resources, such as intelligence, education, and relevant personality factors. Moving to a new city and having to establish new friendships will be more stressful to an introvert than to an extrovert. And finally, the third type of resource refers to the coping strategies that a person uses to confront the stress. External supports by themselves are not that effective in mitigating stress. They tend to help only those who can help themselves. And psychological resources are largely outside our control. It is difficult to become much smarter, or much more outgoing, than one was at birth. But how we cope is both the most important factor in determining what effects stress will have and the most flexible resource, the one most under our personal control. There are two main ways people respond to stress. To illustrate the difference between them, let us take the example of Jim, a fictitious financial analyst who has just been fired from a comfortable job at age forty. Losing one’s job is reckoned to be about midpoint in the severity of life stresses; its impact varies, of course, with a person’s age and skills, the amount of his savings, and the conditions of the labor market. Confronted with this unpleasant event, Jim can take one of two opposite courses of action. He can withdraw into himself, sleep late, deny what has happened, and avoid thinking about it. He can also discharge his frustration by turning against his family and friends, or disguise it by starting to drink more than usual. All these would be examples of regressive coping, or immature defenses. Or Jim can keep his cool by suppressing temporarily his feelings of anger and fear, analyzing the problem logically, and reassessing his priorities. Afterward he might redefine what the problem is, so that he can solve it more easily—for instance, by deciding to move to a place where his skills are more in demand, or by retraining himself and acquiring the skills for a new job. If he takes this course, he would be using mature defenses, or transformational coping. Few people rely on only one or the other strategy exclusively.”
- There are 3 steps that are involved in transforming a challenge into a grwoth opportunity: 1. You are self-assured. You feel that you are in control of your destiny. You are not self-centered in that you want to dominate the environment surrounding you but rather you know how to function within it harmonously. You do not see yourself in opposition to the environment. Rather you feel that you are part of whatever goes around you and try to do your best within the system you’re in.”Paradoxically, this sense of humility—the recognition that one’s goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity, and that to succeed one may have to play by a different set of rules from what one would prefer—is a hallmark of strong people.” 2. You are perceptive to the environment surrounding you: focusing on the inward – how you feel and how things should go from your perspective, will make you lose sight of what is happening in the surrounding environment. The ability not to lose sight of the things that are happening around you make you focus less on your concerns and desires. “Achieving this unity with one’s surroundings is not only an important component of enjoyable flow experiences but is also a central mechanism by which adversity is conquered. In the first place, when attention is focused away from the self, frustrations of one’s desires have less of a chance to disrupt consciousness.To experience psychic entropy one must concentrate on the internal disorder; but by paying attention to what is happening around oneself instead, the destructive effects of stress are lessened. And this makes it possible for the individual to understand the properties of the system, so that she can find a better way to adapt to problematic situation.”
- “A sense of complete openness to the environment is well described by Charles Lindbergh, who experienced it during his epoch-making solo crossing of the Atlantic: My cockpit is small, and its walls are thin: but inside this cocoon I feel secure, despite the speculations of my mind…. I become minutely conscious of details in my cockpit—of the instruments, the levers, the angles of construction. Each item takes on a new value. I study weld marks on the tubing (frozen ripples of steel through which pass invisible hundredweights of strain), a dot of radiolite paint on the altimeter’s face…the battery of fuel valves…—all such things, which I never considered much before, are now obvious and important…. I may be flying a complicated airplane, rushing through space, but in this cabin I’m surrounded by simplicity and thoughts set free of time.”
- 3. As every situation in life is likely to present opportunities for growth, it becomes important to uncover hidden opportunities. This ability develops as a result of self-assuredness and openness to the environment. An original artist starts a painting with no specific endpoint in mind. Rather, she listens to her inner voice while being receptive to what is on the canvas to determine how the painting should evolve.
- “We will never become aware of other possibilities unless, like the painter, we become aware of how external events makes us feel rather than framing such events into preconceived notions. When we do that, we may realize that we enjoy spending time with a two-year-old kid rather than the company president. “
- Outside forces will not turn adverssity into enjoyment. A person who is rich, healthy, powerful and strong is not in control of his consciousness more than one who is sickly, poor, weak and oppressed. The difference between someone who enjoys life and someone who is overwhelmed by it is the way each person interprets external factors – viewing challenges as threats or opportunities.
- Autotelic self is one that translates threats into enjoyable challenges and therefore maintains inner harmony. Autotelic self is one that derives goals from experience evaluated in consciousness, rather than having the goals be shaped directly by biological needs and social conventions.
- The rules for developing an autotelic self come directly from the elements of the flow experience:
- You set goals and you seek feedback. You need clear goals to strive for. A person with autotelic self learns to make choices over long-term commitments like getting married, to trivial plans for a weekend. A goal is what helps create challenges: if you set a goal of wanting to learn tennis, then you need to learn how to serve, how to use your hands, and how to control your reflexes. The goals then informs the skills that need to be developed. An important aspect of that is the feedback. An autotelic person does not do things as a result of external forces or randomness. This allows the person to be agile yet deterministic in their approach.
- An autotelic person becomes deeply involved in whatever it is they are doing – irrespective of whether it is washing dishes or flying a plane.
Take an example of an autotelic person entring a party, the person wouldn’t wait in a corner waititng for someone to speak to them, instead they shift their attention away from themselves to the party – observe the guests, try to guess which ones might have similar interests and temperaments, and start talking to the person about topics he suspects will be of mutual interest.
Deep involvement comes from the ability to concentrate. - Paying attention to what is happening: concentration leads to involvement which can only be maintained by constant input of attention. Such type of personality will shift attention away from how he is doing or looking to the outside, it is focused on goals. The autotelic self focused on interaction obtains a paradoxical result: it no longer feels like a separate individual yet her self becomes stronger. She invests psychic energy in a system she’s included in.
In the long term looking at the world exclusively from the little window that one’s self affords is always limiting. - Learning to enjoy the immediate experience: outcome of autotelic self – one that sets goals, develop skills, seeks/pays attention to feedback, learns how to concentrate and get involved is one that would enjoy any event that happens in life regardless of how brutish and nasty events can be. To achieve control, however, requires determination and discipline. Optimal experience is not the result of a hedonistic, lotus-eating approach to life. A relaxed approach is not sufficient to deal with chaos. To achieve flow, the self needs to develop skills that makes one become more than one is. But to change all existence to flow, one needs to have an overall context of goals for the events of everyday life to make sense.
- Achieving flow in one activity does not guarantee that it will carry over to other activities in life. Picasso was a great painter but he was quite hard to deal with in regular life. Any activity in life that brings a flow experience will come to an end: spouses die, your involvement in a job ends, etc. The solution is to turn life into a unified flow experience.
Despite the fact that many philosophers and social scientists say that life has no meaning, and that chance and impersonal forces rule our fate, and that all values are relative and hence arbitrary, it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning. Much of the cultures and civilizations were the work of our ancestors to create a sense of purpose for themselves and their descendants.
It is one thing to recognize that life is meaningless, it is another to accept it with resignation. The first fact doesn’t entail the second no more than us having wings prevents us from flying. - defining meaning is difficult because the definition can end up being circular: how can you give meaning to meaning? However, there are three ways meaning can be interpreted. First: it implies a goal, a sense of purpose, things happen in a pattern already drawn. Second: when it references intentions. What this sense of meaning implies is that the person reveals their purposes in action. Third: meaning could be a definition that explains what something is – it is a qualifying word that helps one draw up a specific image when seen.
- Creating meaning in life means bringing harmony to one’s actions. The three senses of the word meaning explained above helps us understand how that is accomplished. The first sense implies that one has to have a goal that motivates them to work to achieve that goal and overcome difficulties by learning new skills while enjoying the whole process. The meaning of life in this sense is astonishingly simple: it is meaning: whatever it is, wherever it comes from, a unified purpose is what gives meaning to life.
Two people who did that are Napoleon and Mother Teresa. The first set the single-minded goal of having power regardless at what cost it has been obtained. The second spent her life trying to make people’s lives better. Of course this poses an ethics question, but if we were to look at their lives from the perspective as to whether their goals brought purpose to their lives, we’d find that both might have been on the same page. They have both achieved the same level of inner purpose, and therefore of optimal experience.
The second meaning implies action. Having a meaning will make you strive, translating intent into action. Third meaning is the harmony that results from having a goal in life and an action plan towards achieving this goal. - “Someone who is in harmony no matter what he does, no matter what is happening to him, knows that his psychic energy is not being wasted on doubt, regret, guilt and fear, but is always usefully employed. Inner congruence ultimately leads to that inner strength and serentiy we admire in people who seem to have come to eterms with themselves. Every living moment will make sense, and most of it will be enjoyable.”
- There are four stages to finding a meaning in life for an indvidual. First stage: preserving the body and health. This is simple to achieve as the goal is clear. Second stage involves finding meaning in connection with community – through religion and adhering to the norms. Third stage involves divergence, where the person reflects inward on what values matter to them and make independent decisions as to what they should conform to. The goal in this stage is growth, improvement, and actualization of potential. Fourth and final stage involves integrating oneself again wtih the society. Many people are at the first stage, majority are at the second, a select few at the third and very few achieve the forth.
- Setting goals in one’s life does not make life easy. Those who give up their goals when encountered by challenges may avoid difficult choices – and set goals that are less demanding, but will live a life that is ultimately unfulfilling.
When a goal is taken seriously, and becomes the compass that guides action, the obstables found on the way will be treated by the individual as steps on the way to achieving a goal. And the goal becomes worthwhile regardless of whether it was originally valuable. If a mountain climber decides to climb a high mountain, she knows there are difficulties to overcome. However, if she gives up when faced by challenges, she reveals that the quest had little value. In the beginning, goals justify efforts, but efforts later sustain the goal. One marries so that their life is worth spending with someone else, but unless they act that way once they get married, the relationship will not last. - As the complexity of cultures evolve, it has become more difficult to gain resolve as to whether a goal should dictate’s one’s life actions. We can now easily move from one country to another. We can decide to change religions. Although a woman a few decades unquestionably viewed her family responsibility, this is no longer the case nowadays since she can work and pursue other endavours.
- The freedom that we enjoy nowadays gives us too many options. Having too many options decreases our ability to achieve flow experiences in our lives. When faced with equally attractive options, we will have uncertainty of purpose. lose the ability to have resolve when making choices. When you lose resolve, you are likely to bounce between different goals – back and forth, and not spend enough time really working on one.
This isn’t a suggestion to go back to the way life was bacck in a day where options were few. Rather, it is a reminder that if we think in new ways as to how to be effective in a world of choices, we could thrive in ways were not possible before. - How do we determine what goals to invest our psychic energy in? This takes trial and error. Having a deep understanding of one self is instrumental in this too.
- Inner conflict occurs when thoughts compete for attention. There are two ways to deal with that: pursuing a life through action or reflection. A life through action means that a person sets a goal(s) and dedicate their life to achieving it. It means involvement in concrete external challenges. Winston Churchill did that. There is no internal struggle or questioning of priorities. While the person will achieve the flow when action is pursued, they sooner or later, could end up questioning whether what they did was worthwhile: what does it mean to have achieved the goal? is there something else that could have been done? what about the time that is permanently gone on the goal? The elminiation of internal conflict could be at the expense of excessively restricting options. This is where the other aspect – reflection comes to play. It works by having periodical checks to ensure that actions pursued are congruent with goals set. Reflection on its own lead to impotence, and action on its own leads to loss. Prior to pursuing any goal, it is worth asking whether it is something that we enjoy doing, we really want to do? such questions should be relatively easy for someone who has good knowledge of self to answer.
- It is relatively easy to experience flow as a result of certain activity. However, to sustain that for extended or throughout life requires serious commtiments to lifetime goals. These goals will help us persevere through action even when our resources are exhausted. We shall be focused on actions and events around us that that we won’t have time to be unhappy.
- Why should humans strive to live a life full of flow experiences? won’t people normally live in peace as their natural state?
While that might be true of our ancestors – where our experiences were largely controlled by our hunger, sexuality, and other immediate needs, the advancement of our cerberal cortex and incrase in complexity of culture led us to have an increased sense of satisfaction with what was once fulfilling.
Animals – when viewed from the perspective of humans, can be viewed as always living in the flow. When they are hungry, they go hunting. Their attention is focused on the immediate environment surrounding them with respect to food. They do not think about alternatives and what could be. - Animals would feel just as dissatisfied as we are when they are hungry or have an unfulfilled biological need. Outside of that, they experience the flow that people strive for.
The psychic entropy that is unique to humans inolves seeing more than one actually accomplished and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow. Humans think in terms of what could be, not only about what is. The more complex a system, the more room it leaves open for alternatives, and the more things that could go wrong with it.
If we are to extend the evolution theory to cultures, we see that cultures where the social roles and the different possiblities are neglibile, the “happy save” phenomenon exists. It is possible that someone who has less means and lives in that culture to expereince flow more than people in cultures where choices are many. However, people in cultures that have fewer options do not experience the flow as often as people in cultures with many options. - Few would argue that simpler consciousness is favorable to to a more complex one. While we might admire the serentiy of a lion, the tribesman’s untroubled acceptance of his fate, they cannot offer solution to our predicament. Once the fruit of knowledge is plucked from tree, the path back to Eden is barred forever.
- We cannot rely on rules of society or genetic instructions to achieve flow. Instead, we need to rely on reason and choice. This creates a set of goal-directed actions that provide shape and meaning to an individual’s life. Life becomes like a game that has a set of instructions which help identifies what makes experiences enjoyable. If one sets a goal of becoming a millionaire before 30, the steps that they take towards achieving that would either bring them closer or further away from it. The clear feedback provided will keep the person involved with her actions, even if she loses all her money. When a person’s psychic energy enters into a life theme, consciousness achieves harmoney. But there are two ways of achieving that: one is personal based on rational evaluation of circumstances. The other is based on external factors – a person do what feels ought to be done.
- The only way to transform suffering into a positive catalyst in life is to view it as a challenge, a challenge that other people can face too. It is that altruistic dimension that is typical of negentropic life themes.
- Having a role model, learning from the techniques that our ancestors use to achieve order in their minds, and reading literature are all strategies that can help us achieve order in the thoughts that occur to our mind too.
- Since complexity consists of integration and differntiation, the challenge for humans beings in the future would be to discover what unites us to everything that surrounds us – and which is not human, after we have learned how we are differentiated from them.
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“The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws, and that it makes no sense that we impose our desires and dreams on nature without taking them into account.Recognizing the limitation of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual’s purpose merges with the universal flow.“
- “Florentino Ariza rolled cigarettes for her, but she did not smoke more than a few, for she was tormented by pain that would ease for a few moments and flare up again when the boat bellowed as it passed another ship or a sleeping village, or when it slowed to sound the depth of the river. He told her with what longing he had watched her at the Poetic Festival, on the balloon flight, on the acrobat’s velocipede, with what longing he had waited all year for public festivals just so he could see her. She had often seen him as well, and she had never imagined that he was there only to see her.”
- “Encouraged by that illusion, he dared to explore her withered neck with his fingertips, her bosom armored in metal stays, her hips with their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins. She accepted with pleasure, her eyes closed, but she did not tremble, and she smoked and drank at regular intervals. At last, when his caresses slid over her belly, she had enough anisette in her heart. “If we’re going to do it, let’s do it,” she said, “but let’s do it like grownups.” She took him to the bedroom and, with the lights on, began to undress without false modesty. Florentino Ariza was on the bed, lying on his back and trying to regain control, once again not knowing what to, do with the skin of the tiger he had slain. She said: “Don’t look.” He asked why without taking his eyes off the ceiling. “Because you won’t like it,” she said. Then he looked at her and saw her naked to her waist, just as he had imagined her. Her shoulders were wrinkled, her breasts sagged, her ribs were covered by a flabby skin as pale and cold as a frog’s. She covered her chest with the blouse she had just taken off, and she turned out the light. Then he sat up and began to undress in the darkness, throwing everything at her that he took off, while she tossed it back, dying of laughter. They lay on their backs for a long time, he more and more perturbed as his intoxication left him, and she peaceful, almost without will, but praying to God that she would not laugh like a fool, as she always did when she overindulged in anisette. They talked to pass the time. They spoke of themselves, of their divergent lives, of the incredible coincidence of their lying naked in a dark cabin on a stranded boat when reason told them they had time only for death. She had never heard of his having a woman, not even one, in that city where everything was known even before it happened. She spoke in a casual manner, and he replied without hesitation in a steady voice: “I’ve remained a virgin for you.” She would not have believed it in any event, even if it had been true, because his love letters were composed of similar phrases whose meaning mattered less than brilliance.”
- “It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.“
- ““Do you mean what you say?” he asked. “From the moment I was born,” said Florentino Ariza, “I have never said anything I did not mean.” The Captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits. “And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?” he asked. Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights. “Forever,” he said”
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