Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
3-Sentence Summary:
The quality of your life is the quality of your internal experience.
You optimise this by being in a “Flow-State”, which is found during experiences where you are voluntarily being challenged to the limits of your skills, in a way that causes you to lose a sense of time, yourself, and external issues.
This “Flow” can be seen as synonymous with the feeling of ‘meaning’, and aiming to experience this as much as possible, through your work and your relationships (with yourself and others), is likely to lead to a more enjoyable and meaningful life.
Notes:
The quality of your life is dependent on your inner experience.
We don’t optimise this by searching for happiness. We optimise it by aiming to be fully involved in each moment.
The best moments are of those where the mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to do something difficult and worthwhile.
When we are so involved in something so much that nothing else seems to matter and time flies by quickly, it can be said that we are in a “flow-state”.
We must engage with our inner experience so that we don’t become controlled by our biological urges (which can be exploited, and subject to addiction) nor to blindly follow social norms (which can be overly restrictive.) Either of these has the potential to replace our religious proclivities.
We only have so much ‘psychic energy’ - bandwidth to process information.
Having too much going on, to the point of being distracted from what we want to be focussing on is known as “psychic entropy” - inner disorder.
The opposite, when the information coming in is fully aligned with what we’re doing is “flow” when “psychic energy flows effortlessly”. We should aim for more of this.
“Flow experiences” tend to make the ‘self’ more complex through both differentiation of the self from others, and from integration of the self within itself, the outside world, and other people.
Flow makes the present more enjoyable, but also leads to greater contribution and self-confidence.
We should aim to make external conditions match our goals by both improving the external conditions, and by changing how we feel about external conditions.
Pleasure comes from satisfying our biological needs (hunger etc.). Enjoyment comes from novelty and forward movement.
Enjoyable experience: A challenging activity, that requires skills that we have, which we can concentrate on, which has goals and immediate feedback, which removes focus on other things, which you feel in control over, in which the self disappears, but emerges stronger, and which alters the experience of time.
Flow activities provide a sense of discovery, pushing the person to new levels of performance and consciousness, ultimately making the self more complex.
Flow is where we’re on the line between our current level of skill and the challenge in front of us. Too much skill and not enough challenge = boredom. Not enough skill and too much challenge = anxiety and frustration.
The evolutionary purpose may be to encourage skill development, which should lead to a better society.
If the cultural goals match the goals and skills of the people, we have a “great game”.
Some people naturally have more of an “autotelic personality” - they can experience flow more easily than others - but this can be encouraged by family and societal values of clarity, centring, commitment, choice, challenge, and can also be developed by individuals (e.g. Frankl, Solzhenitsyn)
Bodily functions can lead to flow experiences (exercise, sex, eating, seeing beauty etc.) but only if we acquire the skills and do them well. We should also be careful not to become addicted to these, as they can take psychic energy from other things.
To keep producing flow, we must:
1. Set goals with milestones/subgoals.
2. Measure progress.
3. Concentrate on what we’re doing during the process.
4. Develop skills to match opportunities.
5. Raise stakes if the activity becomes boring.
The mind can be a portable, life-ordering, entertainment tool, if we’re able to use it to bring order to our view of the world, through our interest in things like science, history, philosophy, etc. (thinking about life’s big questions when bored). We should follow our interests in these pursuits and be ok with being ‘dilettantes’ (amateurs) rather than thinking we always have to be professionals.
Work can provide flow, but only if we take control of it, find opportunities for development, and challenge and engage fully.
The same can be said for leisure activities, but often both are used passively, leading to us feeling out of control, wasteful etc.
Obviously, jobs should be more suited to this, but we should aim to be autotelic regardless, rather than waiting for the jobs to change.
Our quality of life depends on 2 main factors:
How we experience work.
How we experience relationships.
Loneliness is inherently tough, evolutionarily leading to no access to resources, and exile from the group and the protections it provides.
How you control your mind in solitude will have a big impact on life quality. Often this can be drugs, mindless entertainment, social media etc.
The First immediate social group is family, where we want to create flow through shared goals in line with skills. Then friends, where more effort is required to maintain contact vs family, where you’re not living together for example, and we experience a different kind of flow, since we are somewhat free of our role in the family, and are more so on a similar journey to our friends. Then flow might be experienced in the greater community’s challenges after sorting these 2.
Subjective experience is not just one aspect of life. It is life. Material conditions are secondary. They only affect us indirectly by way of experience.
Some people can go through terrible events and turn them in positive, while others turn small negative experiences into catastrophes.
Those who turn negative into positive are autotelic. They tend to:
Have unconscious self-assurance.
Focus on the world rather than themselves.
Discover new solutions.
“Meaning” can be seen as synonymous with Flow. We want our life to become a flow experience, challenging ourselves in line with our skills, bringing order to the mind by integrating one’s actions with one’s goals, and becoming more complex.
Meaning will come from different things at different stages. First, preservation of self, then becoming part of the community, then individualisation from the community, then reintegration.
“Goals justify the effort they demand at the offset, but later it’s the effort that justifies the goals.”
Life themes, discovered from personal struggle with the search for meaning, or accepted from society/others, will direct our life and give each act and event meaning, good or bad.
We can discover these life themes from our own negative experiences, as well as from wisdom of the past (books, arts, religions, history, biographies etc.) - There’s no need to start from scratch in our own search for life themes/meaning.
Ultimately, we also want our own mission to be in line with the mission/purpose/flow experience of everything and everyone else.
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