Flow
The classic work on how to achieve happiness
Harper and Row
1992, 2002
By Mihaly Csizenkmihaly
Happiness Revisited
Happiness 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 will come to being happy.
Victor Frankl said,
‘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 ones personal dedication to a
course greater than one’s self.’
Achieving happiness is a circuitous path that begins with
achieving control over the contents of our consciousness.
Our perceptions about our lives are the outcome of many
forces that shape experience most of which are outside of
our control. (The Patricia Aredondo Model of three
dimensions of difference is useful as a framework for
thinking about this, moments in time, social circumstances
and biological determinants)
‘Those occasions when we feel in control of our actions and
masters of our own fate, when we feel a sense of
exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that becomes a
landmark in memory of what life should be like…………..
this is optimal experience.’
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The best moments occur when a person’s body or mind are
stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish
something difficult and worth while. We can therefore make
optimal experience happen and at the time when it occurs it
may not be particularly pleasant.
Csizenkmihaly has developed a theory of optimal experience
based on the concept of flow – the state in which people are
so involved in an activity nothing else matters. The
experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at
great cost.
He believes that what would really satisfy people is not
getting slim or rich but feeling good about their lives. In the
quest for happiness partial solutions don’t work.
Because optimal experience depends on the ability to control
what happens in consciousness moment by moment, each
person has to achieve it on the basis of his own individual
efforts and creativity.
Everything we experience - joy or pain, interest or boredom
is represented in the mind as information. If we are able to
control this information we can decide what our lives will be
like.
The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there
is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic
energy or attention is invested in realistic goals and skills
match the opportunities for action. By stretching skills, by
reaching towards higher challenges, such a person becomes
an increasingly extra ordinary individual.
Flow is the way people describe their state of mind when
consciousness is harmoniously ordered and they want to
pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.
To achieve control over what happens in the mind, one can
draw upon an almost infinite range of opportunities for
enjoyment - for instance, through the use of physical and
sensory skills, ranging from athletics to music to yoga or
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through the development of symbolic skills such as poetry,
philosophy, or mathematics.
The Roots of Discontent
The primary reason it is so difficult to achieve happiness
centres on the fact that contrary to the myths that mankind
has developed to reassure itself, the universe was not
created to answer our needs.
When people try to achieve happiness on their own without
the support of a faith, they usually seek to maximise
pleasures that are either biologically programmed in their
genes or are labelled as attractive by the society in which
they live.
How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living,
ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and
interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy
depends on inner harmony not on the controls we are able
to exert over the great forces of the universe. To do this we
must achieve mastery over consciousness itself.
This is the covey idea that between the experience or stimuli
and the response or outcome, we choose to act.
JS Mill ‘No great improvements in the lot of mankind are
possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental
constitution of their modes of thought’
The shields of Culture
Over the course of human evolution as each group of people
became aware of the enormity of its isolation and the
precariousness of its hold on survival, it developed myths
and beliefs to transform the random crushing forces of the
universe into understandable patterns. In this regard culture
shields its members from chaos.
However this is a false reality and we are lulled into a false
sense of security which occasionally starts to break down.
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We are then propelled into a state of anxiety or a moral
apathy.
The roots of discontent are internal and each person must
untangle them personally with his or her own power. The
shields that have worked in the past; the order that religion,
patriotism, ethnic traditions and habits instilled by social
classes used to provide, are no longer effective for
increasing numbers of people who feel exposed to the
harsh winds of chaos.
The lack of inner order manifests itself in the subjective
condition that some called ontological anxiety or existential
dread.
A fear that there is no meaning to life. This is intensified as
we get older and realise there may be no meaning and that
what we expected to happen or come true is not going to. It
gives way to a feeling of having been deceived. We deal with
this increasing sense of disillusionment by trying to make
ourselves happy with external stimuli. We spend too much,
go to the gym, dig the garden, start collecting stamps etc.
Over the past generation there has been a three to four fold
increase in social pathology in 1955 there were 1,700,000
clinical interventions involving mental patients in the US in
1975 this figure had risen to 6,400,000. Between 1975 and
1985 the American defence budget rose from 87.9 billion to
284 billion dollars. In 1985 the education budget had
tripped to 17.4 billion. The sword is sixteen times mightier
than the pen.
In recent times this figure has changed to 533.7 billion
dollars on defence and 98.2 on education - a ratio of one to
five.
Reclaiming Experience
To overcome 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
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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 is difficult in an environment where we are socially
conditioned to defer gratification. As Freud recognised,
civilisation is built on the repression of individual desires.
This is the key purpose of socialisation.
As long as we respond predictably to what is good or bad, it
is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own
ends.
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.
It is not by abandoning ourselves to instinctual desire that
we become free of social controls, we must also become
independent of the dictates of the body and learn to take
change of what happens in the mind. As long as we obey the
socially conditioned stimulus response patterns that exploit
our biological inclinations, we are controlled from outside.
Paths of Liberation
The simple truth that control of consciousness determines
the quality of our lives has been known for a long time. The
oracle of Delphi, ‘Know thyself’ is an example of this.
The last great attempt to free consciousness from the
domination of impulses and social controls was
psychoanalysis, as Freud pointed out the two tyrants that
fought for control over the mind was the Id and the super –
ego. The first, a servant of our genes, the second a lackey of
society. Opposed to them, the ego stands for the genuine
needs of the self-connected to its concrete environment.
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While we know these things, there are two good reasons why
we are often helpless to impact upon our desire for genuine
happiness:
Firstly, the knowledge or wisdom one needs for
emancipating consciousness is not cumulative or condensed
in a formula. It must be earned through trial and error
experience by each individual, generation after generation.
Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill or
the brighter members of society would have grasped it long
ago.
Secondly, the knowledge of how to control consciousness
must be reformulated every time the cultural context
changes.
Control over consciousness cannot be institutionalised. As
soon as it becomes a part of set of social rules and norms, it
ceases to be effective in the way that it was intended to be.
As Dostoevsky along with others has observed, if Christ had
returned to preach a message of liberation in the middle
ages, he would have been crucified many times over by the
leaders of the very church built in his name.
We need to move with the times and regularly rethink and
reformulate what it takes to establish autonomy in
consciousness.
Ridding ourselves of the social controls of society is the
route map to personal autonomy and happiness. This means
control over the pull of our genes and the rules and norms
that bind us. It is the starting point for developing clarity
about what makes us personally happy and fulfilled.
The Anatomy of Consciousness
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 kind of clearing house
for sensations, perceptions, feelings, and ideas establishing
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priorities among all the diverse information. This
representation of consciousness is phenomenological in that
it deals directly with events – phenomena – as we experience
and interpret them, rather than focus upon the anatomical
structures and neuro-chemical processes.
In this way we choose to order information in a certain way.
Since outside events do not exist unless we are aware of
them, consciousness corresponds to subjectively
experienced reality. Intentions arise in consciousness
whenever a person is aware of desiring something or
wanting to accomplish something. They act as magnetic
fields moving attention towards some objects and away
from others, keeping our minds focused.
The Limits of Consciousness
We can manage at most seven bits of information – such as
differentiated sounds, or visual stimuli or recognisable
nuances of emotion or thought at any one time. The shortest
time it takes to discriminate between one set of bits and
another is eighteenth of a second. Thus we can process 126
bits of information a second or half a million in an hour.
This constitutes 185 billion bits over a single life time.
The limitation of consciousness is demonstrated in the fact
that to understand what another person is saying we must
process about 40 bits of information in a second. If we are
trying to converse with three people we will only be able to
concentrate if we keep out of consciousness every other
thought or sensation.
The author talks of controlled consciousness as psychic
energy. The mark of a person who is on 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. Attention is the most important tool
in the task of improving the quality of experience. The more
that we can diminish the randomness and wandering of the
mind the more we are in control of our own consciousness
and the happier and contented we will be.
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Being disturbed and distracted by other things is called
psychic entropy. This is disorganisation of the self that
impairs effectiveness.
The opposite of psychic entropy is optimal experience or
what sometimes individuals describe as flow.
Following a flow experience, the organisation of the self is
more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming
increasingly more 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 towards uniqueness, towards
separating oneself from others. Integration is the 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.
Flow helps to integrate the self because in the state of deep
concentration, consciousness is usually well ordered.
Thoughts, intentions, feelings and all the senses are focused
on the same goal. Experience is in harmony. And when the
flow experience is over one feels more together than before.
Only when a person 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 more complex as a result of experiencing
flow. When we act freely for the sake of the action itself
rather than ulterior motives, we learn to become more than
what we are. Once we have tasked this joy we will redouble
our efforts to do it again
Enjoyment and the Quality of Life
There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the
quality of life. The first is to try and make external
conditions match out goals, the second is to change how we
experience external conditions to make them fit our goals
better.
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(If you can’t get what you want try to want what you get.)
But neither of these strategies is effective when used alone.
People keep hoping that changing the external conditions of
their lives will provide a solution to their problem, i.e.
winning lots of money or getting a good job.
To improve life one must improve the quality of experience
as Covey says in the space between what happens to us and
how we create impact is the freedom to choose how we want
to respond.
Pleasure and Enjoyment
Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves
whenever information in consciousness says that
expectations set by biological programmes or social
conditioning have been met.
Resting after work drinking some beer watching the TV,
represent daily pleasurable activities. However pleasure by
itself does not bring happiness. It helps to maintain order
but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness.
Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met a
prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also
gone beyond what he or she is programmed to do and
achieved something unexpected, perhaps something
unimagined before. In this regard, enjoyment is often linked
with a sense of accomplishment.
Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that
are new that are relatively challenging. This is very much the
case in children but the connection between growth and
enjoyment tends to disappear over time. Our boundaries
become narrowly and are less a statement of how far we
have grown and more similar to defensive lines and space.
To gain personal control over the quality of experience one
needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens
day in and day out.
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The Elements of Enjoyment
There were some surprisingly similar results and common
factors in the global research that transcended culture and
nationality. However enormous variation in what people
described as enjoyable but not in terms of what they felt or
how they experienced it.
In short, optimal experience and the psychological
conditions that make it possible seem to be the same the
world over.
The study suggested the phenomenology of enjoyment has
eight components, they are as follows:
1.
A challenging Activity that requires skills
The overwhelming amount of optimal experiences have
occurred within sequences of activities that are goal directed
and bounded by rules, i.e. playing chess, reading, listening,
climbing a mountain etc - activities that require the
investment of psychic energy and that could not be done
without the appropriate skills.
Competition can provide the challenge and can be a quick
way to developing complexity. But enjoyment and optimal
experience can disappear when beating an opponent is more
important that the goal of performing well. Enjoyment
comes at a very specific point when ever the opportunities
for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her
capabilities. Enjoyment appears at the boundary between
boredom and anxiety when the challenges are just balanced
with the person’s capacity to act.
The merging of action and awareness
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. In these circumstances
people become so involved in what they are doing that the
activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop
being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they
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are performing. Examples include a dancer, a rock climber, a
mother teaching her daughter to read. This is generally
regarded as a state of flow.
Clear Goals and feedback
The reason it is possible to achieve such complete
involvement in a flow experience is that goals are usually
clear and feedback immediate. Even if a things take a long
time for feedback components of goals and feedback are
still important. Unless a person learns to set goals and to
recognise and gauge feedback in such activities she will not
enjoy them.
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.
Concentration on the Task in Hand
One of the most frequently mentioned dimensions of the
flow experiences that while it last one is able to forget all
the unpleasant aspects of one’s life. In normal everyday
existence we are the prey of thoughts and worries intruding
on our consciousness. Individuals talk about their mind
being clear, they leave behind if only temporarily the things
that are worrying and distracting them.
The Paradox of Control
Enjoyment often occurs in games, sports and other leisure
activities that are distinct from ordinary life where bad
things can happen. The outcome from things that we enjoy
are never so bad in this sense we lack the sense of worry
about losing control that is typical in many situations of
normal life. Activities that produce flow experiences even
the seemingly more 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.
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What people enjoy is not the sense of being in control but
the sense of exercising control in challenging situations.
However 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.
Even in relation to card games or roulette gamblers still feel
they are in control.
But activities which produce flow can have a potential
negative effect. 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.
The Loss of self-Consciousness
The loss of the sense of a self separate from the world
around it is sometimes accompanied by a feeling of union
with the environment. Working within a team is a good
example. Preoccupation with the self consumes psychic
energy because in everyday life we often feel threatened.
When ever we do so we have to bring the image we have of
ourselves back into awareness so that we can assess the
seriousness of the threat and work out how we should meet
it.
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 fort he self to
feel threatened.
But loss of self-consciousness does not involve a loss of self
nor a loss of consciousness but rather a loss of
consciousness of the self. We become less aware of how we
are because we are being defined in what we do.
The Transformation of Time
Time does not seem to pass in the way it normally does.
People are les conscious of time. Hours can seem to pass
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like minutes and everything seems much faster. But we can
also be very conscious of time. We can know exactly what
the time is because we have measured it what we are doing
i.e. surgery or swimming.
Freedom from the tyranny of time does add to the
exhilaration we feel during a state of complete involvement.
The Autotelic Experience
The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end
in itself. The activity that consumes us is one that is
intrinsically rewarding. The word is derived from the Greek,
meaning self and goal. It refers to a self-contained activity.
One that is done not with the expectation of some future
benefit, but simply because the doing it is the reward.
Playing the stock market to make money is not autotelic but
playing it to prove one’s skills at foretelling future trends is.
Teaching children in order to run them into good citizens is
not autotelic but because ne enjoys interacting with children
is.
When something is autotelic the person is paying attention
to the activity for its own sake when it is not the attention is
focused upon its consequences. Most things we do are
neither purely autotelic or exotelic.
Most enjoyable activities are natural; they demand an effort
that one is initially reluctant to make. But once the
interaction starts to provide feedback to the person’s skills
it usually becomes intrinsically rewarding.
Autotelic experiences are rare. Work is rarely autotelic and
leisure time is generally wasted in passive experiences where
no new skills are developed or used.
The autotelic experience of 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
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sense of self, instead of being lost in the service or external
goals.
Optimal experience is a form of energy that can be used for
good or bad purposes. Flow is not of itself good but it has
the potential to make life more rich, intense and meaningful.
4. The Conditions of Flow
Flow can occur by chance, from a structured activity or from
an individual’s ability to make flow occur .
Flow Activities
Roger Caillois the French psychological anthropologist has
decided the world’s games into four broad classes
depending upon the kinds of experiences they provide.
Agon includes competitive games eg monopoly, hurdling
Alea includes games of chance eg cards, bingo
Ilinx or vertigo are games that alter consciousness or
scramble perception ie skydiving a house of mirrors
Mimicry groups of activities in which alternative realities
are created such as dance theatre and the arts.
In agonistic games, individuals stretch their skills through
competition from the Latin con petire which means to seek
together. What this means is to actualise ones potential
when others force us to do our best.
Whether flow activities contained any or all of these
elements, what they all had in common was a sense of
discovery, a creative feeling of transporting a person into a
new reality. In so doing it transformed the self by making it
more complex.
The following diagram explains the way in which we re-enter
the flow channel as we alternate between anxiety and
boredom in response to develop the knowledge and skills to
address a challenge
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Why the complexity of consciousness increases as a result
of flow experiences
The author uses the example of tennis to demonstrate the
dynamic that underpins the concept of flow
One cannot enjoy the same thing at the same level form too
long. We grow either bored or frustrated and then the desire
to enjoy ourselves again pushes us to stretch our skills or to
discover new opportunities for using them. It is not
however the skills we actually have but the ones that we
think we have that matters.
Flow and Culture
Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed
to reduce the impact of randomness on experience. They are
adaptive responses. Cultures prescribe norms, evolve goals,
build beliefs that help us to challenges of existence. In so
ding they must rule out alternative goals and beliefs and
thereby limit possibilities. The concept of flow within this
context is confined to the goals and means prescribed by the
culture.
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Thus games provide a compelling analogy to cultures. They
reinforce the rule of law, and save people from the
distraction of randomness that might lead to chaos and
anarchy.
Evidence suggests that working people achieve the flow
experience about four times as often in their work as they
do when they are watching television, suggesting that the
paradox of leisure is that it is not leading to enjoyment.
So the first condition that affects whether flow will occur or
not is the culture, its norms, rituals, rules and practices. The
second is the individual’s ability to restructure
consciousness so as to make flow possible.
The Autotelic Personality
What can impede flow is an inability to control psychic
energy – in short to concentrate on something at the
exclusion of other things. A less drastic obstacle is excessive
self-consciousness and excessive self-centredness.
Attention disorders and stimulus over inclusion (attending
indiscriminately to everything) prevent flow because psychic
energy is too fluid and erratic. Excessive self-consciousness
and self-centredness prevent it for the opposite reason attention is too rigid and tight.
The author suggests anomie (lack of rules) and alienation.
These Durkheimian concepts are not dissimilar to the selfconsciousness and self-centredness ideas presented above.
Bruno Bettelheim uses the concept of ‘nonself-conscious
individualism to explain the Frankl survivor concept.
Chapter 5 The Body in Flow
The human body is capable of hundreds of separate
functions, seeing, hearing, touching, running, swimming,
throwing, catching, climbing up mountains, down caves too
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numerous to mention and to teach of these there is a
corresponding flow experience.
When a normal physical function like running is performed
in a socially designed, goal-directed setting with rules that
offer challenges and require skills, it turns into a flow
activity.
Each sensory organ each motor function can be harnesses in
the production of flow. As well as the physical the mind is
always involved.
Latin Motto of the modern Olympics Altius, citius, fortius is
a summary of how the body can achieve flow.
Even the simplest physical act becomes enjoyable when it is
transformed so as to produce flow
The essential steps in the process are:
 To set an overall goal, and as many sub-goals as is
realistically feasible;
 To find ways of measuring progress in terms of the
goals chosen;
 To keep concentrating on what one is doing, and to
keep making finer and finer distinctions in the
challenges involved in the activity;
 To develop the skills necessary to interact with the
opportunities available;
 To keep raising the stakes if the activity becomes
boring;
In short, enjoyment does not depend upon what you do but
how you do it. In an experience sampling exercise, the
author discovered that individuals who were involved in less
expensive, less resource demanding activities such as
gardening, talking to friends, knitting etc, were much
happier than those engaged in power-boating, driving or
even watching television.
The Flow of Thought
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The good things in life do not only come through the senses.
Some of the most exhilarating experiences we undergo are
generated inside the mind, triggered by information that
challenges our ability to think, rather than from the use of
sensory skills.
Although a lot of flow activities are linked to physiology this
is not the only route to flow. Other activities which are
largely symbolic in nature in that they depend upon natural
languages, mathematics or some other abstract notion
system.
We don’t usually notice how little control we have over the
mind, because habits channel psychic energy so well that
thoughts seem to follow each other without a hitch. From
the moment we get up we follow a routine which places us
generally on automatic pilot. But when we are left alone,
with no demands on attention, the basic disorder of the
mind reveals itself. With nothing to do it begins to follow
random patterns usually stopping to consider something
painful or disturbing. This is entropy which is the normal
state of consciousness.
To avoid this condition people generally fill their minds with
whatever is available. This explains why so many people
invest their time in watching television even though it is
often rarely enjoyed.
The better route for avoiding chaos of consciousness is
through habits that give control over mental processes to
the individual. To acquire such habits requires practice and
the kinds of goals and rules that are inherent in flow
activities. Daydreaming can be a very useful way of doing
this. It helps to create emotional order by compensating in
imagination for unpleasant reality.
The conditions that help to establish order in the mind
All forms of mental flow depend upon memory. A person
who cannot remember is cut off from the knowledge of
prior experience. Remembering is enjoyable because it
entails fulfilling a goal and so brings order to consciousness.
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Even though our culture lineage histories have lost all
practical significance, people still enjoy thinking and talking
about their routes. Memory is an important way of ordering
the mind, creating connection and delivering happiness.
A person who can remember stories, poems, lyrics of songs,
baseball statistics, chemical formulas mathematical
operations, historical dates, biblical passages has many
advantages.
The Rules of the Games of the Mind
It is useful to be able to remember facts unless they fit into
patterns and one is able to find likenesses and regularities
among them. Words are a way in which we give order to
things. They are the building blocks of most symbolic
systems.
A more substantive potential use of words to enhance our
lives is the lost art of conversation. Berger and Luckmann
suggest our sense of the universe in which we live is held
together through conversation. A simple statement upon
meeting some like ‘Nice day’ reaffirms a whole set of social
and behavioural codes.
Without such constant restatements of the obvious people
would begin to have doubt about the reality of the world in
which they live.
It is a common fate of many human institutions to begin as
a response to some universal problem until, after many
generations, the problems peculiar to the institutions
themselves will take precedent over the goals
This chapter has been about the way in which mental
activity can produce enjoyment. This requires discipline and
learning.
A person who forgoes the use of his or her symbolic skills is
never really free. His thinking will be directed by the
opinions of his neighbours by the editorials in papers and
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by the appeals of television. He will be at the mercy of
experts to tell him how to think and what things mean.
Chapter 7 Work as Flow
Work requires great skills and if it is done freely refines the
complexity of the self but if it is unskilled and done under
compulsion it is highly entropic.
Autotelic Workers
In general work has a fairly poor reputation we see it as a
necessary evil stealing our time and energy. Yet the more
materialistic we become the harder and longer we have to
work.
Universally, the author found that regardless of the job,
whether glamorous and diverse or routinised and relatively
unskilled, those who were able to transform their jobs into
complex activities did so by recognising opportunities for
action where others had 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 afterwards. Thus transformed, work becomes
enjoyable and as a result of personal investment of psychic
energy it feels as if it were freely chosen as well.
Autotelic jobs
He more a job inherently resembles a game – with variety,
appropriate and flexible challenges, the application of skills,
clear goals and immediate feedback the more enjoyable it
will be regardless of the worker’s level of development.
The sooner we realise that the quality of work experience
can be transformed at will, the sooner we can improve this
enormously important dimensions of life.
Currently however whether a job is enjoyable or not counts
for very little among those who have the power to make it so
(line managers). Management chases the productivity goal
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and unions in response, chase the conditions of service and
benefits to make sure people get the best deal.
To improve quality of life through work, two complimentary
strategies are necessary. On the one hand, jobs should be
redesigned to as much as possible they represent flow
activities and secondly people will need to be trained to
recognise opportunities for action, to hone their skills, to set
reachable goals.
The Paradox of Work
Do people report more instances of flow at work or leisure?
The answer to this was developed using experience sampling
method to monitor daily flow.
As expected the more time a person spent in flow the better
the quality of his or her experience. What was evident was
that people were much more likely to experience flow in
work than in leisure.
Managers were the most likely to be flow (64%)
Clerical workers (51%)
Blue collar workers (47%) reported more flow in leisure (20%)
than clerical workers (16%) and managers (15%)
Even workers on assembly lines reported they were in flow
twice as often at work as at leisure (47% versus 20%)
The exception to this trend suggested that people wished to
be doing something else to a much greater extent when
working than at leisure regardless of whether there was
flow. In other words, motivation was low at work even when
there was flow and it was high in leisure even when the
quality of the experience was low.
The paradox: On the job, people feel skilful and challenged
and therefore feel happy strong creative and satisfied. In
their free time, there is generally not much to do and their
skills and not being used, therefore they tend to feel more
sad, weak dull and dissatisfied. Yet they would like to work
less and spend more time in leisure
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Although people experience most flow when in work, they
still see it as less enjoyable than non-flow leisure time. This
is because they psychologically believe work to be a bad
thing.
The problem seems to lie more in the modern worker’s
relation to his job and with the way he perceives his goals in
relation to it.
People disliked their work because it often lacked variety
and challenge, there was conflict with other individuals
often their line managers and because of burnout.
Work represents a subtraction from free time however
enjoyable it might seem. Need to create a shift in the
perception people hold about work.
The Waste of Free time
We generally miss our leisure time and we live it vicariously
through others e.g. watching reality TV programmes
listening to music rather than making it, watching athletes
instead of being athletic. Mass leisure has become a parasite
of the mind.
As CK Brightbill says,
The future will belong not only to the educated man but to
the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.
Chapter 8 Enjoying Solitude and Other People
The quality of life depends on two factors how we
experience work and our relations with other people. We are
biologically programmed to find other human beings the
most important objects in the world. If we learn to make our
relations with others more like flow experiences, our quality
of life as a whole will be improved.
The Conflict between Being Alone and Being with Others
Of the things that frighten us the fear of being left out of
the flow of human interaction is certainly one of the worst.
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The average adult spends about one-third of his or her
waking time alone.
One of the reasons we might dislike it so much is that it is
easier for us to keep order in the mind using extrinsic
stimulus and distractions. As soon as the mind begins to
relax in isolations the anxieties and problems that are
generally kept at bay begin to surface.
Distractions such as watching the telly fail to develop any of
the attentional habits that lead to a greater complexity of
consciousness. Learning to use time alone instead of
escaping from it is important in creating order in
consciousness.
Unfortunately, many people who move in the public arena
do not act at very high levels of complexity. But perhaps the
most powerful effect flow theory could have in the public
sector is in providing a blue print for how institutions may
be reformed so as to make them more conducive to optimal
experience. But an exclusively economic approach to life is
profoundly irrational, the true bottom line consists in the
quality and complexity of experience.
Chapter 9 Cheating Chaos
The power of Dissipative Structures
Physical systems that harness energy that would otherwise
be lost in random motion are called dissipative structures.
For example, the entire vegetable kingdom is a huge
dissipative structure because it generally feeds on sunlight
what would otherwise be lost. Similarly the dissipating
energy of fire is used to cook food warm houses and heat
water.
How do we enable public service to become a dissipative
structure harnessing the human energy that is otherwise
lost to the benefit of the citizen.
It is for this reason that courage, resilience, perseverance,
mature defence, or transformational coping, the dissipative
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structures of the mind are so essential. Without them we
would be constantly suffering through the random
bombardment of stray psychological meteorites.
Those who are able to transform a hopeless situation into a
new flow activity that can be controlled will be able to enjoy
themselves and emerge stronger from the ordeal. There are
three main steps that seem to be involved in such
transformations:
1. Unselfconscious assurance – the implicit belief that your
destiny is in your own hands. It carries with it a sense of
humility and 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 a strong person.
2. Focusing attention on the world – It is difficult to notice
the environment as long as attention is focused inward and
ones psychic energy is absorbed by the concerns and desires
of the ego.
Achieving unity with one’s surroundings is essential to
creating enjoyable flow experiences.
3. The discovery of new solutions - There are two ways to
cope with a situation that creates psychic entropy. Firstly,
focus attention on the obstacles to achieving one’s goals and
then to move them out of the way. The second approach is
to focus upon the entire situation including oneself to
discover whether alternative goals may be more appropriate
and thus different solutions possible.
Transformations require that a person be prepared to
perceive unexpected opportunities. Most of us becoming so
rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by generic programming
and social conditioning that we ignore the options for
choosing any other course of action.
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The Autotelic self: A Summary
The autotelic self is one that easily translates potential
threats into enjoyable challenges and therefore maintains
inner harmony. A person who is never bored, seldom
anxious, involved with what goes on, and in flow most of the
time may be said to have an autotelic self.
The rules for developing such a self can be summarised as
follows:
1. Setting goals
One must strive for clear goals throughout life. Selecting a
goal is related to the recognition of challenges. Choices are
not random but thought through and focused
2. Becoming immersed in the activity
A person grows deeply involved in what ever he is doing, as
a result he or she is inside the process not just following it.
3. Paying attention to what is happening
Concentrate on the business in hand. Sustain involvement,
avoid self-consciousness and self-centredness
4. Learning to enjoy immediate experience
The outcome of having an autotelic self of learning to set
goals to develop skills, to be sensitive to feedback to know
how to concentrate and get involved – is that one can enjoy
life even when objective circumstances are brutish and
nasty.
To achieve this control requires determination and
discipline.
Chapter 10 The Making of Meaning
There are three ways in which unpacking the sense of this
word helps illuminate the last step in achieving optimal
experience. Its first usage points towards the end, purpose
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and significance of something i.e. What is the meaning of
life? The second usage refers to a person’s intentions. The
third refers to the ordering of information i.e. red sky
tonight night means good weather tomorrow.
Creating meaning involves bringing order to the content of
the mind by integrating one’s actions into a unified flow
experience.
Pitrim Sorokin divided the various epochs of Western
civilisation into three types which have alternated with one
another for over twenty five centuries. The sensate,
ideational and idealistic phases of culture. In each one
different priorities justified the goals of existence. Sensate
cultures are integrated around views of reality designed to
satisfy the senses. They tend to be epicurean, utilitarian
concerned primarily with concrete needs. 440 to 200BC
Ideational cultures are organised on a principle opposite
from the sensate: they strive for non-material supernatural
ends. People turn their attention to religion or ideology and
view their challenges not in terms of making life easier but
of reaching inner clarity and conviction. 200BC to 400AD
not withstanding the Nazi Interlude and Islamic revival.
Occasionally a culture succeeds in integrating these two
dialectically opposed principles that preserves the
advantages of both while neutralising the disadvantages of
each. They combine an acceptance of concrete sensory
experience with a reverence for spiritual ends.
Psychologists suggest people develop their concept of who
they are and of what they want to achieve according to a
sequence of steps.
Step 1 a need to preserve the self to keep the body and its
basic goals from disintegrating
Step 2 to embrace the community - basic needs having been
met higher complexity but conformity
Step 3 Involves reflective individualism finding new groups
for authority and value in oneself – an autonomous
conscience
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Step 4 Turning away from the self back towards an
integration with other people and with universal values.
These describe the mergence of meaning along a gradient of
complexity.
The end
ISBN 9780061339202
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