Laurent, what was your impression of FlowThePsychologyOfOptimalExperience? What did you take away from it? --DaveHoover
I loved it. It's littered with stories, anecdotes, and odd snippets of information; at the same time it manages to present a solid, comprehensive and well-grounded theory of that most elusive of all mental states, happiness. I read it in a period of unhappiness and have somehow associated it in memory with emerging from that into a more felicitous state. Take that either as evidence of bias on my part or as testimony to the worth of the book. ;) -- lb
My wife highly recommends WritingInFlow? by Susan K. Perry (ISBN 1-58297-086-6 (amazon.com, search)). It is a HOWTO guide for getting into flow, told from the point of creative writers. I've been meaning to read it myself and post a review here, but I've been too distracted. -- SeanO'Leary
The main message I took from the book was that the standard means of pursuing happiness are pretty much in vain. The author presents his "Experience Sampling Method" which enabled him to learn that despite most people's protestations to the contrary, they are on average happier at work than when engaged in leisure activities. This, the author surmises, is due to the fact that at work one faces (or creates, if necessary) challenges that are well matched to one's skills, so one is neither bored, nor is one overwhelmed with the impossible. The inevitable conclusion is that only leisure activities that provide such well-matched challenges are worth pursuing. Watching television, for example, would not be a leisure activity deserving of a large amount of time, but playing chess, or rock-climbing, would. The "Flow" of the title is a mental state in which one feels highly engaged with a challenge, one's attention is focussed, and one is confident of a positive outcome even if a solution is not yet in sight. This is a provocative book, one that upsets the received idea that work is not to be enjoyed under any circumstances. -- ConanDalton
What about, say, reading a novel? (I spend much of my leisure time reading.) Is this a flow activity like playing chess, or a worthless passive activity like watching television? --ApoorvaMuralidhara
The real issue is: how challenging is the activity relative to the capacity of the person? "Reading a novel" doesn't completely describe the activity; I might sit with a book and passively absorb stuff while you take the same book and create a challenge: analysis of character, plot, theme; if you're really up for a challenge you could go and apply some of those marvelllous twentieth-century critical theories like deconstruction. Now, we're both sitting reading a novel, but the challenge is very different, and hence, I suppose, the potential for flow. -- ConanDalton
I find there to be something slightly off-putting about this discourse. Why should I want or need to be "happy" in this sense all the time? Or even at any particular time? Why should I pursue only "leisure activities that provide such well-matched challenges" at any given non-working moment? Why shouldn't I enjoy some passive entertainment from time to time? It may well be that the standard (whatever that they are) means of pursuing happiness are pretty much in vain considered as means of pursuing happiness defined as flow, but perhaps waht I need right now is not flow, but comfort, contentment and rest. What then? --KeithBraithwaite
What sorts of things give you comfort, contentment, and rest ? -- lb
Well, reading books and passively absorbing stuff, sometimes :) I recall a friend of mine explaining why he hadn't done what everyone agreed was the obviously right thing for him and pursued a university degree in English Literature. His answer: I still want to be able to read just for the pleasure of it. I really don't feel the need to apply deconstruction to the character and plot of, say, TheUnpleasantProfessionOfJonathanHoag? while re-reading it for the 42nd time. I just pass a comfortable, content, restful while with its familiar words passing before my eyes.
++ Exactlt! Sonjta Lyubomirsky's book "Happiness" makes exactly that argument -- research shows that *intrinsic* motivation is what is important. So taking the university course might cause untoward stress, especially if you have deconstruction rammed down your throat. Also, reading (say) Tolstoy surely creates enough challenge for most people without having to suffer reading inferior commentators pushing the pet theory of the day! - Mal
Then again I like to listen to what MichaelFeathers calls difficult listening music: King Crimson, Thelonius Monk, Stravinsky, you know the sort of thing. It's like cubism for the ears, and I can happily study a Braque painting for hours. These things make my brain itch, and I'll buy that scratching that itch is the satisfaction of a cognitive challenge that isn't a million miles away from flow. But sometimes I really haven't the energy, I just want to be soothed. So on goes Holland by the Beach Boys, or the acoustic tracks on the re-issue of All Things Must Pass. Good music, yes. But eminently suited to enjoy simply for itself, without synthesising work out of it. Now, someone once said that working because you want to is the best kind of play, and that's true, but sometimes I don't even want to play, just be stroked. And I'm happy with that.
Or, consider that motorcycle riding is an exercise in pure flow, and after a day's run over good biking roads (up hill and down dale, sweeping S-bends between fast straights) I return home exhausted but exhilarated, with, so it seems, all my emotional and psychological needs met, on a gentle high and not even hungry even though I forgot to stop and have lunch. And some days I can't even look at the bike, I just want to sit in a local cafe with an espresso and the paper and watch the world pass me by. --KeithBraithwaite
Another one in my queue, AuthenticHappiness [ISBN 0743222989 (amazon.com, search)]. Flow is not everyone's idea of happiness. There's also sensation seekers and those who want to fulfill a "higher purpose".
-- I don't recall the book suggesting that flow is somehow superior. Rather, it claims that flow seems to correlate with two things: (1) feelings that we humans tend to associate with happiness, and (2) a matching of task-challenge and person-skill. Flow may not be everyone's idea of happiness, but if the alternatives are either being bored with a task that is too easy, or being intimidated by a task that is too difficult, then give me flow please. If I don't have any task right now, then flow is not an issue, because there is neither a challenge to be addressed nor a skill to bring to bear upon it.
I wonder if flow might be a kind of biological feedback like taste or other kinds of pleasure: our bodies send us signals to tell us we're doing the right thing, as far as it's concerned. If so ... how long before we can have artificial flow like we have artificial sweeteners today? -- ConanDalton
A long time, I suspect. Flow seems to me to be intimately tied up in authentic experience. In fact, "artifical flow" strikes me as being an oxymoron. Meanwhile, if there is no suggestion that flow-based enjoyments are somehow superior to others, then I must be misinterpreting the text above which claims that "the standard means of pursuing happiness are pretty much in vain" and that "only leisure activities that provide [the posibility of flow] are worth pursuing". --KB
Note, also, that we can be lured by flow. -- HuwLloyd
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