“vital engagement,” which they define as “a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experiences of flow (enjoyed absorption) and by meaning (subjective significance).” 30 Vital engagement is another way of saying that work has become “love made visible”; Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi even describe vital engagement in words that could almost have been taken from a romance novel: “There is a strong felt connection between self and object; a writer is ‘swept away’ by a project, a scientist is ‘mesmerized by the stars.’ The relationship has subjective meaning; work is a
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