Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal—health, beauty, money, or power—is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy.

“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.”

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.

Whenever the goal is to improve the quality of life, the flow theory can point the way.

These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives

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 the obstacles to fulfillment.

Each of us has a picture, however vague, of what we would like to accomplish before we die. How close we get to attaining this goal becomes the measure for the quality of our lives.

The form in which religions have presented their truths—myths, revelations, holy texts—no longer compels belief in an era of scientific rationality, even though the substance of the truths may have remained unchanged.

The essence of socialization is to make people dependent on social controls, to have them respond predictably to rewards and punishments.

seeking pleasure is a reflex response built into our genes for the preservation of the species, not for the purpose of our own personal advantage.

On the one hand, official institutions like schools, churches, and banks try to turn us into responsible citizens willing to work hard and save. On the other hand, we are constantly cajoled by merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers to spend our earnings on products that will produce the most profits for them.

to survive, and especially to survive in a complex society, it is necessary to work for external goals and to postpone immediate gratifications.

The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers.

the control of consciousness determines the quality of life—has

We all know individuals who can transform hopeless situations into challenges to be overcome, just through the force of their personalities. This ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks is the quality people most admire in others,

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. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective.

Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness.

It is the self that interprets that raw information in the context of its own interests, and determines whether it is harmful or not.

Rico knows that very soon he will reach the limit beyond which he will no longer be able to improve his performance at his job. So twice a week he takes evening courses in electronics. When he has his diploma he will seek a more complex job, one that presumably he will confront with the same enthusiasm he has shown so far.

The “battle” is not really against the self, but against the entropy that brings disorder to consciousness.

When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again.

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.

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness.

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.

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.

The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow.

if one chooses a trivial goal, success in it does not provide enjoyment.

unless a person learns to set goals and to recognize and gauge feedback in such activities, she will not enjoy them.

Others have invested so much in being liked that the only feedback they take into account is approval and admiration.

any activity that requires concentration has a similarly narrow window of time.

Enjoyment often occurs in games, sports, and other leisure activities that are distinct from ordinary life, where any number of bad things can happen.

being able to forget temporarily who we are seems to be very enjoyable.

many children never reach the point of recognizing the possibilities of the activity into which they are forced, and end up disliking it forever.

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.

Love may lead to cruelty, science can create destruction, technology unchecked produces pollution.

As long as a significant segment of society has few opportunities to encounter meaningful challenges, and few chances to develop the skills necessary to benefit from them, we must expect that violence and crime will attract those who cannot find their way to more complex autotelic experiences.

itself. If extrinsic goals—such as beating the opponent, wanting to impress an audience, or obtaining a big professional contract—are what one is concerned about, then competition is likely to become a distraction, rather than an incentive to focus consciousness on what is happening.

Any activity that transforms the way we perceive reality is enjoyable,

Many ideologies are now competing to provide the best explanation for the way we behave: the law of supply and demand and the “invisible hand” regulating the free market seek to account for our rational economic choices; the law of class conflict that underlies historical materialism tries to explain our irrational political actions;

Shushwap region was and is considered by the Indian people to be a rich place:

TV watching, the single most often pursued leisure activity in the United States today, leads to the flow condition very rarely.

Attentional disorders and stimulus overinclusion prevent flow because psychic energy is too fluid and erratic.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect,

When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces. When every aspiration is frustrated, a person still must seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self.

“nonself-conscious individualism,”

The human body is capable of hundreds of separate functions—seeing, hearing, touching, running, swimming, throwing, catching, climbing up mountains and climbing down caves, to name only a few—and to each of these there correspond flow experiences.

Unless one sets goals and develops skills, walking is just featureless drudgery.

enjoyment, as we have seen, does not depend on what you do, but rather on how

The saying that “love makes the world go round” is a polite reference to the fact that most of our deeds are impelled, either directly or indirectly, by sexual needs.

We wash, dress, and comb our hair to be attractive, many of us go to work so as to afford keeping a partner and a household, we struggle