Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
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For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.
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“The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly,” in the words of J. H. Holmes. “It is simply indifferent.”
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As J. S. Mill wrote, “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.”
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The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.
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But religions are only temporarily successful attempts to cope with the lack of meaning in life; they are not permanent answers.
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The answer seems clear: while humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.
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Although it seems likely that losing track of the clock is not one of the major elements of enjoyment, freedom from the tyranny of time does add to the exhilaration we feel during a state of complete involvement.
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Despite ambiguous findings, all large-scale surveys agree that citizens of nations that are more affluent, better educated, and ruled by more stable governments report higher levels of happiness and satisfaction with life.
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Anomie—literally, “lack of rules”—is the name the French sociologist
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At the individual level anomie corresponds to anxiety, while alienation corresponds to boredom.
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However, enjoyment, as we have seen, does not depend on what you do, but rather on how you do it.
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Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one’s status—are parasites of the mind.