The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

The point of the activity is the activity itself. Talbot Brewer has elaborated such “autotelic” activities and finds that they have a certain structure to them: they are guided by intimations of something valuable that you are trying to bring more fully into view through your activity. In the course of your repeated efforts, you find that what you are aiming at is a moving target, because it reveals itself only in the course of your pursuit. Brewer gives the example of a blues singer who is trying to find just the right phrasing to convey the subtle and complex emotional register she is aiming at in a particular passage of a song. In doing so she is not simply finding the means to express an emotional truth that she is already fully in possession of. Rather, she is finding that emotional truth in the course of singing it this way and then that way.