Someone who understood this well was Erich Fromm, a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and moved to the United States in 1933. He was a polymath: a brilliant psychologist, sociologist, and humanistic philosopher. In 1976, Fromm wrote a book titled To Have or to Be? In it, he coined the term productive activity: when one’s activity is “a manifestation of their powers; when the person, their activity, and the result of their activity are one.” If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Fromm’s productive activity is strikingly similar to what modern scientists call flow, what Buddhism calls
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