When do I feel happiest? What brings me enjoyment? How can I live a fulfilling life? How do I find my purpose on earth? If you’re anything like me, perhaps you have found yourself asking such questions with greater urgency over the past two years. (Perhaps not—if so, lucky you!)
For many of us, though, the pandemic has provoked a kind of spiritual crisis. In a recent New Yorker interview, noting that her classic “The Artist’s Way” has shot back up into top-10 best-seller lists, Julia Cameron observes that people have had to come to terms with themselves and their lives in a new way. She attributes the renewed interest in her self-help books to the fact that people have felt a need for guidance, for exploration, and for an enriched inner life in these times.
Even before the pandemic, I had been in the throes of a spiritual crisis of my own. I was losing confidence in the value of my work—not so much about its quality, though that was a concern as well, but in terms of its relevance to anything beyond my academic niche—and I was looking for ways to decouple my sense of self from my professional identity. Toward the end of 2019, I was talking about my troubles with a friend who had been through a similar rough patch at the end of graduate school, and she suggested I try playing a game that she invented: the Feelings Collector. (By the way, this friend, Natalia, is an Existential Gamemaker and you should subscribe to her newsletter!).
The Feelings Collector is an existential adventure that lasts a calendar year, played mostly solo. The game involves first choosing a feeling you want to have more of, and then doing various exercises to identify ways that you can bring that feeling into your life, before finally setting off on a free-form adventure of discovery and play. An important part of the game is to collect the bits of wisdom that your feeling guides you to and to enjoy the surprises and synchronicities that inevitably emerge.
The feeling I identified for the first year that I played the Feelings Collector was “flow.” This choice came from two sources. First, out of a feeling of lack in my work and in my life, a persistent difficulty with getting “in the zone” when and as much as I wanted. And second, my life-long interest in self-help literature. Playing the Feelings Collector in 2020 was one of the highlights of an otherwise mostly unpleasant year. It also led me to a book that changed my life.
My first stop on the “flow” journey was to consult the literature—once an academic, always a scholar, I suppose. The first title that came up was “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by the late, great Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (that’s “me-high chick-sent-me-high-ee,” and less of a mouthful than it looks). “Flow” presents the findings of a career’s worth of research into a condition that Csikszentmihalyi calls “optimal experience,” i.e., those times in life when we feel in control of our actions, when we a sense of exhilaration and a deep sense of enjoyment. Csikszentmihalyi also proposes a theory of how we can change our minds and actions to be able to have more of these experiences and in so doing improve the quality of our lives. Because of this aspect, alongside “The Artist’s Way,” I consider “Flow” to be one of the all-time best self-help books.
Interestingly, however, Csikszentmihalyi explicitly rejects the idea that “Flow” is a self-help book. From his point of view, the problem with self-help books is that their objective is teach you how to achieve a specific limited goal. The issue is that not only do few of the readers of these books actually accomplish these goals, for those who do, having done so doesn’t necessarily make their lives better. Rather, it leaves them with new unfulfilled desires. Csikszentmihalyi argues that what is truly satisfying is not slimming down or getting rich but feeling good about one’s life, and it is in its emphasis on the latter that “Flow” can be distinguished from self-help.
Indeed, happiness, enjoyment, fulfillment, and purpose—the questions with which I began—are at the center of the book. Rather than attempting to provide a recipe for finding these feelings, “Flow” instead presents a set of general principles and concrete examples—derived from the lives of Csikszentmihalyi’s research participants—that illustrate how some people have transformed otherwise dull and lackluster lives into ones full of joy and growth.
The central thesis of the book goes something like this: these feelings—happiness, enjoyment, fulfillment, and purpose—don’t just happen by chance to a fortunate few. Money cannot buy them. External circumstances cannot be relied upon to ensure them. Changing the material conditions of one’s life has a limited impact on the amount that a person feels these feelings, or at least, it only works up to a certain threshold, beyond which the effect is negligible. Instead, what most consistently and consequentially brings these feelings into a person’s life is a change in how they relate to the world around them. This change involves the private and individual cultivation of certain mental dispositions that allow for the emergence of these feelings.
In other words, the secret to improving the quality of life simple. It involves increasing control over one’s inner world by creating and maintaining the condition of optimal experience that Csikszentmihalyi calls “order in consciousness,” or flow.
This is easier said than done, of course. Achieving such control over one’s inner life is a bit like trying to lose weight. Despite the knowledge of what is entailed, and notwithstanding the fact that so many want to so badly, shedding pounds remains next to impossible for many. But when it comes to controlling our inner lives, the stakes are higher than our waistlines. What we are wagering here is our chance to have a life worth living.
Csikszentmihalyi argues that such a worthwhile life is—despite the forces arrayed against us from both within and without—within reach for just about everybody. This is the great promise of the book, but also the seed of its biggest flaws as well. Indeed, there are some fairly serious critiques that can be leveled at Csikszentmihalyi’s theory from a number of perspectives. He anticipates some of these criticisms and deals with them semi-convincingly. Other more concerning problems are left unresolved, including but not limited to the theory’s scope of applicability, its lack of attention to neurodivergence or other conditions that may render flow less accessible, and the ambivalences of the ethical and political entailments of the book’s central argument. Despite these drawbacks, I still think it is an excellent read and I have found it useful in many dark moments. Before getting to my concerns, though, I want to take a look at what makes the book so compelling.
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First, some definitions. What does Csikszentmihalyi mean by the interchangeable terms optimal experience, order in consciousness, and flow? Based on the results of extensive social psychological surveys on the characteristics of enjoyable activity, he uses these terms to designate periods of action and their corresponding mental states, marked by the following qualities:
“First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.” (49).
The first four components describe the conditions of the flow state itself. The last four components have to do with its effects. Because flow entails being fully engrossed in an activity, it leaves no space in the mind for distraction, the past or future, or indeed, the self. In these moments, the only thing that matters is the present and what you are doing in the moment. Flow is often described as phenomenologically akin to a Zen-like feeling, like a meditative state. Csikszentmihalyi quotes a rock-climber to illustrate: “One thing you’re after is the one-pointedness of mind. You can get your ego mixed up with climbing in all sorts of ways and it isn’t necessarily enlightening. But when things become automatic, it’s like an egoless thing, in a way.” (62) In a less mystical register, we might gloss it simply as being “in the zone.”
Just about any activity can be made into a flow experience, as long as it offers the first four conditions. Common examples observed cross-culturally include games, music, dance, sports, arts and crafts, pageantry, gardening, courtship, and ritual, among others. These activities are endlessly attractive to people because they are designed—whether intentionally or not—to provide participants the possibility of getting into flow, of having an enjoyable experience.
These activities have several additional things in common. They provide a sense of discovery; they generate a creative feeling that takes a person into a new reality; and they can lead to previously unimagined possibilities. In short, flow activities offer opportunities for growth. The reason for this is simple: it is difficult to enjoy doing the same thing at the same level for too long. Inevitably we grow bored and the desire to continue enjoying ourselves leads us once again to push ourselves, to practice and develop new skills, and to find new possibilities for using them. Activities that are truly enjoyable don’t merely involve fulfilling a desire or meeting a goal. Rather, they involve exceeding our own expectations and accomplishing something new. To consistently turn the randomness of life into flow, the continued development and extension of skills is required. Enjoyment is therefore characterized by forward movement and accomplishment.
One of the key aspects of optimal experience is that it is undertaken as an ends-unto-itself. The activity becomes its own intrinsic reward, because the doing itself provides more than enough satisfaction. Csikszentmihalyi refers to this property of flow as autotelic (i.e., “auto” = self, “telos” = goal). When autotelic experiences are pursued: “Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control, and psychic energy works to reinforce the sense of self, instead of being lost in the service of external goals.” (69). When we are alienated from our labor or spend our leisure time passively absorbing whatever comes along, without using any skills or seeking new opportunities for action, then life amounts to little more than a string of soporific (at best) and nervous (at worst) moments over which a person feels little sense of agency. The autotelic experience is the opposite—it lifts life to another level.
Pursuing enjoyment is thus less about what you do and more about how you do it. This is especially clear in those flow activities that involve the use of the body. One need not be an Olympian to jump a little higher, run a little faster, grow a little stronger. Indeed, everyone is capable of surpassing their previous bodily limits. This is also true of intellectual activities, such as the pursuit of knowledge and writing verse or prose, as well as the arts, such as learning to paint, draw, sculpt, play a musical instrument or dance. The essential steps are the same: setting an overall goal with subgoals, finding ways to measure progress, to maintain focus and distinguish challenges, to develop the skills necessary to engage with available opportunities, and to keep raising the stakes.
In other words, optimal experience is not an accident. It doesn’t come from hedonic pursuits or a laissez-faire disposition. Instead, accessing flow requires achieving control over attention and the contents of consciousness through determination and discipline. When a person has trained themselves to direct their psychic energy properly within the framework of conditions that give rise to optimal experience—such that they can experience flow under any circumstances—their quality of life will improve.
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I can attest from my own personal experience that re-orienting the way that I lived around regularly getting into a flow state certainly improve the quality of my life on a day-to-day basis. Order in consciousness is far and away preferable to psychic entropy. When I am in flow, there isn’t mental room to think anxious or sad thoughts. Instead, all of my attention is directed toward the activity at hand. Furthermore, it was liberating to realize that—if approached in the right way—nearly anything that happens or anything that I could get involved in can be flow-inducing and thus a source of joy.
But, as I also discovered through playing the Feelings Collector and experiencing more flow in my life, enjoyment alone will not bring a lasting sense of fulfillment. Why is this so? Well, in part, because it is actually not terribly difficult to create short-term order in consciousness. Indeed, working toward basically any achievable goal can get you into flow.
What is much more challenging is to suffuse the entirety of one’s life with this quality. In other words, it is perfectly possible to live a more pleasant or even a more enjoyable life by increasing the amount of time you spend in flow, but this will not necessarily make a meaningful life. According to Csikszentmihalyi, what is required to create a meaningful life and to reach the highest levels of optimal experience is to transform the whole of life into a flow experience.
To change all of existence into a flow experience, however, requires more than just focusing on the now, enjoying the momentary, and handling quotidian events in a way that produces order in consciousness. Rather, what is required to provide life a sense of harmony is a broader sense of purpose. Purpose is necessary for to create a meaningful life because it gives a direction to one’s efforts. To achieve the highest possible level of harmony in consciousness requires merging all of the unrelated goals of separate flow activities into an all-encompassing set of aims related to a single important challenge. Purpose in this sense can be thought of as some larger goal that lesser goals depend upon, a meta-goal that acts like a magnetic field attracting a person’s attention. This raises the question: how do we find our purpose? How do we know where to invest our attention?
It’s certainly not easy. Given the human capacity for self-awareness, it is natural for a person to imagine more things to do than they could ever possibly accomplish. It is also inevitable that people will feel frustrated by the disjuncture of what they feel capable of and what they actually have the resources to do. Part of the human condition is the inclination to not just think of what is, but what could be! In fact, this is the source of the most intense experiences of psychic entropy. Anxiety, fear, worry, guilt, and all the other negative emotions are forms of inner conflict resulting from competing claims on attention being allowed to run wild. When a person feels overwhelmed by too many desires—many of which are likely to be incompatible with each other—they are unable to marshal their psychic energy and invest their attention in their chosen goals.
Csikszentmihalyi’s solution to this problem falls into the same category as much of his advice (i.e., simple in principle, difficult to do). The only way to resolve this kind of inner conflict is to sort out the claims on one’s attention that are essential from those that are not, and to prioritize among those that remain. Through trial and error, a person can cultivate the self-knowledge required to conduct this sorting of competing goals to choose the one that will give purpose to their action before inner conflict ever arises.
This involves a considerable amount of reflection and reviewing of one’s chosen actions. It requires checking in with to see whether one’s actions are in harmony with one’s goals, as well as asking difficult questions like: “Is this something I really want to do? Is it something I enjoy doing? Am I likely to enjoy it in the foreseeable future? Is the price that I—and others—will have to pay worth it? Will I be able to live with myself if I accomplish it?” (226). Only by asking these questions is it possible identify goals that are so worth investing attention in that the effort put toward them will feel justified even despite the inevitable resistances that will come up and unfavorable circumstances that will emerge. If a person’s goals are well chosen and they can continue working toward them even when their mental and physical resources are otherwise exhausted, they will be that much closer to feeling fulfilled and purposeful.
This brings up a conundrum though—and one of my main problems with the book. To his credit, Csikszentmihalyi addresses the question head on: why are some people able to do this and other people are not? He tries to find an answer in the distinction between authentic and inauthentic life projects—i.e., the difference between intrinsically and extrinsically motivated goals—and in the related distinction between accepted and discovered life themes—i.e., the difference between taking on a role and a corresponding script for life of one’s own and accepting an already existing one. Both authentic and inauthentic projects and discovered and accepted life themes can give life meaning, but they both have their drawbacks. Accepted themes and inauthentic projects are only as good as the social system that determines the priorities that motivate them. Discovered themes and authentic projects have their weakness in the fact that, insofar as they are individual and idiosyncratic, they may be out of touch with what’s going on around a person. Ultimately, however, Csikszentmihalyi decides that this distinction isn’t that useful. This is because it is impossible to create a life theme without reference to the knowledge acquired by and accomplishments of previous generations. The past is replete with templates for how psychic chaos can be tamed. In fact, Csikszentmihalyi finds that those who manage to turn their entire existence into a unified flow activity by finding a sense of purpose and thereby deriving fulfillment from their actions have one thing in common: they learned how to make new things by first deeply familiarizing themselves with the achievements of those who came before them in their chosen domain of action.
Now, this all sounds fairly straightforward of course, but for a person struggling to “find their purpose,” this advice could fall a little flat. I know it certainly does for me at times. The good news is two-fold. One’s purpose cannot be determined ahead of time. Indeed, finding it is an ongoing process. Goals change over time. Moreover, the bigger goal that a person may be working toward in their life could be entirely obscure to them, or only become clear in hindsight. And this isn’t really that big of a deal, actually. This is because it is entirely possible for a person’s purpose, their unifying goal in life, to be fully committing themselves to whatever is immediately in front of them. They choose to leave the future up to the randomness of the universe, knowing that they will continue to act then as they do now, and knowing this is enough to guide their actions and give them a sense of purpose. There is much more to be said on this subject, but that’s the topic of another essay. For now, you can find fuller elaborations of this perspective in “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein and “Unfollow Your Passion: How to Create a Life That Matters to You” by Terri Trespicio.
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Ok, so now that we’re familiar with the basic outlines of Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow and its implications for the question of an individual’s pursuit of happiness, enjoyment, fulfillment, and purpose, it’s time to consider some of the bigger flaws in the argument. A full accounting of these issues could probably be the subject of an entire book, but I’m going to leave that project either for a later date or for someone else. For now, the main issues I want to address concern the scope of the theory’s applicability, its individualism, and its political project.
Csikszentmihalyi does a decent job throughout the book of addressing the various critiques his work has received over the years. One of the big problems with the flow theory, or at least a persistent line of critique goes something like this: it’s all well and good to contemplate the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment when our material needs are fulfilled, but for most people on earth today, such a pursuit is a luxury beyond reach. Naturally, if one already has a comfortable enough life, with a good job, it makes sense to think about complexity and higher purposes. But what about those who are not so well off, whether materially, mentally, or physically? Might their lives be more improved by ameliorating their general condition than by teaching them to pursue flow?
In other words, some critics have seen flow as the cherry on top of a life that is already objectively quite good. Csikszentmihalyi’s counter argument is basically that external conditions are secondary and only affect us indirectly (a somewhat weak argument). A stronger case, and one that Csikszentmihalyi uses frequently, would be the example of Viktor Frankl and others who survived the Nazi concentration camps with their sanity intact by finding ways to enter flow despite the objectively immiserating conditions they found themselves in.
More convincingly, Csikszentmihalyi argues that health, money, and other material advantages are no guarantee of an improved life. Indeed, unless a person can create order in consciousness, these advantages are pretty much pointless. The counterfactual question that he poses is powerful: how do we account for the fact that many people who have suffered immensely end up not just surviving ordeals, but in fact thoroughly enjoying life? Why are some people weakened by trials and tribulations whereas others are strengthened by them? The answer: latter group knows how to transform a bleak circumstance into a new flow activity. This involves three things: 1) unselfconscious self-assurance, confidence in one’s ability to cope; 2) focusing attention externally, i.e., staying switched on to opportunities and possibilities; 3) the discovery of new responses and solutions. Accordingly, most every situation—no matter how objectively bad—presents opportunities for growth through finding flow. And in the long run, our goals are likely to be frustrated one way or another, so it is key to be able to make new goals and create a flow activity for oneself. Otherwise, we will waste our energies on needless inner turmoil. The key is whether we see challenges and difficult circumstances as threats or as proving grounds. That is, when difficult conditions threaten to trap us in anxiety, fear, and other negative states, we can still achieve order in consciousness by finding a new outlet for the investment of our attention, ideally in a direction that is unaffected by externalities: “When every aspiration is frustrated, a person still must seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self. Then, even though that person is objectively a slave, subjectively he is free.” (92).
Now, what I am concerned about here is that this may actually not be good advice for everyone. I have been seeing more and more critiques on Twitter (for what that’s worth) against these kinds of approaches. People with neurodivergence, in particular, bristle at the notion that the ability to focus in the way that Csikszentmihalyi recommends is something that everyone can just will into existence. But, as someone not particularly versed in that discourse, I’ll leave a fuller discussion of the problem to someone with more authority and expertise. As someone who does struggle with mild attention deficit issues, addiction, and bouts of depression and intense anxiety, however, I can attest that at times even getting to a baseline level of mental tranquility such that even basic daily tasks can be accomplished—much less a state of heightened focus, allowing for creativity and self-expression—takes more or less all of your effort. Again, I think this is an important angle to be pursued further in exploring the applicability of the flow theory, but it won’t be me (or at least present me, in-the-now) fully articulating it. What I’ll say for now is that Csikszentmihalyi is not a clinical psychiatrist, he is a social psychological survey researcher. Surely there are clinicians who have tried to turn flow into a therapeutic technique, and that would be a good place to look to find strengths and weaknesses of the approach.
A critique that I have thought more deeply about, however, concerns the book’s political project. In commenting on the discipline of psychology’s effect in the world, Csikszentmihalyi notes that psychology had been used mainly to make sense of how adult irrationality is the result of childhood frustrations and offer a variety of amelioratives. A debatable claim, perhaps, but the point is that Csikszentmihalyi’s premise is that there is another purpose to which psychology can be put, however: to answer the question, “given what we know about human nature—warts and all—what can we do to improve our futures?” (16) He provides some seemingly contradictory answers that struggle to reconcile the individual with society. Let’s explore.
Most of Csikszentmihalyi’s prescriptive interventions concern actions that the individual can take to improve their conditions of existence. This is in part because psychology can be thought of as the science of the self, but it is also in part because Csikszentmihalyi actually has a pretty pessimistic view of society and processes of socialization, the process by which a human is transformed into a functioning member of a social system. He sees society at large as a system of order, one that only works because the individuals that comprise it are compelled to “take on the habits and skills that the culture required, whether the individuals like it or not” (17). The core of socialization makes people dependent upon social controls, such that they behave more or less predictably in response to socially sanctioned rewards and punishments. The problem here is that that there are as many different forms of social control as there are institutions that constitute the complex society of modern life, and this gives rise to contradictory impulses: “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” (19).
The solution that Csikszentmihalyi argues for is to liberate ourselves individually from the strictures of socialization, to instead chart paths for ourselves based on our own goals. Or at least, to supplement the externally imposed imperatives with a sui generis individualized reward structure. This will allow a person to live in the moment and find enjoyment in the process of living itself—when one is able to determine which rewards they pursue for themselves, then their reclaim their power as an individual. When a person reclaims their power in this way, they generate an interior locus of control over consciousness, stepping beyond the “socially conditioned stimulus-response patterns” that control them from the outside (19).
Thus, to improve one’s future Csikszentmihalyi claims that individuals must become autonomous and independent of their social environment such that they are no longer conditioned to structure their experience around the goals and aims imputed by socialization. In other words, what is most important, above everything else, is radically changing one’s idea of what is and is not important, such that one can achieve control over their own experience.
The prescription for what ails us is ultimately a form of mental discipline, not unlike that advised by the Stoics. Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi recognizes the alignment between these perspectives. Insofar as reality is what we experience, then we can change our reality by changing our consciousness: “Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them,” said Epictetus a long time ago. And the great emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.”” (20). Here’s a hook for another essay, to be written by me or someone else: this also happens to be the core of the argument of the human potential movement, of Esalen, and of a bunch of other mid-century streams of thought, all of which either led to some pretty dark places or got coopted as the basis for the reactionary neoliberal project of self-hood, as documented in “Century of the Self” by Adam Curtis.
At any rate, the point is that we can make a better future by training ourselves to experience the world in a different way, to put our psychic resources toward goals of our own choosing. The issue with this idea of course, is that the theory of flow is rather neutral on the point of what goals are worth pursuing. In fact, he explicitly argues that our ultimate goal doesn’t matter so much, so long as it is something compelling enough to invest a lifetime’s worth of attention into it. “As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life.” (215) To his credit, Csikszentmihalyi is fully aware of this problem—the example about Adolf Eichmann finding flow in arranging the Nazi train time-tables to deliver people to concentration camps is a particularly chilling cautionary tale—but it doesn’t seem that he has fully worked out an ethics of flow. In other words, the relationship between an individual’s quest to make a better future for themselves isn’t systematically articulated with how individuals might work together to make a better future for all involved, collectively. That isn’t to say he doesn’t have an idea of how this might work, but that it is underdeveloped, and represents a major area in which the theory of flow can be advanced.
His vision of this is that as one works their way up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs there is a constant dialectical process of differentiation and integration. First a person looks to take care of their basic individual survival, comfort and pleasure needs. Then they look to expand their meaning system to accord with the values of a community of some kind, a sense of belonging. With this sense of belonging in hand, this is followed by a more reflective individualism in which the person turns inward again, no longer conforming to the group’s values but instead developing a sense of autonomy, desiring growth and self-actualization, to probe the limits of their own individual potential. Finally, the person returns to the interests of a greater entity, a cause, or mission involving harmonious action with others. That is, once a person has “discovered what one can and, more important, cannot do alone, the ultimate goal merges with a system larger than the person—a cause, an idea, a transcendental entity.” (222). This is actually a central point concerning the broader project Csikszentmihalyi has in mind. In the end, he views the most urgent human task for the future is how to “reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality” (240). In the final sentences of the book, he claims that the needed next step in resolving the problem of meaning and creating a better life is for us as humans to recognize the limitations of volition and to accept a cooperative rather than a ruling role among the species alive on earth.
Here he is probably correct philosophically, but it is difficult to square with the argumentation that precedes it concerning individual liberation. Part of the problem is that the lines between his descriptive and prescriptive projects get blurred here a bit. Ultimately, what I would like to see done with the theory of flow is for someone—maybe future me?—to articulate a vision of how individual cultivation of flow, of increasing the quality of experience, could be merged with a collective project of cooperative betterment that doesn’t run afoul of the socialization trap. In other words, what if the project of “how to improve the future” was less about individuals learning to liberate themselves—however partially—from socialization processes and more about individuals working together to change processes of socialization so that society’s reward structure was oriented around liberated optimal experience rather than profit, materialism, and all of the other forces that are currently contributing to human immiseration?