Book Review: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - This was one of my top book recommendations from last week. It was published in 1990 - 30 years ago - and is only more relevant and wise today. If anything could be more important to #livingyourbestlife it must be finding ways to get yourself into a state of flow. This book is the original source of knowhow on the subject. A few quotes and observations below:

On what flow is:

People describe the common characteristics of optimal experience: a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing. Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted. An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult or dangerous.

For me, this is either completely absorbing activities like skiing or kitesurfing where you will be immediately, physically punished for losing concentration. Or its problem-solving and analytical thought - often the act of writing, devising a strategic solution to a problem I'm highly motivated to solve, learning to code. etc. 

From the book:

The prefect society would be able to strike a healthy balance between the spiritual and material worlds, but short of aiming for perfection, we can look toward Eastern religions for guidance in how to achieve control over consciousness

So much of what I read and experience seems to find a way back to this. 

Enjoyment does not depend on what you do, but rather how you do it.

Yeah. of course. 

We found that when people were pursuing leisure activities that were expensive in terms of the outside resources required they were significantly less happy than when involved in expensive leisure. They were happiest when they were just talking to one another. Leisure that uses up external resources, however, often requires less attention, and as a consequence it generally provides less memorable rewards. 

That's good news. 

Two terms describing states of social pathology apply also to conditions that make flow difficult to experience: anomie and alienation. Anomie — literally, “lack of rules’ the condition in society in which the norms of behavior had become muddled. When it is no longer clear what is permitted and what is not, when it is uncertain what public opinion values, behavior becomes erratic and meaningless. People who depend on the rules of society to give order to their consciousness become anxious. Anomic situations might arise when the economy collapses or when one culture is destroyed by another, but they can also come about when prosperity increases rapidly and old values of thrift and hard work are no longer as relevant as they had been. 

Maybe this is why we live in a confusing time? The concept of Anomie is an interesting one. To what extent to people believe that we live in a world that has increased in anomie and alienation?