The Conditions of Flow
People who are engaged describe a number of qualities of the engagement experience, but how do such experiences happen?
In some instances, it may occur by chance: a person may simply drift into a task that has the conditions to engage them. In other instances, they may find a way to make the experience engaging for themselves. And given that two people may have different impressions of the exact same experience, it seems probable that an individual's ability to enter into flow is more important than qualities of the activity in question.
This is the reason that a person may experience joy in a ghetto while another person finds despair in a tropical resort hotel.
Flow Activities
Having stated that flow is more about a person's state of mind than their environment, it must be conceded that certain activities lend themselves more readily to engagement.
Activities that enable participants to learn and apply skills, accomplish goals, appreciate their progress, provide latitude and control, and require a reasonable amount of time are all excellent situations for generating engagement.
We can see how activities such as sports, the arts, and other activities lend themselves very well to engagement. These "flow activities" have the qualities necessary for a person to become engaged, if they are so willing.
Types of Games
He turns to the work of Roger Caillois, a French anthropologist, who considered every game or game-like activity in the world, and divided them into four classes:
- Agon - Activities in which players compete - whether with one another or to exceed one's previous performance
- Alea - Activities that involve random chance, which provide the opportunity to predict the future and see that prediction fulfilled
- Ilinx - Activities that alter ordinary experiences - whether by enabling a person to experience something unusual (skydiving) or alter their perception of reality (psychedelics drugs, rush of motion, or dizziness)
- Mimicry - Activities that create an alternative reality, which may involve creating a depiction of something (art) or bringing something into existence (craftsmanship) or merely pretending it to exist
In his own studies, the author found that every flow activity provided a sense of discovery, which created a feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. This may be a world of imagination, or a change to actual circumstances.
The Flow Channel
He also speaks of a "flow channel" that exists between anxiety and boredom. Anxiety exists where a person feels themselves incapable of success, to the degree they find the experience intimidating; boredom exists where a person feels they can easily succeed and the experience is uninteresting.
The perception of challenge is in that way tied to a person's perception of their existing capabilities. This is why games for older children are unable to take the interest of younger ones (who do not have the ability to succeed) or of adults (who find the tasks easy and unchallenging). It is also the reason some people take interest in things and others do not.
It is also the reason human beings seek increasing challenges. Once a puzzle is solved, there's little point in doing it again: one must find a more challenging puzzle in order to remain engaged. Unless we are able to grow to do something that was previously beyond our reach, an activity is unattractive.
He also returns to the fact that it is perception of one's own skills that is used to assess an activity. We may believe ourselves more or less capable than we are, and sometimes must learn through experience whether our self-estimation is correct - but before taking a challenge, we do not know and must estimate and predict.
The nature of the activity is also not of particular importance. Some people find tasks such as work or parenting to be "fun" because they are able to perceive challenges that others cannot - or to define for themselves a standard of performance to which others do not aspire. Some are not able to take interest in a task for the pleasure of doing it, but remain ever focused on tasks that achieve a practical outcome.
Flow and Culture
CS notes that, in codifying "the pursuit of happiness" the American government was the first that concerned itself with the emotional welfare of its citizens - though it stands to reason that any government must be, or at least concerned with ensuring the people are not so unhappy that they revolt, and the mere fact that governments have been tolerated suggest that people can get by without it. Even the most wretched of rulers presented people with an option that they imagined to be more tolerable than any available alternative.
In the present culture of political correctness, academics are reluctant to make any assessment of the success of a culture for fear of being labeled as bigoted. One is no better than another, it is supposed, for the people who choose to belong to it and the only culture you are permitted to criticize or speak negatively of is your own.
Culture itself is a set of norms and habits people accept, and by so doing proscribe any behavior or attitude that does not fit within the culture. In essence, being part of a culture means doing some things and refraining from others not out of personal interest but obedience.
And politics aside it seems reasonable to consider that some cultures must be better than others in facilitating the happiness of their citizens, and he names a few that seem quite dreadful, in which life is so harsh that people are generally physically unhealthy and have a very short lifespan, others whose cultures extol violence and brutality, others where religious superstition governs every waking hour, and so on.
There are also cultures whose norms promote happiness and engagement. In particular, he describes a primitive tribe whose elders decided they should move their village every 25 or 30 years to a new place - because having to start over meant the people would be have to learn new ways to meet their basic needs and would therefore find life challenging and meaningful.
This continues a while, eventually getting around to contemporary American culture - which is among the happiest. The large-scale surveys seem to identify the developed countries of the world as places where people are happiest: Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands regularly top the list, and America is "not very far behind."
This is not surprising, given that people in developed countries do not struggle to meet the basic needs of existence. They are not hungry, riddled with disease, fearful of being physically attacked, and so on, and in general have things pretty good. Their greatest sources of unhappiness are entirely psychological.
But on the other hand, while Americans have a great deal of free time, they do not necessarily spend that time experiencing flow. The most popular activity in the US is watching television, which is passive consumption that alleviates boredom but does not create happiness. And many show very little interest in their work - finding their job to be boring and noisome rather than engaging. So having a great deal of freedom and leisure time to pursue happiness doesn't mean that a person will choose to use their freedom and time to actually pursue it.
In all, we have many more opportunities to enjoy life than our ancestors did, but surveys of happiness do not seem to indicate that it is in any way correlated to technological achievement, health, the economy, or any other external stimulus.
In fact, the sense of being happy has been flat since the phenomenon began to be studied. And while this has only been a few generations, a great deal has changed. Particularly in recent years there is a cornucopia of recreational gadgets and leisure options. And yet most people go on feeling bored and vaguely frustrated.
This underscores the earlier point: that people who are in the same environment, culture, and other circumstances have varying degrees of happiness. And if all external causes are eliminated, it must be something to do with the individual.
The Autotelic Personality
Transforming an experience into a flow is something that an individual person must do - an MC believes it is within each person to improve their ability to do so. This book would be little more than an academic analysis of the way things happen to work if it were not so. He feels his analysis is actionable because there are marked differences between people who experience flow frequently and deeply and others who don't, and that it is possible to choose a path rather than accept the status quo.
The inability of a person to experience normal pleasures is a psychiatric dysfunction called "anhedonia." People with this condition do not take pleasure in the same stimulus that others do it's a common component of schizophrenia, in which people feel disempowered, that they are passive receptors of whatever happens and incapable of taking action to improve their situation. If nothing they do matters, they lose motivation to do anything.
But this merely describes on extreme of mind, and the other extreme involves hedonism and pleasure-seeking, denial of reality's constraints, and a constant state of ignoring anything unpleasant. This is no more healthy.
For the majority of people, living in-between the extremes means choosing where they fit on that scale (and not merely accepting their status quo) - to experience pleasure in moderation, and to decide how much pleasure they will take from existence. And for most people, they can do much to improve their enjoyment of life before reaching a dysfunctional extreme.
As with any psychological condition, there is evidence that the ability to experience pleasure has genetic factors. And it is likewise true that patterns established in early childhood tend to perpetuate if one does nothing to change them. But in the broad sense these constraints tend to matter very little for most people, who can overcome dysfunctions by changing their behaviors and attitudes. That is, we can learn and grow.
On the topic of dysfunction, he mentions that there are a number of disorders that can obstruct engagement. A person with an attention disorder cannot focus on an activity long enough to be engaged. A person with an inordinate need for control and order cannot be satisfied with the limitations of his ability to influence things. It is much in the same way that a blind person cannot take pleasure in a sunset.
Neurophysiology and Flow
Nothing can be said universally of human capabilities without addressing the fact that human beings are not uniform. Some people are "wired" differently than others - one person might have a generic disposition to be able to run faster than normal, another a genetic defect that prevents them from running as fast as normal. Our mental capabilities are the same.
The argument of nature versus nurture is resolved by stating firmly that both play a part. A person has a genetic predisposition to being a musician in their ability to perceive and deal with sound than other people, but a "normal" or even "disabled" person can develop musical talent, albeit with greater effort. Even someone who has no musical talent can develop it later in life.
The same is true of our mental capacities. One doesn't need to be born with a genetic disposition to have a high intelligent quotient to develop one, and to become able to learn and understand. It may not be as natural or easy for the non-gifted, but it is not impossible.
(EN: The typical counter-argument is that people with genetic dispositions can far exceed those without them if their life experience be the same. But that is often a competitive argument, and a person doesn't need to be happier than anyone else in order to be happy.)
There are also correlations between mental capacities and personality types, though it's also likely that they are correlated rather than causal. That is, the same neurological causes that makes a person extraverted also makes them more attentive to certain details or patterns.
There are a few cases mentioned in which people demonstrate certain facilities to perform intellectual tasks based on their ability to focus attention and concentrate: they simply notice certain things and come to certain conclusions faster than others. This may also make them better able to enter into a state of flow.
The Effects of the Family
The developmental years of infancy through early adulthood are generally credited with establishing baseline patterns of behavior that remain fixed throughout later life unless there is a conscious and deliberate effort to change them.
The relationships we have with family often form patterns for the relationships we have with others. Hence those whose parents interacted with them in childhood are more at ease interacting with others in later life, and are more attuned to social cues.
He mentions five specific characteristics of the family context with a significant relationship to flow.
- Clarity - Children have varying degrees of certainty in what parents expect of them. Goals and feedback in the family can be ambiguous or clear.
- Centering - Children take cues from their parents to determine whether what they are doing is important, and should be continued or desisted
- Choice - Children feel that they have the ability to pursue an option of their own volition, that they will not be prevented or compelled from doing things
- Control - The confidence a child feels in his ability to remain uninterrupted, and that no-one will interfere with him doing something
- Challenge - The degree to which parents shield a child from danger or encourage him to pursue opportunities
To spell it out: children who have clarity of goals and feedback, have a sense of importance, feel they can choose an activity, are confident they can continue it without interference, and are encouraged to pursue opportunities have experienced an "autotelic family context."
He stresses that these factors must exist in moderation, and not in the extremes. For example, a child's ability to exercise choice does not mean that he should be permitted to do anything - as children need constraints to know that certain things are inappropriate, but the constraints cannot be overly binding. A child needs to be praised for what he does, but if he is praised for anything he does not distinguish what is important.
The difference in the manner in which children act in their families is not merely a social identity, as they have an impact on the behavior of the child in groups other than the family (in school, with friends, etc.) as well as behavior in solitude.
The People of Flow
Considering the manner in which people cope with difficultly often reveals the traits of the autotelic personality. "Lost in Antarctica or confined to a prison cell, some individuals succeed in transforming their harrowing conditions into a manageable and even enjoyable struggle whereas most others would succumb to the ordeal."
He mentions a researcher who interviewed many survivors of prolonged tragic events - political prisoners, kidnapping victims, people isolated by natural disaster, etc. - and found that they maintained morale by discovering controllable elements in an otherwise bleak situation. This was first through perception and observation, to find opportunities that others would not notice and set goals appropriate to their situation, accepting the things they could not change as constraints. And those who endured prolonged ordeals often completed a goal and then upped the ante with their next.
Imagination is often a critical component: where the environment is bleak or deprived, the mind is unfettered. Reports of activities such as playing chess in one's mind, imagining the construction of a building, and conjuring memories of life experiences are common.
He mentions a specific case of an American pilot held captive in Vietnam for eight years who, upon his release, most wanted to play a game of golf. His mental exercise in captivity was playing the game in his imagination, over various courses and imagining the outcome using different clubs. In spite of his emaciated condition, his performance at the game was generally regarded as "superb."
Another example is intellectuals imprisoned by the communist party passed the time in poetry contests - teaching others verses that each hand memorized, and competing to translate poems from foreign languages into Hungarian.
A person who has an autotelic personality can find opportunity to create a flow experience in the most dreadful situations - and it stands to reason that people with the ability to create flow can do the same under normal circumstances. Where others focus on their conditions, the autotelic individual finds something pleasant to occupy his mind.
But it is also important to note that people who were not happy in their lives before an ordeal often emerge as happier people afterward - and it can be speculated that this is because they developed an autotelic ability during the ordeal that they were able to carry into normal life after their ordeal had ended. In essence, they had learned to find flow.