Work as Flow
Man's primary drive, like that of any creature, is survival - so it follows that we spend a large part of our existence doing things that are necessary to our survival: we need food and water to sustain our lives, clothing and shelter to protect us from the elements. And our second strongest drive is to pass our genes along to the next generation: to marry, reproduce, and sustain our families.
In the modern economy, it is uncommon for people to produce all the things they need for their household, but instead to work at a job helping to produce a product or service that others need, and receive a wage or salary that reflects our contribution, that we may trade for other things.
And, of course, this arrangement precipitates a plethora of other needs: we need a vehicle to commute to the job where we earn money, we need to wear fashionable clothing to impress others so that they recognize our worth as business partners or mates, and so on.
Which is to say that work is often recognized as a necessary evil: an activity that is not rewarding unto itself, but one which is done for the sake of gaining other things. We work to make money, and use the money to obtain what we really want. And therefore, it is not important for work to be enjoyable.
But at the same time, we find that we envy the chosen few in society whose work entails doing things they enjoy - and which we believe we would do for the fun of it - and yet they still bring home a paycheck. To do what you love for a living is an ideal which many people find unachievable because that which they love doesn't earn a paycheck.
(EN: Personal experience has shown me that if you do what you love for a living, you quickly stop loving it. But this is more a matter of the manner in which work is arranged: you do not get to do things as you would like to do them, but must do as you are bidden. This very quickly perverts an enjoyable activity into something unpleasant, and all the more so because you have the sense that you ought to be enjoying it.)
Autotelic Workers
MC mentions ethnographies and interview of people who live in communities that have escaped, or chosen to evade, the industrial revolution. In these locations, people live much as they had done generations ago, by subsistence farming and crafting useful objects, largely for the use of their own family but with some instances of trade.
The "work" in such a community is constant, with people involved in manual chores for twelve to sixteen hours per day. He gives the example of a farm wife in the Alps, who gets up before dawn to milk the cows, cooks a huge breakfast, cleans up afterward, then tends her orchard and her fields, chops firewood, prepares a dinner, then spends here evening spinning and carding wool. There's very little "free" time in such an existence, yet many who live in this manner are quite happy.
But more to the point, they are happy in their work. Some who leave the village to make their lives in the modern world - of office jobs, apartments, appliances, cars, and all the comforts and conveniences of civilization - utterly hate it. They recognize it requires less effort, and leaves them with a great deal of time to be bored and unhappy.
He concedes hat not all pre-industrial cultures are idyllic, and a great many struggle to meet their basic needs. Primitive tribes are often riddled with hunger, disease, and ignorance and those whose lives are pre-agricultural have rather short and unpleasant lives. Few succeed for long at the balancing act between human needs and the ability to meet them.
He then switches to a worker in the industrialized work: a welder in a plant that makes railroad cars. This individual had done the same job do over forty years, and had declined a number of promotions to remain "a simple welder." When he speaks of his work, he projects happiness and a strong sense of satisfaction with a job that many find onerous and boring.
Such a person is a rare example of the "autotelic personality" - a person with the ability to create flow experiences in situations which others find impossible to tolerate. That is, he sees each task he does as a challenge, and perceives even minor variations in the situation and the outcome, and has developed a high level of skill. In essence, he does not need work of increasing complexity to remain engaged, but by his attention to detail makes a simple task more complex by seeking to do it to perfection.
This is something that anyone is capable of doing, but which few people have the mental discipline to perfect.
(EN: I scanned forward a bit to see if there's any mention of the Japanese, and was surprised not to find it. Part of their culture is striving for perfection even in small things and there are many within the culture that remain fascinated for decades in mastering small tasks, such as making noodles, to a high degree of perfection.)
There are a few examples of ascetics in various cultures who pursue this same path. Their goal is to live life well, and to do everything with skill and perfection. To such people, peeling potatoes deserves as much focus and attention to detail as building a cathedral - as there is a sacredness in every task that must be performed.
The application of this perspective to work, or to any task, grants it a sense of flow. Even if it has been done thousands of times before, each iteration requires focus to achieve a higher level of perfection than the last.
We recognize this in the performance of various tasks and feats: that achieving mastery of a craft isn't a quantum leap forward, but a slow progression. The master does a task that an apprentice can learn in a week, but the performance of an apprentice shows a level of sloppiness and lack of attention to detail: he produces goods that are serviceable, but not sturdy, and not particularly well-executed. The master, meanwhile, perfects his craft by paying attention to subtle details - he has the discipline to slow down, take his time, and do the work well in every detail. As such it takes years for an apprentice to develop an appreciation of the subtle details that differentiate a barely serviceable item from one that is crafted to perfection.
And more to the point, the master finds greater satisfaction in his work than does the apprentice. Though some of this derives from the sense of competence as he admires his finished work, the majority of his pleasure derives from the process of doing things well and paying close attention during the process of crafting an item, rather than admiring it afterward.
Autotelic Jobs
While people with an autotelic personality have the ability to find flow in activities that seem mindless and tedious to most, there are also jobs whose nature provides a sense of flow even to people who are not normally inclined to perceive one on their own.
The more that a job resembles a game - with variety, flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback - the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker's cognitive skills.
Hunting and fishing, which were survival skills to primitive man, are activities that are so intrinsically rewarding that people who do not need to use them for survival still do them as hobbies.
MC considers that the agricultural revolution was likely just as disheartening to the savage tribes as the industrial revolution was to modern man. To grow a crop or herd animals is much less thrilling than hunting for game, as it requires a great deal of routine work for a long period of time before reaping the reward.
Essentially, what man finds thrilling is a quick payoff, the ability to reap the rewards of his effort very shortly after the effort has been expended, in order to appreciate his accomplishment. To wait for a reward requires patience and discipline, and a greater ability to perceive the final outcome during a long period in which effort produces no immediate reward.
He mentions interviewing weavers who were paid by the piece, as opposed to factory workers who receive a wage at the end of each month. Those whose work paid daily found greater satisfaction - particularly when they had the option to vary their work (to choose colors, patterns, weaves, and other variations) to reap a greater reward for doing more difficult or intricate work.
Given the nature of modern work, there is little wonder that it is tedious and boring. Workers are constrained to doing what they are told and have little choice. Many do repetitive tasks that fabricate one part of a finished good rather than the entire object. Compensation is delayed for days or weeks, and is not directly related to performance. Mechanization has further divorced workers from their products because they monitor and operate machines that do the work. There is very little feedback or reward for progress, little connection between activity and productivity.
In theory, work can be arranged to create a greater sense of flow, but to do so would require abstaining from or violating principles to which management is often dedicated: standardized products, a consistent rate of output, reduced risk, predictable payrolls, and other such desires lead them to put into place policies and procedures that prevent risk-taking and eliminate the rewards of high performance in order to achieve steady and dependable results.
The same can be said of workers: the most competent and capable of workers are likely to be highly attracted to the challenge of accomplishing more or better work - but the majority of workers are mediocre, and would likewise prefer a steady income for putting little effort into their work and achieving a level of productivity and income in which they are confident and secure.
People also differ in their ability to achieve and perceive flow. He considers the profession of surgery, which has one of the highest ratings of satisfactions. Many surgeons find their work addictive, and more enjoyable than any other activity. Others find it tedious and boring.
It is remarked that surgeons who specialize in a very specific kind of surgery - such as removing appendices -experience burnout more often than generalists who perform multiple kinds of surgeries, and who have a greater variety of challenges. But this is not universal: some generalists burn out and some specialists remain engaged.
(EN: There follows a lengthy description of the ways in which surgery conforms to the requirements of flow activities, but it seems excessively detailed - the core principles were mentioned at the start of the section.)
The Paradox of Work
The fundamental activity of work has not changed much over centuries. The tribal hunter/gatherer, the subsistence farmer, and the factory worker all engage in repetitive activities to serve ongoing needs - whether they worked to obtain the very things they needed (food) or worked to obtain tokens that could be exchanged for those things (money), the fundamentals have not changed, though the incidental details have.
In his interviews, MC has discovered a clear division in peoples' attitudes toward the topic of work. Some people have strong positive impressions and feel that work is the most meaningful activity in their lives, whereas others have strong negatives and feel their work distracts them from the more pleasant things they would rather be doing with their time.
He mentions an ethnographic study in which text pagers were provided to over 4,800 different respondents - their task was simply to send a message whenever they found themselves doing something enjoyable, indicating where and what they were doing.
- First, it was found that 75% of the messages were sent from people while they were at work and only 25% during leisure activities (EN: This may be skewed by the amount of time spent in the workplace, or preparing for work, as well as doing chores)
- It was also found that 54% of the activities reported from work qualified as flow activities
- Managers and supervisors reported flow activities 64% of the time, clerical workers 51%, and blue-collar workers 47%
- For posts made during leisure time, only 18% qualified as flow activities - most were passive consumption
- Also for leisure activities, blue-collar workers reported 20% flow activity, clerical workers 16%, and managers 15%
What's notable about these results is that more workplace activities provide flow than leisure activities - and that there is an inverse relationship that would seem to indicate those who have flow activities at work seek more consumptive activities in their leisure time and vice-versa.
He also mentions follow-up interviews that questioned people about their responses. One telling question was "Do you wish you could have been doing something else at the time?" This seemed to indicate that when people are involved in flow activities in the workplace, they still wished that they could be doing something else.
Another interpretation is that people who are on the job feel more skillful and challenged, and this makes them feel more productive and satisfied with their activities. When they are engaged in leisure activities, they recognize that their skills are not engaged and do not have as much satisfaction with the activity. But even so, they would prefer to spend less time at work and more on leisure pursuits.
He also observes that engagement has its limitations: people do not enjoy being highly challenged at all times but need to recuperate from flow activities, though this correlation is fairly week. It can often be found that individuals who have highly engaging jobs also prefer highly engaging leisure pursuits.
(EN: I would speculate that there is likely a lot of detail that is lost in the aggregate of this study, but MC does not isolate specific cases from the mass of data, so it is not possible to draw a firm conclusion about common patterns that may be masked in the aggregate.)
He then considers the notion of purpose and reward, and posits that people may be deeply engaged in a flow activity for its intrinsic rewards while the activity is being performed, but feel dissatisfaction afterward because it lacks extrinsic reward. Particularly in the workplace, where we do things we may not want to be doing for the benefit of others, this paradox arises. Working hard for the benefit of others may be satisfying in charitable activity, but in commercial activity there is a sense we have been cheated when the fruit of our labor is not our own.
It's also noted that satisfaction with working is a general sense that combines our feelings about a number of activities - some of which we like and some of which we don't. Even workers who report being "extremely satisfied" with their jobs can easily find thinks to complain about, and those who are "extremely dissatisfied" can also identify parts of their jobs that they enjoy a great deal.
He pauses to mention key factors in job satisfaction: a desire for variety and challenge, a feeling of solidarity with fellow workers, pressure to do work quickly rather than well, and spending too much time on the job to the detriment of their personal lives.
The Waste of Free Time
In general, people prefer free time to working hours - largely because they have the ability to choose what they do with their time rather than having to do what they are bidden.
But this too is a paradox because, given free time, many people don't seem to know what to do with it. As such, some sociologists regard free time as "the greatest waste of American life" because it does not produce anything of value, not even pleasure for the individual who is at his leisure.
"Free time" is unstructured, which causes people to have to face the task of finding things to do, and makes them personally responsible for the outcome: if they are not experiencing pleasure, it is their own fault for being unable to choose something pleasant to do.
The anxiety over having to make a decision, and the fear of making the wrong decision, have given rise to the entertainment industry. The industry specializes in giving people something to do with their free time so that they don't have to decide what to do with themselves and, as importantly, so that they do not have to accept the blame for having a poor experience.
A person who spends their money and time on seeing a movie can then blame the film when they did not experience pleasure. The expression is that "the movie was bad" and never "I made a bad decision to spend my time and money on watching that movie." Having someone else to blame is a great sense of relief.
To help sell the importance of learning to find flow, MC falls into the crowd that disparages the "waste" of free time, by considering the amount of free time people have in aggregate: if four billion people waste two hours of free time a week, that's nearly a million years of human consciousness that is wasted each week. Were that time put to productive use, what a wonderful world it would be.
(EN: He does have a point there, but this also presumes that all the time would be put to productive use. Flow activities do not always produce social good, but often merely pleasant engagement for the actor. The world would not be made wonderful if all those hours were spent mountain-climbing or learning to tap-dance.)
More to the point, reflect on the autotelic personality: a person who can find happiness in virtually any activity by using his imagination to turn it into a flow activity. The more we can do this, the more engaged and happy we will be in our lives. Instead of experiencing flow for a few hours now and then, it can become the default state of our lives - at work and at play - which would be a significant improvement over living the majority of life in a state of dissatisfaction.