Creating Chaos
There is the misconception that happiness is the pursuit of people who have already achieved success in life - and that you must be in a stable and sustainable situation before attempting to address "higher" needs such as the need to be engaged.
This is not so, and in fact the research the author has conducted have found many individuals who are on the lower rungs of society, whose daily life is an uncertain struggle, but who nonetheless are happy in lifestyles that seem desolate and chaotic to others.
If anything, those in tragic circumstances have a need to find flow as a means to sustain their spirit in such a situation, and even those whose lives are generally without care can benefit from seeking flow when terrible things happen to them.
Tragedies Transformed
It would be naive to suggest that control of consciousness is all that is necessary for a person to be happy: there are limits to the pain, hunger, or deprivation that the body can endure, and a positive mental attitude has never been shown to cure a disease, repair an injury, or sustain a person deprived of their basic needs.
However, the situations in which a person is legitimately deprived and is literally dying of neglect are extremely few. Most of the "pain" people suffer is entirely psychological, and maintaining control over consciousness will in fact sustain a person through terrible but not deadly circumstances.
Interviews with paraplegics have found that the tragedy that deprived them of their limbs is often viewed as "one of the most negative and one of the most positive events in their lives." The negative is clear enough, but the positive is the result of the focus a person gains when attempting to cope with such an injury. Everyday activities that were once performed in a mindless state become challenges to be met and overcome, and this gives patients a clarity of purpose they lacked before.
One patient, paralyzed from the waist down, describes his experience as "like being born again." Aside of learning basic daily skills, there is the struggle to find things that can be done - and because it is a struggle it becomes purposeful. One does not fall into a profession or a hobby, but must consider what seems possible and pursue it with considerable effort.
Similar testimonials are presented by people who were blinded. (EN: It is interesting that all the interviews presented are of people who lost their sight, causing me to wonder if a person who is blind since birth or a very young age has the same experience.)
Another series of interviews mentions the struggle of poverty, particularly of homeless people in major cities around the world. Poverty is a struggle to survive on limited resources, and requires a person to be very inventive in succeeding at daily challenges.
The final interview is wit ha hermit, who was born into privilege but decided to become destitute out of choice. What began as an experiment in 1967 (a walking tour of Europe) led to a sort of spiritual awakening, and the man has refused to rejoin society ever since, choosing instead a life of poverty in which he owns nothing.
To many, such a choice would seem insane, but to the hermit he has come to recognize that when life comes easy, it is not valued. Struggling to survive makes him appreciate everything in a way that, as a person of wealth and privilege, he had never known.
Coping with Stress
People who are involved in catastrophic accidents generally report one of two things: they either do not remember the incident at all, or they recall it in granular detail and describe the event as happening in slow motion. That is, such events either shut down the mind or cause it to become intensely focused.
For those who go blank, this is a psychological defense that shields them from harm, though this option provides no benefit after the fact. For those who find focus, all the minor distractions of daily life are stripped away and concentration crystallizes on the one thing that genuinely deserves undivided attention - and it is not unusual for them to emerge from tragedy with focus, drive, and engagement.
Psychoanalysts are intently focused on such events in a person's life, though their obsession with them seems misguided: there is a dramatic difference between the manner in which a person reacts in a catastrophic situation and the manner in which the same person deals with the non-life-threatening nuisances that are the source of stress and misery in their everyday lives. Though it's noted that the solution is often the same - to recognize what is important and dismiss what is unimportant.
(EN: There's a "joke" flowchart about worry that is actually quite insightful, in that it eliminates the things that people should not worry about: if it is highly unlikely to happen, if it doesn't affect you, if you have no power to change it, if the damage will be negligible, etc.)
There are three different kinds of resources people use to cope with stress in a positive manner:
- Support network - friends and family who can provide functional and emotional assistance in dealing with crises
- Psychological resources - Intelligence, education, knowledge, self-confidence, and "other personality factors" that enable them to take effective action
- Coping strategies - Specific patterns of action that are taken to enable the person to tolerate stress when effective action is not possible
The first of these strategies is entirely passive, and while the second is active it tends to manifest itself in a single or short-term action. Coping strategies, however, are ongoing, and the more positive among them qualify as flow activities because they involve applying skills to effect change that can be improved upon and exercised for a long duration.
Negative coping strategies, which are of little interest in regard to flow, generally involve denying or distracting oneself from stress. Busying oneself with menial tasks, displacing one's anger and frustration, turning to drugs or alcohol, or self-mutilation are not constructive, nor do they lend themselves to improvement, nor should it be advocated that they be used for a long period of time.
Positive coping skills generally begin with analysis, of oneself and of the situation at hand, and effecting a positive change in either the external or internal world. Those who are adept at doing so are often called "survivors" and are lauded for their resilience and courage.
The distinction between coping skills and psychological resources is that "coping" involves accepting the problem such as it is. A person who is blinded or paralyzed in an accident but finds a new profession to replace one they can no longer do is not taking action that eliminates their disability, but has accepted their disability and is coping with it.
There is some mention of coping skills as dealing with social pressures to conform or desist in an activity - virtually every inventor went through a period in which his idea was mocked and he was discouraged from pursuing it. And the formulaic story of triumph ends with their perseverance paying off and eventually getting the recognition, acclaim, and material rewards they deserved.
Perseverance is not a single quality of character, but a reflection of coping skills - the ability to recognize and ignore what is troublesome but unimportant. However, CS notes that suggesting a person should have perseverance is empty cheerleading and we do not yet understand how people who have this quality develop and exercise it. "Out ignorance in this matter is still very great."
The Power of Dissipative Structures
The author describes "dissipative structures" as systems that harness energy that would otherwise be dispersed and lost. Plants, for example, leverage the energy of the sun to produce nutrients, grow, and reproduce - to essentially create life out of solar radiation that serves no purpose and would otherwise fall on barren earth.
Human beings also find uses for waste energy and turn it to serve their goals. The most basic tool of civilization, fire, was created from dead vegetation that served little purpose, and we used its energy to prepare food, warm ourselves, smelt metal, and so on. The most common fuels of the present age, coal and petroleum, have no purpose in nature.
The human mind seeks to make use of things. We seldom destroy something that is serving a useful purpose to make it serve another purpose, and even then it is made to serve a more important one - but in most instances we find something that is serving no purpose and discover a use for it.
Even life itself, which is unstructured and purposeless, is shaped to form a purpose. We create the necessities and convenience of life out of raw materials that have little value in a natural state. We structure our own activities to yield something of value. Our ability to exert control toward achieving a beneficial outcome is the mechanism of our survival as a species.
Psychology is similar - the ability to find something useful to do with the mind is the essence of flow. Given the relative ease with which our basic survival needs are met, there is little for us to do in our natural state and we could be as animals, who seem to laze about when they are not motivated by instinctual drives to take some action such as feeding.
This is also essential to our coping mechanisms. We are not long preoccupied with negative emotions before we find something useful to do. A person fired from a job, or who loses a loved one, is not destroyed by the negative emotions that result. They set about the work of building a new life for themselves.
In this sense, the frustration we feel when we are bored or are experiencing negative emotions is a natural impulse to engage our minds in discovering something to do, if only to escape the entropic state in which our energy and time has no purpose or value. Said another way, finding flow is in our very nature.
However, the ability to escape from entropy is itself a skill that is evident in varying degrees in people. Some are weakened by stress while others seem to take strength from it. MC notes that there are three common practices among those who are skilled at applying themselves.
Unconscious Self-Assurance
Unconscious self-assurance is a kind of confidence that occurs in people who survive severe physical ordeals: a sense of harmony and the belief that things will work out for the best.
This is not a sense of personal power or control, but quite the opposite: it is the feeling that comes when one stops struggling and stops trying to make things work out a certain way, and simply lets go and surrenders to the situation.
Likewise, it is not the same as the sense of helplessness - that one is hopelessly doomed. Instead, it has to do with recognizing that intense concentration and desperate actions are not going to result in success, and in trusting oneself.
Consider the example of a pilot in a hurricane or another dangerous situation, who is at first frantically attempting to regain control of their craft - and makes quite a few mistakes. When the pilot simply stops panicking, reassures himself that he is skilled, trained, and experience, a calm settles over him and he is able to focus on doing exactly the right things to regain control.
Broadening Attention
In some instances, flow involves an intense awareness of self and a tight focus on the activity being performed. But in other instances, it is a broadened attention - to become aware of their surroundings, that enables them to achieve success.
While focused attention enables a person to see a specific action through to completion, broadened attention enables them to see all of their options and choose the right action to take. This is essential to success at a goal, rather than success at a task that fails to achieve a goal.
In this state, the basic activities of performing a task are accomplished automatically as the individual's attention is focused on broader things. Consider the example of driving a car: the novice driver is aware of the way in which they manipulate the pedals and steering wheel to operate the vehicle, but with experience these tasks become automatic. When an experienced driver speaks of driving, he does not say that "I turned the car to the left and pressed the accelerator" but instead "I turned to the left and sped up" - losing the distinction between driver and vehicle to instead focus on the broader experience.
He does concede that broadened attention can become problematic when things go wrong. He presents the example of an accomplished parachutist who had plummeted to his death because he had put on a rig that was set for a left-handed jumper. The difference was simply that the rip-cord was a few inches further to the left than usual - and because his mind was concerned with the broader situation (falling with a chute that did not open) he failed to collect himself and focus on the specific details.
Discovery of New Solutions
There are basically two ways to cope with a chaotic situation: either focus attention on the obstacles that impede your progress through know methods to a desired outcome, or to focus on the situation to consider different approaches or different goals.
A significant proportion of the frustration and despair people experience in dealing with difficult situations arises not from the fact that the situation itself is hopeless, but from the fact that the tactics on which they normally rely do not seem to work.
Consider the "peter principle" that observes that people often fail miserably at a position into which they have been promoted after achieving stunning success in their present job. This is because they attempt to us the same formulas and tactics in their new role as they did in their old, which are not appropriate to their new role. Rather than pausing to recognize this and seek to develop new formulas and tactics, many struggle to keep applying those that were successful for them in the past - in a completely different situation.
And in the broader sense, people all have preconceived notions about what they wish to achieve or obtain in life, and suffer a great deal of frustration and misery for their inability to achieve it. The solution to their problem is simply letting go of their preconceptions, and observing their situation to discover a different means to achieve satisfaction and happiness.
The Autotelic Self
It's well established that a person's ability to cope with adversity has less to do with the situation itself than their character. In general, a person who is successful in life is better equipped to deal with catastrophe and tragedy than one who is not, as the skills to overcome low-intensity long-term challenges are the same as those necessary to face high-intensity and short-term ones.
The "autotelic" self has previously been mentioned as a person who is capable of creating flow activities in boring and monotonous situations. The very same personality type is able to apply his skills to dealing with threats and challenges of a more dramatic nature. He is not only immune to boredom, but also to being overwhelmed because he is able to define structure and find a course of action.
Setting Goals
To experience flow, a person must have clear goals to achieve. The autotelic personality is able to perceive opportunities to change things to his liking, and to identify goals that can be attained in various circumstances.
Once a goal is defined, the autotelic person considers the tasks necessary to achieve it, and then the skills he must gain to attend to those tasks competently.
In taking action, the autotelic person is attuned to his outcomes and monitors feedback. Even if he is not the type to have an end-to-end plan to achieve a goal, he has a sense of the direction in which he needs to go to achieve it and considers whether the actions he is taking move him in the right direction, and abandon or adjust those that are not.
Another critical difference is that the autotelic person chooses their own goals - where as a person who lacks this quality often follows instructions that others have provided to them. This gives the autotelic person a stronger sense of dedication top achieving the outcome, and a clearer sense of purpose because they define the desired outcome rather than depending on others to define it for them.
Becoming Immersed
The autotelic person is able to become immersed in an activity, focusing on the necessary tasks and ignoring distractions that are unimportant to the task at hand.
This can be dangerous if it leads to a narrowness of focus - becoming so focused on the task that one ignored the objective, but as previously mentioned a well-defined task takes into account its objective, not just the ritual of activity, and is undertaken with attention to feedback.
The author concedes that attention disorders interfere with a person's ability to concentrate, and those who suffer from such disorders find a great deal of difficulty in achieving flow.
Being Attentive
Attentiveness is another core characteristic of the autotelic person. It requires attention in the first place to discover a goal, then to translate the goal into a plan, and then to undertake an extended period of action in its pursuit.
He mentions athletics again, as a venue in which attention is critical. A talented runner may not have to think about the precise motions of his body in a race (though he likely did so at one time in order to develop precise and effective motions) but he is also aware that he must be attentive to his surroundings. Even a champion boxer can be knocked out by a novice if he fails to pay attention to what he is doing.
CS admits that this seems paradoxical - to be focused on something, ignoring distractions, yet being aware of everything. The attention of the autotelic person during the process of a task includes all of these things: the environment, the action he takes, and what results from that action - as it is all part of the cycle of activity: observe-act-monitor.
Progressive Success
An autotelic person has the ability to appreciate incremental success. Those who are focused on the final outcome become impatient with the task and tend to give up easily when they fail to achieve the final outcome in a short time. They have no appreciation of progress and often feel stagnant and frustrated.
To the autotelic person, no part of a task is unimportant. Setting up his equipment is just as important to succeeding as using it. The beginning, middle, and end of a task - and every step in between, is important unto itself. Some parts are more challenging than others, but even the mundane parts are critical to success.
The autotelic person is constantly attentive, both of the long-term goal and the importance of each moment in its achievement.