Flow and the good life
What constitutes a good life? ... Viewed through the experiential lens of flow, a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.
That is a quote from The Concept of Flow by Nakamura, Csikszentmihalyi, Lopez, & Snyder, (2001). The field of positive psychology, which I have been digging into of the last few months, seeks to answer the question: what is the good life? But from a psychological rather than strictly philosophical perspective.
Have you experienced doing something where time seems to pass without you noticing, where you look up and an hour has passed? Where you think of nothing but the activity, and everything else, including your sense of self, seems to disappear? Then you have experienced what psychologists call flow. Flow can be defined as “a state of being in which people become so immersed in the joy of their work or activity that nothing else seems to matter” (source).
I can remember when I was a financial analyst and I would get a big trove of data and I would start digging through it, looking for patterns and answers, trying to understand what was happening in my organization and how I could help the leadership improve our utilization of scarce resources. I would spin the data this way and that, looking for it to give up its secrets. I sometimes felt like I was Neo at the end of the Matrix. Without the cool leather and guns, but with all the numbers flowing around me. I’d look up and hours would have passed, with me crunching away.
The core of the flow experience is based on challenge and skill. We experience flow when we are engaged in an activity that requires us to use our skill to solve a problem that is just at the edge of our ability. The problem has to match our ability. If the problem is too complex for our ability, we experience anxiety because we can’t solve it. If the problem is too easy relative to our ability, we experience boredom because we aren’t being challenged. But if we can find the sweet spot of just enough challenge to make us sweat without overwhelming us, we move into a state of flow where all of our attention becomes fixated on the problem at hand. So much so that we don’t have brain space to dedicate to anything else - like checking our social media notifications or getting lunch or talking to a colleague. When we step away, we’re often stunned by how much time has passed and how wrung out but good we feel. Csikszentmihalyi (2000) graphically represented flow this way:
Essential to the experience of flow is “Clear proximal goals and immediate feedback about the progress that is being made” (Nakamura, et al, 2001, p. 90). In other words, there’s a tight feedback loop between action and outcome so that you can adjust quickly. Because of the need for feedback, many of the studies of flow have been done in a sports context where participants can quickly tell if their actions are successful or not. There is also literature looking at flow and musicians. Think of a great concert you are at - what makes it great? The interaction between the musician(s) and the audience, with the audience feeding back to the musician(s) their approval of the musician’s performance. These days I do a lot less number crunching, but I sometimes experience flow when I am teaching. A really great class feels like I am a jazz musician, improvising and creating new examples, playing off the students, using things I know about them in my examples, seeing them actually paying attention (instead of looking at their laptops or phones), smiling and laughing, or better yet, seeing they are getting the ideas I am trying to explain. It’s an amazing feeling and I just don’t want it to end when it is going well. That’s the flow I most often experience these days. The immediate feedback is in the reactions of the students, letting me continue or adjust my performance.
Nakamura, et al, identify a flow state as having the following characteristics:
Intense and focused concentration on what one is doing in the present moment
Merging of action and awareness
Loss of reflective self-consciousness (i.e., loss of awareness of oneself as a social actor)
A sense that one can control one’s actions; that is, a sense that one can in principle deal with the situation because one knows how to respond to whatever happens next
Distortion of temporal experience (typically, a sense that time has passed faster than normal)
Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, such that often the end goal is just an excuse for the process.
The Nakamura, et al, paper is excellent, and has been cited over 5,000 times, so it’s not just me who thinks so. But going back to their initial assertion that what constitutes a good life is to be in flow, I partially agree. One of the problems with positive psychology that I have seen so far in my studies is a lack of moral foundations. As I wrote about in my essay The Very Happy Gangster, it’s possible to find happiness (and flow is an important part of happiness) without being moral. It doesn’t mean that you are living a worthy, or even good, life. If the Very Happy Gangster finds flow from running a criminal empire, that doesn’t mean he’s living a good life. So we need some moral grounding that precedes flow as a good. If you experience flow from selling drugs to junior high school kids or conning retirees out of their savings, you don’t belong in society. What we do matters. We need to point our efforts in a righteous direction before we worry about experiencing flow.
In addition to flow, we need to know that what we are doing matters. It’s not enough for our life’s Work to be not bad, but it needs to be good. We need to know we are contributing. We also can’t be in flow all of the time. We have to stop to eat and sleep and bathe every now and then (general competence). But there are other things that make life worthwhile. Our relationships matter. Having connections with other human beings is important as well. Human relationships can be built to some degree in group flow (being in a band), but most relationships are built outside of flow, because they require being conscious of others.
When I talk about competence as one of the 3Cs of Meaning, I divide it into specific and general competence. Flow mostly comes from specific competence. In my essay Performance, Talent, and Fit, I talk about how we need to develop specific competence in some area or areas that we can use to generate resources for us to live on. If you are lucky, you get to experience flow in your work - in the thing you are really good at that supports you (and maybe your family). If you are unlucky, you may have to do a job that is not intrinsically rewarding. I do think flow is still important. If you do not get flow at work, you most likely need to build specific competence in a hobby that will allow you to experience flow to compensate for the lack of flow at work. Maybe you can experience it on the golf course, fly fishing, carpentry, gardening, or somewhere else. Flow is part of a good life, it just isn’t all of it.
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Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Beyond boredom and anxiety. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Nakamura, J., Csikszentmihalyi, M., Lopez, S. J., & Snyder, C. R. (2001). The Concept of Flow. In Handbook of Positive Psychology. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195135336.003.0007