Flow: The Psychology of Happiness

THE AUTOTELIC EXPERIENCE

But in flow there is no room for self-scrutiny. Because enjoyable activities have clear goals, stable rules, and challenges well matched to skills, there is little opportunity for the self to be threatened.

The Loss of Self-Consciousness

One item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much time thinking about it: our own self.

Thus enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative aspect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life.

When a person becomes so dependent on the ability to control an enjoyable activity that he cannot pay attention to anything else, then he loses the ultimate control: the freedom to determine the content of consciousness.

This sense of being in a world where entropy is suspended explains in part why flow-producing activities can become so addictive.

As this example illustrates, what people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations.

The important thing to realize here is that activities that produce flow experiences, even the seemingly most risky ones, are so constructed as to allow the practitioner to develop sufficient skills to reduce the margin of error to as close to zero as possible. Rock