To improve the quality of life through work, two complementary strategies are necessary. On the one hand jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities—as do hunting, cottage weaving, and surgery. But it will also be necessary to help people develop autotelic personalities like those of Serafina, Joe, and Tin

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 concentration of the flow experience—together with clear goals and immediate feedback—provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic negentropy.

RECLAIMING EXPERIENCE

As our studies have suggested, the phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components.

“The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.”

The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present.

3 ENJOYMENT AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.