Our ability to feel awe in the form of chills, goose bumps, or choking up serves as a kind of emotional radar for detecting meaningful activity.

They create epic contexts for action: collective stories that help us connect our individual gameplay to a much bigger mission.

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” We need real-time data to understand our performance: are we getting better or worse? And we can use quantitative benchmarks—specific, numerical goals we want to achieve—to focus our efforts and motivate us to try harder.

But . . . [perhaps] it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.25

“it takes active meditations and gestures.”24

we’re increasing our ability to rise to the occasion, to inspire awe, and to take part in something bigger than ourselves.

cause,

nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow”.4 When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.

We do autotelic work because it engages us completely, and because intense engagement is the most pleasurable, satisfying, and meaningful emotional state we can experience.