flow
“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.”
from Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
flow
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Happiness
In my opinion a good hobby has gear you can nerd out on, increasing levels of skill or knowledge that are never finished, is meditative and creates flow state, and naturally creates social connection.
Adolescents who never learn to control their consciousness grow up to be adults without a “discipline.” They lack the complex skills that will help them survive in a competitive, information-intensive environment. And what is even more important, they never learn how to enjoy living. They do not acquire the habit of finding challenges that bring ou
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Cicero once wrote that to be completely free one must become a slave to a set of laws. In other words, accepting limitations is liberating.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Happiness
One of the most interesting examples of how the phenomenon of flow appeared to thinkers of earlier times is the concept of Yu referred to about 2,300 years ago in the writings of the Taoist scholar Chuang Tzu. Yu is a synonym for the right way of following the path, or Tao: it has been translated into English as “wandering”; as “walking without tou
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Ting’s explanation may seem to imply that Yu and flow are the result of different kinds of processes. In fact, some critics have emphasized the differences: while flow is the result of a conscious attempt to master challenges, Yu occurs when the individual gives up conscious mastery. In this sense they see flow as an example of the “Western” search
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Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Flow: The Psychology of Happiness
Given these observations, instead of worrying about how to make a million dollars or how to win friends and influence people, it seems more beneficial to find out how everyday life can be made more harmonious and more satisfying, and thus achieve by a direct route what cannot be reached through the pursuit of symbolic goals.