Introduction

• There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goal better
• Neither of these strategies is effective when used alone
• Symbols can be deveptive: they have a tendency to distract from the reality they are supposed to represent
• To improve life on must improve the quality of experience
• 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

Pleasure and enjoyment

• Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met
• Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself, it does not bring happiness or produce psychological growth or add complexity to the self
• Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness
• Sleep, rest, food, and sex provide restorative homeostatic expereinces that return consciousness to order after the needs of the body intrude and causes psychic entropy to occur
• Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps comething even unimagined before
• Enjoyment is characterizd by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, or accomplishment
• After an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in ssome respect, we have become more complex as a result of it
• We can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investment of attention
• Unfortuneately, this natural connection between growth and enjoyment tends to disappear with time. But if one gets to be too complacent, feeling that psychic energy invested in new directions is wasted unless there is a good chance of reaping extrinsic rewards for it, one may end up no longer enojoying life, and pleasure becomes the only source of positive expereince.

The elements of enjoyment

• The optimal experience, and the psychological conditions that make it possile, seem to be the same the world over.
• The feelings are exactly the same regardless of what they did, who they are, when they did it or where they did it.
• The phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components
  • A challenging activity that requires skills
    • By for the overwhelming proportion of optimal experiences are reported to accur within sequences of activities that are
      • 1. goal-oriented
      • 2. bound by rules
      • 3. require the investment of psychic energy
      • 4. cannot be done without the appropriate skills
    • skill is any capacity to manipulate symbolic information
    • activity contains a bundle of opportunities for actions or "challenges" that require appropriate skill to realize
    • simple way to find challenges is to enter a competitive situation. It is a quick way of developing complexity
    • competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one's skills
  • Merging of actions and awareness
    • when all a person's relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person's attention is completely absorbed by the activity
    • one of the most universal and distinctive features of optimal experience takes please: people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themseles as separate from the actions they are performing
    • the purpose of flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow
    • in normal life, we keep interrupting what we do with doubts and questions
  • Clear Goals
    • unless a person learns to set goals and to recognize and guage feedback in such activities, they will not enjoy them
    • in some creative activities, where goals are not clearly set in advance, a person must develop a strong personal sense of what the person intends to do. At least in the form of internal guidlines
    • Sometimes the goals and the rules governing an activity are invented or negotiated on the spot
  • Feedback
    • the kind of feekback we work toward is in and of itself often unimportant
    • what makes feedback information valuable is the symbolic message it contains: that I have succeeded in my goal.
    • Such knowledge creates order in consciousness
  • Concentration on the task at hand
    • this feature of flow is an important by-product of the fact that enjoyable activities require a complete focusing of attention on the task at hand - thus leaving no room in the mind for irrelecant information
    • normal everyday existence lacks the pressing demands of flow experiences, concentration is rarely so intesnse that preoccupations and anxieties can be automatically ruled out. Thus, unexpected and frequent episodes of entropy interferes with the amooth run of psychic energy
    • the clearly structured demands of the activity impose order, and exclude the interference of disorder in consciousness. This is one reason why flow improves the quality of experience
    • Any activity that requires concentration has a narrow window of time in consciousness and only a very select range of information can be allowed into awareness
  • paradox of control
    • the flow experience is typically described as involving a sense of control - or, more precisely, as lacking the sense of worry about losing control that is typical in many situations of normal life
    • in principle, in the world of flo, perfection is attainable
    • so rather than a pathological thrill that somes from courting disaster, the positive emotion they enjoy is the perfectly healthy feeling of being able to control potentially dangerous forces
    • what people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations
    • this sense of being in a world where entryopy is suspended explains in part why flow-producing activities can become so addictive
    • 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
  • The loss of self-consciousness
    • one item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much time thinking abotu it: our own self
    • the loss of the sense of a self separate from the world around it is sometimes accompanied by a feeling of union with the environment
    • preoccupation with the self consumes psychic energy because in everyday life we often feel threatened
    • whenever we are threatened we beed to bring the image we have of ourselves back into awareness, so we can find out whether or not the threat is serious, and how we should meet it
    • in flow, there is no room for self-scrutiny
    • what slips below the threshold of awareness is the concept of self, the information we use to represent to ourselves who we are
    • growth of the self occurs only if the interaction is an enjoyable one, that is, if it offers nontrivial opportunities for action and requires a constant perfection of skill
    • is it possible to lose onself in systems of action that demand nothing but faith and allegiance
    • from this submission, northing new can come; consciousness may attain a welcome order, but it will be an order imposed rather than achieved. At best the self of the true believer resembles a crystal: strong and beautifully symmetrical, but very slow to grow
    • There is one very important and at first apparently paradoxical relationship between losing the sense of self in a flow experience, and having it emergy stronger afterward. It almost seems that occasionally giving up self-consciousness is necessary for building a strong self-concept. It becomes enriched by new skills and fresh achievements
  • transofrmation of time
    • it is not clear whether thisdimension of flow is just an epiphenomenon - a by-product of the intense concentration requried for the activity at hand - or whether it is something that controbutes in its own right to the positive quality of the experience
    • Although it seems likely that losing track of the clock is not one of the major elements of enjoyment, freedom from the tyranny of time does add to the exhilaration we feel during a state of complete invovlement.

Autotelic Experience

• The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself
• the term autotelic derives from twoGreek words, auto maining self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward
• when the experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on its consequences
• Some things we are initially forced to do against our will turn out in the sourse of time to be intrinsically rewarding. Exotelic becoming autotelic.
• most enjoyable activities are not natura; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding
• The power of flow is only a means, therefore like other means, it can be used for benefit or for destruction
• as long as a significant segment of society has few opportunities to encounter meaningful challenges, and few chances to develope the skills necessary to benefit from them, we must expect that violence and crime will attract those who cannot find their way to more complex autotelic experiences
• Jefferson's uncomfortable dictum "Eternal vigilence is the price of liberty" applies outside the fields of politics as well; it means that we must constantly reevaluate what we do, less habits and past wisdom blind us to new possibilities