introduction

• studies on flow have demonstrated repeatedly that more than anything else, the quality of life depends on two factors: how we experience work, and out relations with other people.
• we are biologically programed to find other human beings the most important objects in the world
• if we learn to make our rleations with oters more like flow expreriences, out quality of life as a whole is going to be much improved
• on the other hand, we also value privacy and often wish to be left alone.
• yet unless one learns to tolerate and even enjoy being alone, it is very difficult to accomplisty nay task that requires undivided concentration. for this reason, it is essential to find ways to control consciousness even when we are left to our own devices

the conflict between being alone and being with others

• of the things that frighten us, the fear of being left out of the flow of human interaction is certainly one of the worst. there is no question that we are social animals; only in the company of other people do we feel complete
• the person ignored grows gradually depressed, and soon begins to doubt his or her very existence. in some societies the final outcome of being ostracized is death: the person who is left alone comes to accept the fact that he must be already dead, since no one pays attention to him any longer; little by little he stops taking care of his body, and eventually passes away
• the density of human contacts that great cities afford is like a soothing balm; people in such centers relish in even when the interactions it provides may be unpeasant or dangerous.
• social science surveys have universally concluded that people claim to be most happy with friends and family, or just in the company of others. one of the major symptoms that sets depressed and unhappy people apart is that they rarely report such events occurring to them.
• A supportive social network also mitigates stress: an illness or other misfortune is less likely to break a person down if he or she can rely on the emotional support of others
• for instance, the more people grew to depend for survival on knowledge instead of instinct, the more they benefited from sharing their learning mututally; a solitary individual under such conditions became an idiot, which in greek originally meant a "private person" - someone who is unable to learn from others
• when we examine the most negative experiences in the life of average people, we find the other side of the glittering coin of gregariousness: the most painful events are alsothose that involve relationships.
• like anything else that really matters, relationships make us extremely happy when they go well, and very depressed when they don't work out
• a social situation has the potential to be transformed by redefining its rules. human relations are malleable, and if a person has the appropriate skills their rules can be transformed

the pain of loneliness

• the worst moods are reported when one is alone and there is nothing that needs ot be done
• why is solitude such a negative experience? the bottom-line answer is that keeping order in the mind frmo within is very difficult.
• while interacting with television, the mind is protected from personal worries
• while under the influence of shemicals, the self is relieved from the responsibility of directing its psychic energy; we can sit back and watch the patterns of thought that the drug is providing for - whatever happens, it's out of our hands
• while alcohol and other drugs are capable of producing optimal experiences, they are usually at a very low level of complexity. unless consumed in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies, what drugs in fact do is reduce our perception of both what can be accomplished and what we as individuals are able to accomplish, until the two are in balance. this is a pleasant state of affairs, but it is only a misleading simulation of that enjoyment that comes from increasing opportunities for actions and the abilities to act
• the danger is that in becoming dependent on chemicals for patterning the mind, the risks losing the ability to control it by himself
• the habits of pornography and depersonalized sex build on the genetically programmed attraction of images and activities related to reproduction. thy focus attention naturally and pleasurably, and in so doing help to exclude unwanted contents from the mind. what they fail to do is develop any of the attentional habits that might lead to a greater complexity of consciousness
• even pain is better than the chaos that seeps into an unfocused mind. hurting oneself, whether physically or emotionally, ensures that attention can be focused on something that, although painful, is at least controllable - since we are the ones causing it
• the ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention. it is relatively easy to become involved with a job, to enjoy the company of friends, to be entertained in a teater or at a concert. but what happens when we are left to our own devices? alone, when the dark night of the soul descends, are we forced into frantic attempts to distract the mind from its coming? or qre we able to take on activities that are not only enjoyable, but make the self grow?
• a person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favorable external environment to enjoy the moment, has pass the test for having achieved a creative life
• teenagers who can't bear solitude disquality themselves from later carrying out adult tasks that require serious mental preparation.
• a typical scenario familiar to many parents involved a teenager who comes back from school, drops the books in his bedroom, and after taking a snack from the refrigerator immediately head for the phone to get in touch with his friends. if thereis nothing going on there, he will turn on the stereo or the TV. if by any chancehe is tempted to open a book, the resolve is unlikely to last long. to study means to concentrate on difficult patterns of information, and sooner or later even the most disciplined mind drifts away from the relentless templates on the page to pursue more pleasant thoughts. but is it difficult to summon up pleasant thoughts at will. instead, one's mind typically is besieged by the usualy visitors: the shadowy phantoms that intrude n the unstructured mind. the teenager begins to worry about his looks, his popularity, his chanced in life. to repel these intrusionshe must find something else to occupy his consciousness. studying won't do,because it is too difficult. the adolescent is ready to do almost anything to take his mind off this situation - provided it does not take too much psychich energy. the usualy solution is to turn back to the familiar routine of music, tv, or a friends with whom to while the time away
• adolescents who never learn to control their consciousness grow up to be adults without a "discipline" they do not acquire the habit of finding challenges that bring out hidden potentials for growth
• if a person does not know how to control attention in solitude, he will inevitably turn to the easy external solutions: drugs, entertainment, excitement - whatever dulls or distracts the mind
• it is best to develop this habit early, but it is never too late to do so.

taming solitude

• "whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god" - francis bacon
• one can survive solitude, but only if one fins ways of ordering attention that will prevent entropy from destructuring the mindsychich entropy is avoided by takin the mind of unpleasant thoughts and feelings. yet how one copes with solitude makes all the difference. if being alone is seen as a chance to accomplish goals that cannot be reached in the company of others, then instead of feeling lonely, a person will enjoy solitude and might be able to learn new skills in the process. on the other hand, if solitude is seen as a condition to be avoided at all costs instead of as a challenge, the person will panis and resort to distractions that cannot lead to higher levels of complexity.
• hoeever, solitude is a problem that must be confronted whether one lives in southern manhatten or the northern reaches of alaska. unless a person learns to enjoy it, much of life will be spent desperately trying to avoid its will effects

flow and the family

• sociobiologists claim that this familial loyalty is proportional to the amount of genes that any two persons share: for instance, a brother and a sister will have half their genes in common, while two cousines only half as many again. in this scenario siblings will on the average, help each other out twice as much as counsins
• no slowly maturing mammalian species could have survived without some built-in mechanism that made most adults feel responsible for their young, and the young feel dependent on the old; for that reason the bond of the newborn human infant to its caretakers, and viceversa, is especially strong.
• the actual kinds of relationships families have supported have been astonishingly diverse in various cultures, and at various times. for instance, whether a marriage is polygamous or monogamous, or whether it is patrilineal or matrilineal, has a rather strong influence on the kind of daily experiences husbands, wves and children have with one another
• while genetic programming may predispose us to attachment to family members, the cultural context will have a great deal to do with the strength and direction of that attachment
• the increase in the divorce rat is probably more affected by changes in the labor market that have increased women's employment opportunities, and by the diffusion of labor-saving home appliances, than it is by a lessening of loeve or of moral fiber
• if the trend of traditional families keeping together mainly as a convenience is on the wane, the number of families that endure because their membersenjoy each other may be increasing. of course, because external forces are still much more powerful than internal ones, the net efrfect is liekly to be a further fragmentation of family life for some time to some. but the families that do persevere will be in a better position to help their members develop a rich self than families held together against their will are able to do
• the bottom line seems to be that marriages will take the form that most efficiently ensures survival. even members of the same animal species will vary their patterns of relationship so as to adapt best in a given environment.
• the form the human family takes is a response to similar kinds of environmental pressures. in terms of extrinsic reasons, we are monogamous because in technological societies based on a money economy, time has proven this to be a more concenient arrangement. but the issue we have to confront as individuals is not whether humans are "naturally" monogamous or not, but whether we want to be monogamous or not. and in asnwering that question, we need to weigh all the consequences of our choice
• 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. for example, by making up one's mind to invest psychic energy exclusively in a monogamous marriage, regardless of any problems, obstacles, or more attractive options that may come along later, one is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns. as a result a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live
• to provide flow, a family has to have a goal for its existence. extrinsic reasons are not sufficient: it is not enough to feel that, well, "everybody else is married," "it is natural to have children," or "two can live cheaply as one." these attitudes may encourage one to start a family, and may even be strong enough to keep it going, but they cannot make family life enjoyable. positive goals are necessary to focus the psychich energies of parents and children on common tasks
• some of these goals might be very general and long-term, such as planning a partiular life-style - to build an ideal home, to provide the best possible education for the children, or to implement a religious way o living in a modern secularized society. for such goals to result in interactions that will help increase the complexity of its members, the family must be both differentiated and integrated. differentiation means that each person is encouraged to develop his or her unique traits, maximize personal skills, set individual goals. integration, in contrast, guarantees that what happens to one person will affect all others. if a child is proud of what she accomplished in schoo, the rest of the family will pay attention and will be proud of her, too. if the mother is tired and depressed, the family will try to help and cheer her up. in an integrated family, each oerson's goals matter to all others
• in addition to long-term goals, it is imperative to have a constant supply of short-term objectives. these may include simple tasks like buying a new sofa, going ona picnic, planning for a vacation, or playing a game of scrabble together on sunday afternoon. unless there are goals that the whole family is willing to share, it is almost impossible for its members to be physically together, let alone involved in an enjoyable joint activity. here again, differentiation and integration are important: the common goals should reflect the goals of individual members as much as possible.
• as with any other flow activity, family activities should also provide clear feedback. in this case, it is simply a matter of keeping open channels of communication.
• unless partners invest psychic energy in the relationship, conflicts are inevitable, simply because each individual has goals that are to a certain extent divergent from those of all other members of the family. without good lines of communication the distortions will become amplified, until the relationship falls apart.
• feedback is also crucial to determine whether family goals are being achieed
• so most parents just bive up, and abandon their teenagers to the peer culture. the more fruitful, if more difficult, strategy is to find a new set of activities that will continue to keep the family group involved
• the balancing of challenges and skills is another factor as necessary in enjoying social relationships in general, andfamily life in particular, as it is for any other flow activity.
• when a man and a woman are first attracted to each other, the opportunities for action are usually clear enough. with time one gets to know the other person well, and the obvious challenges have been exhausted. at this point, the relationship is in danger of becoming a boring routine that might be kept alive by mutual convenience, but is unlikely to provide further enjoyment, or spark a new growth in complexity. the only way to restore flow to the relationship is by finding new challenges in it
• these might involve steps as simple as varying the routines of eating, sleeping, or shopping. they might involve making an effort to talk together about new topics of conversation, visiting new places, making new friends. more than anything else they involve paying attention to the partner's own complexity, getting to know her at deeper levels than were necessary in the earlier days of the relationship, supporting him with sympathy and compassion during the inevitable changes that the years bring. a complex relationship sooner or later faces the big question: whether the two partners are ready to make a lifelong commitment. at that point, a whole new set of challenges presents itself: raising a family together, getting involved in broader community affiars when the children have grown up, working alongside one another. of course, these things cannot happen without extensive inputs of energy and time; but the payoff in terms of the quality of experience is usually more than worth it
• the same needto constantly increase challenges and skills applies to one's relationshipwith children
• but by early adolescence, many teenagers get to be too much to handle. what most parents do at that point is to politely ignore theirchildren's lives, pretending that everything is all right, hoping against hope that it will be
• teenagers are physiologically mature beings, ripe for sexual reproduction; in most societies (and in ours too, a centuryor so ago) they are considered ready for adult responsibilities and appropriate recognition. becuase our present social arrangements, however, do not provide adequate challenges for the skills teenagers have, they must discover opportunities for action outside those sanctionedby adults
• under existing conditions, it is very difficult for parents to compensate for the poverty of opportunities in the culture at large. in this respect, families living in the richest suburbs are barely better off than families living in the slums.
• what can a strong, vital, intelligent fifteen-year-old do in your typical suburb? if you consider that question you will probably conclude that what is available is either too artificial, or too simple, or not exciting enough to catch a teenager's imagination
• it is not surprising that athletics are so important in suburban schools; compared to the alternatives, they provide some of the most concrete chances to exercise and display one's skills
• but there are some steps that families can take to partially alleviate this wasteland of opportunities. the problem remains with teens: the custom of leaving home for college. the problem remains with the period of puberty, roughly the five years between twelve and seventeen: what meaningful challenges can be found for young people that age?
  • if the parents enjoy playing music, cooking, reading, gardening, carpentry, or fixing engines in the garage, then it is more likely that their children will find similar activities challenging, and invest enough attention in them to begin enjoy doingsomething that will help them grow
  • if parents just talked more about their ideals and dreams - even if these had beenfrustrated - the children might develop the ambition needed to break through the complacency of their present selves
  • if nothing else, discussing one's job or thoughts and events of the day, and treating children as young adults, as friends, help to socialize them into thoughtful adults
  • but if the father spends all his free time at home vegetating in front of the tv set with a glass of alcohol in his hand, children will naturally assume that adults are boring people who don't know how to have fun, and will turn to the peer group for enjoyment
• most activities, including school, recreation, and employment, are under adult control and leave little room for the youths' initiative. lacking any meaningful outlet for their skills and creativity, they may turn to redundant partying, joyriding, malicious gossiping, or drugs, and narcissistic introspection to prove themselves that they are alive.
• consciously or not, many young girls feel that becoming pregnant is the only really adult thing they can do, despite its dangers and unpleasant consequences
• what does help are living examples and concrete opportunities. if these are not available, one cannot blame the young for taking their own counsel
• some of the tensions of teenage life can be eased if the family provides a sense of acceptance, control, and self-confidence to the adolescent. a relationship that has these dimensions is one in which people trust one another, and feel totally accepted.
• being assured of one's worth in the eyes of one's kin gives a person the strength to take chances; excessive conformity is usually caused by fear of disapproval. it is much easier for a person to try developing her potential if she knows that no matter what happens, she has safe emotional base in the family
• unconditional acceptance is especially important to children. if parents threaten to withdraw their love from a child when he fails to measure up, the child's natural playfulness will be gradually replaced by chronic anxiety. however, if the child feels that his parents are unconditionally committed to his welfare, he can then relax and explore the world without fear; otherwise he has to allocate psychic energy to his own protection, thereby reducing the amount he can freely dispose of
• early emotional security may well be one of the conditions that helps develop an autotelic personality in children. without this, it is difficult to let go of th self long enough to experience flow
• when there is no risk attached to transgressing rules they become meaningless, and without meaningful rules an activity cannot be enjoyable. but they must also recognize that no matter what happens, the parents' concern for them is not in question
• when a family has a common purpose and open channels of communication, when it provides gradually expanding opportunities for action in a setting of trust, then life in it becomes an enjoyable flow activity
• one of the basic delusions of our time is that home life takes care of itself naturally, and that the best strategy for dealing wih it is to relax and let it take its course
• they often have an almost superstitious faith in the integrity of the home. only when it is too late - when the wife has become dependent on alcohol, when the children have turned into cold strangers - do many men wake up to the fact that the family, like any other joint enterprise, needs constant investments of psychic energy toassure its existence
• unconditional acceptance, the complete trust family members ought to have for one anothers, is meaningful only when it is accompanied by an unstinting investment of attention. otherwise it is just an empty gesture, a hypocritical pretense indistinguishable frmo disinterest

enjoying friends

• "the worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship" - sir francis bacon
• we can choose our friends, and usually do so, on the basis of common interests and complementary goals
• when a friendship is primarily a way of validating one's own insecure sense of self, it will give pleasure, but it will not be enjoyable in our sense - that of fostering growth
• everyone takes pleasure in occasionally passing the time of day chatting, but many people become extremely dependent on a daily "fix" of superficial contacts. this is especially true for individuals who cannot tolerate solitude, and who have little motional support at home
• teenagers without strong family ties can become so dependent on their peer group that they will doanything to be accepted by it
• if the young person feel accepted and cared for at home, however, dependence on the group is lessened, and the teenager can learn to be in control of his relationships with peers.
• in other words, be transformed the daunting, vague monster of popularity into a feasible flow activity that he ended up enjoyin while it gave him a sense of pride and self-esteem. the company of peers, like every other activity, can be experienced at various levels: at the lowest level of complexity it is a pleasurable way to ward off chaos temporarily; at the highest it provides a strong sense of enjoyment and growth
• there are few things as enjoyable as freely sharing one's most secret feelings and thoughts with another person. even though this sounds like a commoplace, it in fact requires concentrated attention, openness, and sensitivity.
• friendships allow us to express parts of our being that we seldom have the opportunity to act out otherwise. one way to describe the skills that every mand and woman hasis to divide them in two classes: the instrumental and the expressive.
  • intrumental skills are the ones we learn so that we cancope effectively with te environment. they are basic survival tools, liek the cunning of the hunter or the craft of the workman, or intellectual tools, like reading and writing and the specialized knowledge of the professional in our techological society. people who have not learned to find flow in most of the things they undertake generally experience instrumental tasks as extrinsic - because they do not reflect their own choices, but are requriements imposed from the outside
  • expressive skills, on the other hand, refer to actions that attempt to externalize our subjective experiences. singing a song that reflects how we feel, translating our moods into a dance, painting a picture that represents our feelings, telling a joke we like, and going bowling if that is what makes us feel good are forms of expression in this sense. when involved in an expressive activity we feel in touch with out real self.
• a person who lives only by instrumental actions without experiencing the spntaneous flow of expressivity eventaullybecomes indistinguishable from a robot who has been programmed by aliens to mimic human behavior
• it is in the company of friends that we can most clearly experience the freedom of the self and learn who we really are
• the ideal of a modern marriage is to have one's spouse as a friend
• friendship is not enjoyable unless we take up its expressive challenges
• a true friend is someone we can occassionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. it is comeone who shares our goal of self-realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails
• while families provide primarily emotional protection, friendships usually involve mysterious novelty
• but later in life, friendships rarely happen by chance: one must cultivate them as assiduously as one must cultivate a job or a family

a wider communiy

• in the same way, one can belong to a larger interpersonal systems by subscribing to the aspirations of a community, an ethnic group, a political party, or a nation
• in the ancient greek usage, "politics" referred to whatever involved people in affairs that went beyond personal and family welfare
• the greater challenge is not only to benefit oneself, but to help others in the process
• what counts is to set a goal, to concentrate one's psychic energy, to pay attention to the feedback, and to make certain that the challenge is appropriate to one's skill. sooner or later the itneraction will begin to hum, and the flow experience follows
• the concept of flow is useful not only in helping individuals improve the quality of their lives, but also in pointing out how public actions should be directed
• in the past few centuries economic rationality has been so successful that we have come to take for granted that the "bottom line" of any human effort is to be measured in dollars and cents. but an exclusively economic approach to life is profoundly irrational; the true bottom line consists in the quality and complexity of experience
• a community should be judged good not because it is techologically advanced, or swimming in material riches; it is good if it offers people a chance to enjoy as many aspects of their lives as possible, while allowing them to develop their potential in the pursuit of ever greater challenges.
• similarly the value of a shool does not depend on its prestige, or its ability to train students to have up to the necessities of life, but rahter on the degree of the enjoyment of lifelong learning it can transmit
• a good factory is not necessarily the one that makes the most money, but the one that is more responsible for improving the quality of life for its workers and its customers
• and the true function of politics is not to make people more affluent, safe, or powerful, but to let as many as possible enjoy an increasingly complex existence
• but no social change can come about until the consciousness of individuals is changed first. when a young man asked carlyle how he should go about reforming the world, carlyle answered, "reform yourslef. that way there will be one less rascal in the world". the advice is still valid. those who try to make life better for everyone without having learned to control their own lives first usually end up making things worse all around