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FLOW: the psicology of optimal experience (1) HAPPINESS REVISITED (Chapter…

- - - - Only direct control of experience (ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do) can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.
    - - Being fully involved with every detail of our lives: happiness
        
        Achieving control over the contents of our consciousness: optimal experience
        
        Optimal experience depends on the ability to control what happens in consciouness moment by moment.
        
        Everything we experience is information: if we are able to control this information, we can decide what our lives will be like.
        
        The optimal state of inner experience: order in consciousness
        
        The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.
        
        It happens when psychic energy is invested in realistic goals and when skills match the opportunities for action
        
        Getting control of life is never easy. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery or participation in the determining the contents of life
        
        The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is scretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.
- - - - How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. It depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the universe.
        
        Goals are simple for the majority of people (survive and live children). With affluence and power comforts keeps increasing but the sense of well-being we hoped to achieve doesn't occur
        
        People generally are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When it happens, people forfeit their chance of contentment
  - - - The overweening presumption about what we are entiltled to from a universe that is basically insensitive to human needs generally leads to trouble.
        
        When people start believing that progress is inevitable and life easy, they may quickly lose courage and determination in the face of the first signs of adversity.
        
        And then they flounder in a morass of anxiety and apathy.
        
        The roots of the discontent are internal and each person must untangle them personally.
        
        The lack of inner order manifests itself in something called ontological anxiety. Basically, it's a fear of being, a feeling that there is no meaning to life and that existence is not worth going on
        
        Some acquire more of the things that were supposed to make life good. After each sucess it becomes clearer that money, power, status and possessions do not, by themselves, necessarily add to the quality of life.
        
        While humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.
  - - - To overcome the anxities and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment. They have to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circunstances.
        
        We grow up believing that what counts most in our lives is that which will occur in the future.
        
        At certain extent, this postponement of gratification is inevitable. Civilization is built on the repression of individual desires. All social controls, for instance, are ultimately based on a threat to the survival instinct.
        
        Seeking pleasure is a reflex response built into our genes for the preservation of the species. Our interest is simply being manipulated by the invisible genetic code.
        
        People who are controlled by instinct are not free to direct their psychic energy. A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vunerable.
        
        There is nothing wrong with it as long as we retain some control over them when it is necessary to pursue other goals.
        
        We must not get dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes.
        
        It's necessary to work for external goals and to postpone immediate gratifications
        
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        "We are always getting to live, but never living.
  - - - Yoha, zen, awareness techniques etc. intend to free inner life from the threat of chaos and from the rigid conditioning of biological urges and to become independent from the social controls that exploit both.
        
        Control over consciousness
        
        How to become free of the controls of society? Through control over consciousness, which in turn leads to control over the quality of experience.
        
        It is not enough to know how to do it, one must do it, consistently
- - - - Consciousness although is not entirely controlled by our biological programming. It has developed the ability to override its genetic instructions and to set is own independent course of action.
        
        The function of conciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body.
        
        A people can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening "outside" just by changing the contents of consciousness.
        
        The ability to persevere probably is the most important trait not only for succeeding in life, but for enjoying it as well.
        
        To develop this trait, one must find ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts
        
        What does it mean to be conscious? It simply means that certain specific conscious events (sensations, feelings, thoughts, intentions) are occurring and that we are able to direct their course.
        
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- - - - Quality of life does not deppend directly on what others think of us or on what we own. The bottom line is, rather, how we feel about ourselves and about what happens to us.
        
        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.
        
        Chapter 3.1: Pleasure and Enjoyment
        
        Most people think that happiness think in experiencing pleasure
        
        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.
        
        It's a important component of the quality of life, but by itself it doesn't bring happiness. It provides restorative homeostatic experiences that return conciousness to order after the needs of the body intrude and cause psychic entropy to occur.
        
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        Chapter 3.2: The Elements of Enjoyment
        
        1) The experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing
        
        The opportunities for action are equal to his or her capabilities
        
        Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.
        
        2) We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing
        
        When #1 happens, individual's attention is fully concentrated in the relevant stimuli
        
        The activity becomes automatic, an efortless movement.
        
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        3 & 4) The concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback.
        
        If the person doesn't set goals and recognize feedback, she will not enjoy the activity.
        
        Feedback is the information that you have succeed your goal. It creates order in consciousness and strenghtens the structure of the self.
        
        5) One acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
        
        Flow activies leave no room in the mind for irrelevant information
        
        The ordinary state of mind involves unexpected and frequent episodes of entropy interfering with the smooth run of psychic energy.
        
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        6) Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions
        
        Possibility rather than actuality of control
        
        The activities that produce flow experiences are constructed to allow the practitioner to develop sufficient skills to reduce the margin of error to as close as zero as possible.
        
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        7) Concern for the self disappears yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over
        
        Preoccupation with the self consumes psychic energy because in everyday life we often feel threteaned and then we need to bring the image of ourselves back into awareness, so we can find out whether or not the threat is serious, and how should meet it.
        
        Hundreds of times every day we are reminded of the vulnerability of our self. And every time this happens psychic energy is lost trying to restore order to consciousness.
        
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        8) The sense of the duration of time is altered
        
        It is a by-product of the intense concentration required for the activiy at hand.
        
        Chapter 3.3: The Autotelic Experience
        
        The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself. It is 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.
        
        Most enjoyable activities are not natural, 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.
        
        When experience is intrinsically rewarding life is justified in the present, instead of being held hostage by a hypothetical future gain.
        
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- - - - One cannot enjoy doing the same thing at the same level for long. We grow either bored or frustrated; and then the desire to enjoy ourselves again pushes us to stretch our skills, or to discover new opportunities for using them.
  - - - All large-scale surveys agree that citizens of nations that are more affulent, better educated, and ruled by more stable governments report higher levels of happiness and satisfaction with life.
        
        Compared to old times, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time. But opportunities alone, however, are not enough. We also need the skills to make use of them. And we need to know how to control consciousness.
        
        Ability to restructure consciousness so as to make flow possible.
  - - - A person who is constantly worried about how others will perceive her is also condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment.
        
        People who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decided is relevant for the moment.
        
        People who have learned to control consciousness focusing attention is relatively efortless, because they can shut off all mental processes but the relevant ones.
        
        The association between the ability to concentrate and flow is clear.
  - - - It consists in finding ways to turn the bleak objective conditions into subjectively controllable experience.
        
        1) Paying close attention to the most minute details of their environment, discovering hidden opportunities for action that match their skills, given the circunstances
        
        2) Setting goals appropriate to their precarious situations and closely monitoring the feedback they received
        
        3) Whenever they reached their goal, they upped the ante, setting increasingly complex challenges for themselves.
      - When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces (to organize the self).
- - - - Enjoyment does not depend on what you do but rather how you do it.
    - - Most of our deeds are impelled, either directly or indirectly, by sexual needs.
        
        After physical pleasure and romantic relationship -> Enjoy partner as a unique person, to understand her, and to help her fulfill her goals. It can provide flow experiences all through life.
        
        To be enjoyable, the relationship must become more complex. The partners must discover new potentialities in themselves and in each other. They have to learn what thoughts and feelings reside in partner's mind. This in itself is a never-end process, a lifetime's task.
        
        Sexuality, like any other aspect of life, can be made enjoyable if we are willing to control of it, and cultivate it in the direction of greater complexity.
    - - In many respects, what the West has accomplished in terms of harnessing material energy is matched by what India and the Far East have achieved in terms of direct control of consciousness.
    - - Without cultivating the necessary skills, one cannot expect to take true enjoyment in a pursuit.
    - - Music (organized auditory information), helps organize the mind that attends to it, and therefore reduces psychic entropy, or the disorder we experience when random information interferes with goals.
        
        It isn't hearing that improves life, it is the listening.
        
        To enjoy music one must pay attention to it
        
        As one develops analytic listening skills, the opportunities to enjoy music increase geometrically
        
        Learning to produce harmonious sounds is not only enjoyable, but like the mastery of any complex skill, it also helps strengthen the self.
    - - To transform the biological necessity of feeding into a flow experience, one must begin by pating attention to what one eats, taking control of the activity.
- - - - The "action" is usually restricted to the mental manipulation of concepts. There must be skill in a symbolic domain, there have to be rules, a goal, and a way of obtaining feedback.
        
        The normal state of the mind is chaos
        
        We don't usually notice how little control we have over the mind, because habits channel psychic energy so well that thoughts seem to follow each other by themselves without a hitch
        
        Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations.
        
        Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.
        
        To avoid this condition, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings.
        
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- - - - There is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.
        
        Gradual focusing of attention on the opportunities for action in one's environment, which results in a perfection of skills that with time becomes so thoroughly automatci as to seem spontaneous and otherworldy
        
        Individuals transformed the jobs they had to do into complex activities. They recognized opportunities for action where others did not, by developing skills, by focusing on the activiy at hand, and allowing themselves to be lost in the interaction so that their selves could emerge stronger afterward
    - - Despite the severe limitations of their environment they were able to change constraints into opportunities for expressing their freedom and creativity.
        
        The more a job looks like a game - with variety, appropriate and flexbile challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback - the more enjoyable it will be.
        
        Jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities.
        
        Train people to recognize opportunities for action, to hone their skills, to set reachable goals.
    - - People base their work motivation on strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like.
        
        They think of it as an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible.
        
        Work, instead of helping us reach our own goals, it is called upon to make someone else's come true.
        
        One's may mobilize psychic energy and keep it focused on personally forged goals, despite inevitable distractions.
    - - Free time is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
        
        It is in the improvident use of our leisure time, I suspect, that the greatest wastes of American life occur"
        
        The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere.
        
        The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulations that only mimic reality.
        
        The future will belong not only to educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.
- - - - We are biologically programmed to find other human beings the most important objects in the world
        
        Because they can make life either very interesting and fulfilling or utterly miserable, how we manage relationships with them makes an enormous difference to our happiness. If we learn to make our relations with other more like flow experiences, our quality of life as a whole is going to be much improved.
        
        Chapter 8.1: The Conflict Between Being Alone and Being with Others
        
        Everyone feels more alive when surrounded with other people.
        
        People claim to be most happy with friends and family, or just in the company of others.
        
        Relationships make us extremely happy when they go well, and very depressed when they don't work out.
        
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        Chapter 8.2: The Pain of Loneliness
        
        Almost every activity is more enjoyable with another person around, and less so when one does it alone
        
        With nothing to do, the mind is unable to prevent negative thoughts from elbowing their way to center stage.
        
        When interacting with television, the mind is protected from personal worries.
        
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        Chapter 8.3: Taming Solitude
        
        To enjoy being alone a person must build his own mental routines, so that he can achieve flow without the supports of civilized life.
        
        One can survive solitude, but only if one finds ways of ordering attention that will prevent entropy from destructuring the mind.
        
        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.
        
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        Chapter 8.4: Flow and the Family
        
        Quality of life depends to a large extent on how well a person succeeds in making the interaction with his or her relatives enjoyable.
        
        The happiness of the family will depends, in a great extent, on how much psychic energy family members invest in the mutual relationship, and especially in each other's goals.
        
        When two people choose to focus their attention on each other, both will have to change their habits; as a result, the pattern of their consciousness will also have to change.
        
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        Chapter 8.5: Enjoying Friends
        
        We can choose our friends on the basis of common interests and complementary goals. We need not change ourselves to be with friends; they reinfornce our sense of self instead of trying to transform it.
        
        Because a friendship usually involves common goals and common activities, it is "naturally" enjoyable.
        
        Chapter 8.6: The Wider Community
        
        One can belong to larger interpersonal systems by subscribing to the aspirations of a community, an ethnic group, a political party, or a nation.
        
        Trying to optimize the goals of unrelated individuals involves complexities an order of magnitude higher.
        
        An exclusively approach to life is profoundly irrational; the true bottom line consists in the quality and complexity of experience.
        
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- - - - A person who knows how to find flow from life is able to enjoy even situations that seen to allow only despair
        
        Tragedies: people transformed living conditions most people would find unbearable into a meagninful, enjoyable existence.
    - - A major catastrophe that frustrates a central goal of life will either destroy the self, forcing a person to use all his pyschic energy to erect a barrier around remaining goals, defending them against further onslaught of fate; or it will provide a new more clear, and more urgente goal: to overcome the challenges created by the defeat.
        
        Coping ability: difference in how a person responds to stressful events
        
        How we cope is both the most important factor in determining what effects stress wil have and the most flexible resource, the one most under our personal control.
        
        Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and mroe likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.
    - - Complex life forms depend for their existence on a capacity to extract energy out of entropy - to recycle waste into structured order.
        
        Dissipative structures: physical systems that harness energy which otherwise would be dispersed and lost in random motion
        
        Unless men learned various tricks for transforming the forces of disorder into something they could use, we would not have survived as successfully as we wave.
        
        The integrity of the self depends on the ability to take neutral or destructive events and turn them into positive ones.
        
        The dissipative structures of the mind (courange, resilience, perseverance, mature defense, transformational coping) are essential because without them we would be constantly suffering through the random bombardment of stray psychological meteorites.
        
        On other hand, if we do develop such positive strategies, most negative events can be at least neutralized, and possibily even used as challenges that will help make the self stronger and more complex.
        
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    - - Outside forces do not determine wheter adversity will be able to be turned into enjoyment.
        
        The difference between someone who enjoys life and someone who is overwhelmed by it is a product of a combination of such external factors and the way a person has come to interpret them - that is, whether he sees challenges as threats or as opportunities for action.
        
        For most people, goals are shaped directly by biological needs and social conventions, and therefor their origin is outside the self. For an autotelic person, the primary goals emerge from experience evaluated in consciousness, and therefore from the self proper
        
        Developing a self:
        
        1) Setting goals
        
        What a person does is not random, nor is it the result of outside determining forces.
        
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        2) Becoming immersed in the activity
        
        After choosing a system of action, a person with an autotelic personality grow deeply involved with whatever he is doing.
        
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        3) Paying attention to what is happening
        
        Concentration leads to involvement, which can only be maintained by constant inputs of attention.
        
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        4) Learning to enjoy immediate experience
        
        The outcome of having autotelic self is that one can enjoy life even when objective circunstances are brutish and nasty. Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy.
        
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- - - - It is true that life is meagninless. But, life can be given meaning.
        
        As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person's life.
        
        Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.
        
        Chapter 10.1: What Meaning Means
        
        Creating meaning involves bringing order to the contents of the mind by integrating one's action into a unified flow experience.
        
        People who find their lives meaningfull usually have a goal that is challenging enough to take up all their energies, a goal that can give significance to their lives.
        
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        Chapter 10.2: Cultivating Purpose
        
        The goal will define the challenges that a persom needs to face in order to transform his or her life into a flow activity.
        
        Ordinary people organize their goals and justify their behavior with reference primarily to pleasure and practically rather than to more abstract principles.
        
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        Chapter 10.3: Forging Resolve
        
        The price one pays for changing goals whenever opposition threatens is that while one may achieve a more pleasant and comfortable life, it is likely that it will end up empty and void of meaning.
        
        No goal can have much effect unless taken seriously. Each goal prescribes a set of consequences, and if one isn't prepared to reckon with them, the goal becomes meaningless.
        
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        Chapter 10.4: Recovering Harmony
        
        The consequence of forging life by purpose and resolution is a sense of inner harmony, a dynamic order in the contents of consciousness.
        
        The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.(conflicting desires)
        
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        Chapter 10.5: The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes
        
        Instead of accepting the unity of purpose provided by genetic instructions or by the rules of society, the challenge for us is to create harmony based on reason and choice.
        
        Project: set of goals linked to an ultimate goal that gives significance to whatever a person does.
        
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