By: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Department of Psychology, The Claremont Graduate
University
Acknowledgement:
This research was funded in part by the Spencer
Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, whose
support is hereby gratefully acknowledged. However, none
of my conclusions are necessarily endorsed by these
foundations. I also thank Jeremy P. Hunter and Rustin
Wolfe for help with some of the data analyses mentioned
in this article. Finally, I thank Jonathan Baron, David
Myers, Barry Schwartz, and Martin E. P. Seligman for
suggestions that have improved this article.
Note:
Editor's note. The January 2000 issue
of this journal is a special issue devoted to articles
on optimal human functioning, happiness, and positive
psychology. The issue is guest edited by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi and Martin E. P. Seligman.
Correspondence concerning this
article should be addressed to: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Department of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University,
1021 North Dartmouth Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711
Psychology is the heir to those
“sciences of man” envisioned by Enlightenment thinkers
such as Gianbattista Vico, David Hume, and the baron de
Montesquieu. One of their fundamental conclusions was
that the pursuit of happiness constituted the basis of
both individual motivation and social well-being. This
insight into the human condition was condensed by John
Locke (1690/1975) in his famous statement, “That we
call Good which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or
diminish pain” (p. 2), whereas evil is the reverse—it is
what causes or increases pain and diminishes
pleasure.
The generation of utilitarian
philosophers that followed Locke, including David
Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and Jeremy Bentham, construed
a good society as that which allows the greatest
happiness for the greatest number (Bentham,
1789/1970, pp. 64–65). This focus on pleasure or
happiness as the touchstone of private and public life
is by no means a brainchild of post-Reformation Europe.
It was already present in the writings of the Greeks—for
instance, Aristotle noted that although humankind values
a great many things, such as health, fame, and
possessions, because we think that they will make us
happy, we value happiness for itself. Thus, happiness is
the only intrinsic goal that people seek for its own
sake, the bottom line of all desire. The idea that
furthering the pursuit of happiness should be one of the
responsibilities of a just government was of course
enshrined later in the Declaration of Independence of
the United States.
Despite this recognition on the
part of the human sciences that happiness is the
fundamental goal of life, there has been slow progress
in understanding what happiness itself consists of.
Perhaps because the heyday of utilitarian philosophy
coincided with the start of the enormous forward strides
in public health and in the manufacturing and
distribution of goods, the majority of those who thought
about such things assumed that increases in pleasure and
happiness would come from increased affluence, from
greater control over the material environment. The great
self-confidence of the Western technological nations,
and especially of the United States, was in large part
because of the belief that materialism—the prolongation
of a healthy life, the acquisition of wealth, the
ownership of consumer goods—would be the royal road to a
happy life.
However, the virtual monopoly of
materialism as the dominant ideology has come at the
price of a trivialization that has robbed it of much of
the truth it once contained. In current use, it amounts
to little more than a thoughtless hedonism, a call to do
one's thing regardless of consequences, a belief that
whatever feels good at the moment must be worth
doing.
This is a far cry from the
original view of materialists, such as John Locke, who
were aware of the futility of pursuing happiness without
qualifications and who advocated the pursuit of
happiness through prudence—making sure that people do
not mistake imaginary happiness for real happiness.
What does it mean to pursue
happiness through prudence? Locke must have derived his
inspiration from the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who
2,300 years ago already saw clearly that to enjoy a
happy life, one must develop self-discipline. The
materialism of Epicurus was solidly based on the ability
to defer gratification. He claimed that although all
pain was evil, this did not mean one should always avoid
pain—for instance, it made sense to put up with pain now
if one was sure to avoid thereby a greater pain later.
He wrote to his friend Menoeceus
The beginning and the greatest good … is
prudence. For this reason prudence is more valuable
even than philosophy: from it derive all the other
virtues. Prudence teaches us how impossible it is to
live pleasantly without living wisely, virtuously, and
justly … take thought, then, for these and kindred
matters day and night … . You shall be disturbed
neither waking nor sleeping, and you shall live as a
god among men. ( Epicurus
of Samos, trans. 1998, p. 48)
This is not the image of
epicureanism held by most people. The popular view holds
that pleasure and material comforts should be grasped
wherever they can, and that these alone will improve the
quality of one's life. As the fruits of technology have
ripened and the life span has lengthened, the hope that
increased material rewards would bring about a better
life seemed for a while justified.
Now, at the end of the second
millennium, it is becoming clear that the solution is
not that simple. Inhabitants of the wealthiest
industrialized Western nations are living in a period of
unprecedented riches, in conditions that previous
generations would have considered luxuriously
comfortable, in relative peace and security, and they
are living on the average close to twice as long as
their great-grandparents did. Yet, despite all these
improvements in material conditions, it does not seem
that people are so much more satisfied with their lives
than they were before. The
Ambiguous Relationship Between Material and Subjective
Well-Being
The indirect evidence that those
of us living in the United States today are not happier
than our ancestors were comes from national statistics
of social pathology—the figures that show the doubling
and tripling of violent crimes, family breakdown, and
psychosomatic complaints since at least the halfway mark
of the century. If material well-being leads to
happiness, why is it that neither capitalist nor
socialist solutions seem to work? Why is it that the
crew on the flagship of capitalist affluence is becoming
increasingly addicted to drugs for falling asleep, for
waking up, for staying slim, for escaping boredom and
depression? Why are suicides and loneliness such a
problem in Sweden, which has applied the best of
socialist principles to provide material security to its
people?
Direct evidence about the
ambiguous relationship of material and subjective
well-being comes from studies of happiness that
psychologists and other social scientists have finally
started to pursue, after a long delay in which research
on happiness was considered too soft for scientists to
undertake. It is true that these surveys are based on
self-reports and on verbal scales that might have
different meanings depending on the culture and the
language in which they are written. Thus, the results of
culturally and methodologically circumscribed studies
need to be taken with more than the usual grain of salt.
Nevertheless, at this point they represent the state of
the art—an art that will inevitably become more precise
with time.
Although cross-national
comparisons show a reasonable correlation between the
wealth of a country as measured by its gross national
product and the self-reported happiness of its
inhabitants (Inglehart,
1990), the relationship is far from perfect. The
inhabitants of Germany and Japan, for instance, nations
with more than twice the gross national product of
Ireland, report much lower levels of happiness.
Comparisons within countries
show an even weaker relationship between material and
subjective well-being. Diener,
Horwitz, and Emmons (1985), in a study of some of
the wealthiest individuals in the United States, found
their levels of happiness to be barely above that of
individuals with average incomes. After following a
group of lottery winners, Brickman,
Coates, and Janoff-Bulman (1978) concluded that
despite their sudden increase in wealth, their happiness
was no different from that of people struck by traumas,
such as blindness or paraplegia. That having more money
to spend does not necessarily bring about greater
subjective well-being has also been documented on a
national scale by David
G. Myers (1993). His calculations show that although
the adjusted value of after-tax personal income in the
United States has more than doubled between 1960 and
1990, the percentage of people describing themselves as
“very happy” has remained unchanged at 30% (Myers,
1993, pp. 41–42).
In the American
Psychologist's January 2000 special issue on
positive psychology, David
G. Myers (in press) and Ed
Diener (in press) discuss in great detail the lack
of relationship between material and subjective
well-being, so I will not belabor the point here.
Suffice it to say that in current longitudinal studies
of a representative sample of almost 1,000 American
adolescents conducted with the experience sampling
method and supported by the Sloan Foundation, a
consistently low negative relationship between material
and subjective well-being has been found (Csikszentmihalyi
& Schneider, in press). For instance, the
reported happiness of teenagers (measured several times
a day for a week in each of three years) shows a very
significant inverse relationship to the social class of
the community in which teens live, to their parents'
level of education, and to their parents' occupational
status. Children of the lowest socioeconomic strata
generally report the highest happiness, and upper
middle-class children generally report the least
happiness. Does this mean that more affluent children
are in fact less happy, or does it mean that the norms
of their social class prescribe that they should present
themselves as less happy? At this point, we are unable
to make this vital distinction.
Yet despite the evidence that
the relationship between material wealth and happiness
is tenuous at best, most people still cling to the
notion that their problems would be resolved if they
only had more money. In a survey conducted at the
University of Michigan, when people were asked what
would improve the quality of their lives, the first and
foremost answer was “more money” (Campbell,
1981).
Given these facts, it seems that
one of the most important tasks psychologists face is to
better understand the dynamics of happiness and to
communicate these findings to the public at large. If
the main justification of psychology is to help reduce
psychic distress and support psychic well-being, then
psychologists should try to prevent the disillusionment
that comes when people find out that they have wasted
their lives struggling to reach goals that cannot
satisfy them. Psychologists should be able to provide
alternatives that in the long run will lead to a more
rewarding life. Why
Material Rewards Do Not Necessarily Make People
Happy
To answer this question, I'll
start by reflecting on why material rewards, which
people regard so highly, do not necessarily provide the
happiness expected from them. The first reason is the
well-documented escalation of expectations. If people
strive for a certain level of affluence thinking that it
will make them happy, they find that on reaching it,
they become very quickly habituated, and at that point
they start hankering for the next level of income,
property, or good health. In a 1987 poll conducted by
the Chicago Tribune, people who earned less
than $30,000 a year said that $50,000 would fulfill
their dreams, whereas those with yearly incomes of over
$100,000 said they would need $250,000 to be satisfied
(“Pay
Nags,” 1987; “Rich
Think Big,” 1987; see also Myers,
1993, p. 57). Several studies have confirmed that
goals keep getting pushed upward as soon as a lower
level is reached. It is not the objective size of the
reward but its difference from one's “adaptation level”
that provides subjective value (e.g., Davis,
1959; Michalos,
1985; Parducci,
1995).
The second reason is related to
the first. When resources are unevenly distributed,
people evaluate their possessions not in terms of what
they need to live in comfort, but in comparison with
those who have the most. Thus, the relatively affluent
feel poor in comparison with the very rich and are
unhappy as a result. This phenomenon of “relative
deprivation” (Martin,
1981; Williams,
1975) seems to be fairly universal and
well-entrenched. In the United States, the disparity in
incomes between the top percentage and the rest is
getting wider; this does not bode well for the future
happiness of the population.
The third reason is that even
though being rich and famous might be rewarding, nobody
has ever claimed that material rewards alone are
sufficient to make us happy. Other conditions—such as a
satisfying family life, having intimate friends, having
time to reflect and pursue diverse interests—have been
shown to be related to happiness (Myers,
1993; Myers
& Diener, 1995; Veenhoven,
1988). There is no intrinsic reason why these two
sets of rewards—the material and the
socioemotional—should be mutually exclusive. In
practice, however, it is very difficult to reconcile
their conflicting demands. As many psychologists from William
James (1890) to Herbert
A. Simon (1969) have remarked, time is the ultimate
scarce resource, and the allocation of time (or more
precisely, of attention over time) presents difficult
choices that eventually determine the content and
quality of our lives. This is why professional and
business persons find it so difficult to balance the
demands of work and family, and why they so rarely feel
that they have not shortchanged one of these vital
aspects of their lives.
Material advantages do not
readily translate into social and emotional benefits. In
fact, to the extent that most of one's psychic energy
becomes invested in material goals, it is typical for
sensitivity to other rewards to atrophy. Friendship,
art, literature, natural beauty, religion, and
philosophy become less and less interesting. The Swedish
economist Stephen Linder was the first to point out that
as income and therefore the value of one's time
increases, it becomes less and less “rational” to spend
it on anything besides making money—or on spending it
conspicuously (Linder,
1970). The opportunity costs of playing with one's
child, reading poetry, or attending a family reunion
become too high, and so one stops doing such irrational
things. Eventually a person who only responds to
material rewards becomes blind to any other kind and
loses the ability to derive happiness from other sources
(see also Benedikt,
1999; Scitovsky,
1975). As is true of addiction in general, material
rewards at first enrich the quality of life. Because of
this, we tend to conclude that more must be better. But
life is rarely linear; in most cases, what is good in
small quantities becomes commonplace and then harmful in
larger doses.
Dependence on material goals is
so difficult to avoid in part because our culture has
progressively eliminated every alternative that in
previous times used to give meaning and purpose to
individual lives. Although hard comparative data are
lacking, many historians (e.g., Polanyi,
1957) have claimed that past cultures provided a
greater variety of attractive models for successful
lives. A person could be valued and admired because he
or she was a saint, a bon vivant, a wise person, a good
craftsman, a brave patriot, or an upright citizen.
Nowadays the logic of reducing everything to
quantifiable measures has made the dollar the common
metric by which to evaluate every aspect of human
action. The worth of a person and of a person's
accomplishments are determined by the price they fetch
in the marketplace. It is useless to claim that a
painting is good art unless it gets high bids at
Sotheby's, nor can we claim that someone is wise unless
he or she can charge five figures for a consultation.
Given the hegemony of material rewards in our culture's
restricted repertoire, it is not surprising that so many
people feel that their only hope for a happy life is to
amass all the earthly goods they can lay hands on.
To recapitulate, there are
several reasons for the lack of a direct relationship
between material well-being and happiness. Two of them
are sociocultural: (a) The growing disparity in wealth
makes even the reasonably affluent feel poor. (b) This
relative deprivation is exacerbated by a cultural
factor, namely, the lack of alternative values and a
wide range of successful lifestyles that could
compensate for a single, zero-sum hierarchy based on
dollars and cents. Two of the reasons are more
psychological: (a) When we evaluate success, our minds
use a strategy of escalating expectations, so that few
people are ever satisfied for long with what they
possess or what they have achieved. (b) As more psychic
energy is invested in material goals, less of it is left
to pursue other goals that are also necessary for a life
in which one aspires to happiness.
None of this is intended to
suggest that the material rewards of wealth, health,
comfort, and fame detract from happiness. Rather, after
a certain minimum threshold—which is not stable but
varies with the distribution of resources in the given
society—they seem to be irrelevant. Of course, most
people will still go on from cradle to grave believing
that if they could only have had more money, or good
looks, or lucky breaks, they would have achieved that
elusive state. Psychological
Approaches to Happiness
If people are wrong about the
relation between material conditions and how happy they
are, then what does matter? The alternative to
the materialist approach has always been something that
used to be called a “spiritual” and nowadays we may call
a “psychological” solution. This approach is based on
the premise that if happiness is a mental state, people
should be able to control it through cognitive means. Of
course, it is also possible to control the mind
pharmacologically. Every culture has developed drugs
ranging from peyote to heroin to alcohol in an effort to
improve the quality of experience by direct chemical
means. In my opinion, however, chemically induced
well-being lacks a vital ingredient of happiness: the
knowledge that one is responsible for having achieved
it. Happiness is not something that happens to people
but something that they make happen.
In some cultures, drugs ingested
in a ritual, ceremonial context appear to have lasting
beneficial effects, but in such cases the benefits most
likely result primarily from performing the ritual,
rather than from the chemicals per se. Thus, in
discussing psychological approaches to happiness, I
focus exclusively on processes in which human
consciousness uses its self-organizing ability to
achieve a positive internal state through its own
efforts, with minimal reliance on external manipulation
of the nervous system.
There have been many very
different ways to program the mind to increase happiness
or at least to avoid being unhappy. Some religions have
done it by promising an eternal life of happiness
follows our earthly existence. Others, on realizing that
most unhappiness is the result of frustrated goals and
thwarted desires, teach people to give up desires
altogether and thus avoid disappointment. Still others,
such as Yoga and Zen, have developed complex techniques
for controlling the stream of thoughts and feelings,
thereby providing the means for shutting out negative
content from consciousness. Some of the most radical and
sophisticated disciplines for self-control of the mind
were those developed in India, culminating in the
Buddhist teachings 25 centuries ago. Regardless of its
truth content, faith in a supernatural order seems to
enhance subjective well-being: Surveys generally show a
low but consistent correlation between religiosity and
happiness (Csikszentmihalyi
& Patton, 1997; Myers,
1993).
Contemporary psychology has
developed several solutions that share some of the
premises of these ancient traditions but differ
drastically in content and detail. What is common to
them is the assumption that cognitive techniques,
attributions, attitudes, and perceptual styles can
change the effects of material conditions on
consciousness, help restructure an individual's goals,
and consequently improve the quality of experience. Maslow's
(1968, 1971)self-actualization,Block
and Block's (1980)ego-resiliency,Diener's
(1984, in
press)positive emotionality,Antonovsky's
(1979)salutogenic approach,Seeman's
(1996)personality integration,Deci
and Ryan's (1985; Ryan
& Deci, in press)autonomy,Scheier
and Carver's (1985)dispositional optimism,
and Seligman's
(1991)learned optimism are only a few of
the theoretical concepts developed recently, many with
their own preventive and therapeutic implications.
The Experience of Flow
My own addition to this list is
the concept of the autotelic experience, or
flow, and of the autotelic personality. The
concept describes a particular kind of experience that
is so engrossing and enjoyable that it becomes
autotelic, that is, worth doing for its own sake even
though it may have no consequence outside itself.
Creative activities, music, sports, games, and religious
rituals are typical sources for this kind of experience.
Autotelic persons are those who have such flow
experiences relatively often, regardless of what they
are doing.
Of course, we never do anything
purely for its own sake. Our motives are always a
mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic considerations. For
instance, composers may write music because they hope to
sell it and pay the bills, because they want to become
famous, because their self-images depends on writing
songs—all of these being extrinsic motives. But if the
composers are motivated only by these extrinsic rewards,
they are missing an essential ingredient. In addition to
these rewards, they could also enjoy writing music for
its own sake—in which case, the activity would become
autotelic. My studies (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi,
1975, 1996,
1997)
have suggested that happiness depends on whether a
person is able to derive flow from whatever he or she
does.
A brief selection from one of
the more than 10,000 interviews collected from around
the world might provide a sense of what the flow
experience is like. Asked how it felt when writing music
was going well, a composer responded,
You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that
you feel as though you almost don't exist. I have
experienced this time and time again. My hand seems
devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what
is happening. I just sit there watching in a state of
awe and wonderment. And the music just flows out by
itself. ( Csikszentmihalyi,
1975, p. 44)
This response is quite typical
of most descriptions of how people feel when they are
thoroughly involved in something that is enjoyable and
meaningful to the person. First of all, the experience
is described as “ecstatic”: in other words, as being
somehow separate from the routines of everyday life.
This sense of having stepped into a different reality
can be induced by environmental cues, such as walking
into a sport event, a religious ceremony, or a musical
performance, or the feeling can be produced internally,
by focusing attention on a set of stimuli with their own
rules, such as the composition of music.
Next, the composer claims that
“you feel as though you almost don't exist.” This
dimension of the experience refers to involvement in the
activity being so demanding that no surplus attention is
left to monitor any stimuli irrelevant to the task at
hand. Thus, chess players might stand up after a game
and realize that they have splitting headaches and must
run to the bathroom, whereas for many hours during the
game they had excluded all information about their
bodily states from consciousness.
The composer also refers to the
felt spontaneity of the experience: “My hand seems
devoid of myself … I have nothing to do with what is
happening.” Of course, this sense of effortless
performance is only possible because the skills and
techniques have been learned and practiced so well that
they have become automatic. This brings up one of the
paradoxes of flow: One has to be in control of the
activity to experience it, yet one should not try to
consciously control what one is doing.
As the composer stated, when the
conditions are right, action “just flows out by itself.”
It is because so many respondents used the analogy of
spontaneous, effortless flow to describe how it felt
when what they were doing was going well that I used the
term flow to describe the autotelic experience.
Here is what a well-know lyricist, a former poet
laureate of the United States, said about his writing:
You lose your sense of time, you're completely
enraptured, you are completely caught up in what
you're doing, and you are sort of swayed by the
possibilities you see in this work. If that becomes
too powerful, then you get up, because the excitement
is too great … . The idea is to be so, so saturated
with it that there's no future or past, it's just an
extended present in which you are … making meaning.
And dismantling meaning, and remaking it. ( Csikszentmihalyi,
1996, p. 121)
This kind of intense experience
is not limited to creative endeavors. It is reported by
teenagers who love studying, by workers who like their
jobs, by drivers who enjoy driving. Here is what one
woman said about her sources of deepest enjoyment:
[It happens when] I am working with my daughter,
when she's discovered something new. A new cookie
recipe that she has accomplished, that she has made
herself, an artistic work that she's done and she is
proud of. Her reading is something that she is really
into, and we read together. She reads to me and I read
to her, and that's a time when I sort of lose touch
with the rest of the world. I am totally absorbed in
what I am doing. ( Allison
& Duncan, 1988, p. 129)
This kind of experience has a
number of common characteristics. First, people report
knowing very clearly what they have to do moment by
moment, either because the activity requires it (as when
the score of a musical composition specifies what notes
to play next), or because the person sets clear goals
every step of the way (as when a rock climber decides
which hold to try for next). Second, they are able to
get immediate feedback on what they are doing. Again,
this might be because the activity provides information
about the performance (as when one is playing tennis and
after each shot one knows whether the ball went where it
was supposed to go), or it might be because the person
has an internalized standard that makes it possible to
know whether one's actions meet the standard (as when a
poet reads the last word or the last sentence written
and judges it to be right or in need of revision).
Another universal condition for
the flow experience is that the person feels his or her
abilities to act match the opportunities for action. If
the challenges are too great for the person's skill,
anxiety is likely to ensue; if the skills are greater
than the challenges, one feels bored. When challenges
are in balance with skills, one becomes lost in the
activity and flow is likely to result (Csikszentmihalyi,
1975, 1997).
Even this greatly compressed
summary of the flow experience should make it clear that
it has little to do with the widespread cultural trope
of “going with the flow.” To go with the flow means to
abandon oneself to a situation that feels good, natural,
and spontaneous. The flow experience that I have been
studying is something that requires skills,
concentration, and perseverance. However, the evidence
suggests that it is the second form of flow that leads
to subjective well-being.
The relationship between flow
and happiness is not entirely self-evident. Strictly
speaking, during the experience people are not
necessarily happy because they are too involved in the
task to have the luxury to reflect on their subjective
states. Being happy would be a distraction, an
interruption of the flow. But afterward, when the
experience is over, people report having been in as
positive a state as it is possible to feel. Autotelic
persons, those who are often in flow, tend also to
report more positive states overall and to feel that
their lives are more purposeful and meaningful (Adlai-Gail,
1994; Hektner,
1996).
The phenomenon of flow helps
explain the contradictory and confusing causes of what
we usually call happiness. It explains why it is
possible to achieve states of subjective well-being by
so many different routes: either by achieving wealth and
power or by relinquishing them; by cherishing either
solitude or close relationships; through ambition or
through its opposite, contentment; through the pursuit
of objective science or through religious practice.
People are happy not because of what they do, but
because of how they do it. If they can experience
flow working on the assembly line, chances are they will
be happy, whereas if they don't have flow while lounging
at a luxury resort, they are not going to be happy. The
same is true of the various psychological techniques for
achieving positive mental health: If the process of
becoming resilient or self-efficacious is felt to be
boring or an external imposition, the technique is
unlikely to lead to happiness, even if it is mastered to
the letter. You have to enjoy mental health to benefit
from it.
Making Flow Possible
The prerequisite for happiness
is the ability to get fully involved in life. If the
material conditions are abundant, so much the better,
but lack of wealth or health need not prevent one from
finding flow in whatever circumstances one finds at
hand. In fact, our studies suggest that children from
the most affluent families find it more difficult to be
in flow—compared with less well-to-do teenagers, they
tend to be more bored, less involved, less enthusiastic,
less excited.
At the same time, it would be a
mistake to think that each person should be left to find
enjoyment wherever he or she can find it or to give up
efforts for improving collective conditions. There is so
much that could be done to introduce more flow in
schools, in family life, in the planning of communities,
in jobs, in the way we commute to work and eat our
meals—in short, in almost every aspect of life. This is
especially important with respect to young people. Our
research suggests, for instance, that more affluent
teenagers experience flow less often because, although
they dispose of more material possessions, they spend
less time with their parents, and they do fewer
interesting things with them (Hunter,
1998). Creating conditions that make flow
experiences possible is one aspect of that “pursuit of
happiness” for which the social and political community
should be responsible.
Nevertheless, flow alone does
not guarantee a happy life. It is also necessary to find
flow in activities that are complex, namely, activities
that provide a potential for growth over an entire life
span, allow for the emergence of new opportunities for
action, and stimulate the development of new skills. A
person who never learns to enjoy the company of others
and who finds few opportunities within a meaningful
social context is unlikely to achieve inner harmony (Csikszentmihalyi,
1993; Csikszentmihalyi
& Rathunde, 1998; Inghilleri,
1999), but when flow comes from active physical,
mental, or emotional involvement—from work, sports,
hobbies, meditation, and interpersonal
relationships—then the chances for a complex life that
leads to happiness improve. The
Limits of Flow
There is at least one more
important issue left to consider. In reviewing the
history of materialism, I have discussed John Locke's
warnings about the necessity of pursuing happiness with
prudence and about the importance of distinguishing real
from imaginary happiness. Are similar caveats applicable
to flow? Indeed, flow is necessary to happiness, but it
is not sufficient. This is because people can experience
flow in activities that are enjoyable at the moment but
will detract from enjoyment in the long run. For
instance, when a person finds few meaningful
opportunities for action in the environment, he or she
will often resort to finding flow in activities that are
destructive, addictive, or at the very least wasteful
(Csikszentmihalyi
& Larson, 1978; Sato,
1988). Juvenile crime is rarely a direct consequence
of deprivation but rather is caused by boredom or the
frustration teenagers experience when other
opportunities for flow are blocked. Vandalism, gang
fights, promiscuous sex, and experimenting with
psychotropic drugs might provide flow at first, but such
experiences are rarely enjoyable for long.
Another limitation of flow as a
path to happiness is that a person might learn to enjoy
an activity so much that everything else pales by
comparison, and he or she then becomes dependent on a
very narrow range of opportunities for action while
neglecting to develop skills that would open up a much
broader arena for enjoyment later. A chess master who
can enjoy only the game and a workaholic who feels alive
only while on the job are in danger of stunting their
full development as persons and thus of forfeiting
future opportunities for happiness.
In one respect, the negative
impact on the social environment of an addiction to flow
is less severe than that of an addiction to material
rewards. Material rewards are zero–sum: To be rich means
that others must be poor; to be famous means that others
must be anonymous; to be powerful means that others must
be helpless. If everyone strives for such self-limiting
rewards, most people will necessarily remain frustrated,
resulting in personal unhappiness and social
instability. By contrast, the rewards of flow are
open-ended and inexaustible: If I get my joy from
cooking Mediterranean food, or from surfing, or from
coaching Little League, this will not decrease anyone
else's happiness.
Unfortunately, too many
institutions have a vested interest in making people
believe that buying the right car, the right soft drink,
the right watch, the right education will vastly improve
their chances of being happy, even if doing so will
mortgage their lives. In fact, societies are usually
structured so that the majority is led to believe that
their well-being depends on being passive and contented.
Whether the leadership is in the hands of a priesthood,
of a warrior caste, of merchants, or of financiers,
their interest is to have the rest of the population
depend on whatever rewards they have to offer—be it
eternal life, security, or material comfort. But if one
puts one's faith in being a passive consumer—of
products, ideas, or mind-altering drugs—one is likely to
be disappointed. However, materialist propaganda is
clever and convincing. It is not so easy, especially for
young people, to tell what is truly in their interest
from what will only harm them in the long run. This is
why John Locke cautioned people not to mistake imaginary
happiness for real happiness and why 25 centuries ago
Plato wrote that the most urgent task for educators is
to teach young people to find pleasure in the right
things. Now this task falls partly on our shoulders. The
job description for psychologists should encompass
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Source: American
Psychologist. Vol.54 (10) pp.
821-827. Accession
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