What makes life enjoyable? Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers an intriguing answer: flow. As he puts it, “When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable.”
For him, such “flow activities” provide opportunities to exercise control over challenging situations by consciously directing our psychic energy, rather than be constantly distracted, randomly perceiving what’s around us, passively accepting our fate. It’s a psychological theory with a biological basis: it holds that, because you have the innate capacity to focus your attention, you are rewarded both physically and emotionally if you do.
Understood in this way, there are obvious parallels between flow activities and productive activities. Like flow activities, productive activities require concentration and sustained effort in pursuit of challenging goals. Though not all flow activities will necessarily be productive activities (flow can be achieved, for example, by playing games, reading, and conversing), all productive activities can be flow activities.
So between producer and consumer, the benefits may be mutual ― not just materially but psychologically. On the one hand, our producing makes it possible for others to enjoy what we create. On the other, the act of producing can be enjoyable to us.
And because we spend so many hours doing it, may even help us enjoy more of life itself.
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