My Search for Flow
How can we enjoy the inevitable struggle in our lives?
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First, this happened…
I’m chomping on my breakfast, scrolling on my phone, pulling the screen down to refresh the pixels. My eyes are on a red counter—actually, the counter’s white against a red background but by this point I’m so thoroughly Pavlov-ed that show me anything red and my breath would quicken. It is the notification counter on my LinkedIn app. This is my routine. Post something in the morning before playing with my daughter and sitting down to work.
By mid-morning the counter is galloping along. Every time I click on it, the bell-shaped icon tilts its head and un-spools for me all the hubbub I have missed out on—someone commenting on my post, or tagging me to something, or following me. The counter empties itself every time I click on it. The red vanishes. By noon, I know today is that kind of a day when I need not worry about the vanishing red. Because the red reappears, no matter how many times I drain it. Today, it feels to me, is going to make the last few months eat its dust.
In early 2022, I made the cut for the LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Program, the first talent hunt of its kind in India for homegrown creators who represented promising voices in their niches.1 I was in a nationwide incubator of two hundred creators across money management, self-publishing, solopreneurship, health foods, productivity, self-improvement, and more. At the time, I had a full-time job that offered me the opportunity to see at close quarters how businesses made decisions. I juggled my job with writing about decision-making frameworks for others like me. I liked writing. In my twenties, I had quit my job for a couple of years to try my hand at novel-writing. It may sound like a footnote now but at the time it was the cat’s meow. And eight-odd years later, commute-less and time-rich thanks to COVID, getting back to the written word felt like a celebration. LinkedIn, which had been in the under-bed storage of my life until then, became my soapbox.
Only I quickly came to realize that online writing was nothing like anything I knew about writing. I saw writing as self-expression bordering on self-indulgence. I wrote for myself, I was only too happy to admit. Yet writing on social media demanded that I endlessly optimize for the reader. Hooks, calls-to-action, #unpopularopinion—the persuasion was relentless. As part of the LinkedIn program, I was privy to masterclasses from marquee influencers. They encouraged us to be authentic and we took their goading seriously. Few noticed anything odd in “I cried at work today” (accompanied by a close-up of a sniveling face) or “here’s what my six-year-old taught me about leadership.” Everyday life was brimming with epiphanies only if you cared for them. I had never second-guessed myself as much since leaving college.
But all of that is the past, I think now, as I look at the galloping notifications on this winter day. Earlier that morning I had posted a carousel that I had made on Canva. For weeks, I had been testing out formats. Carousels were one. Paragraphed text in the online world is like corn—unprocessed and boring. What the scrolling crowd prefers is Doritos. Corn slathered with fat, salt, and sugar. My carousel had eleven pages, each carrying an image with a couple of short lines of text. The text was laid out carefully, with ample line breaks, in a way that would draw eyeballs. It had a hook and it gave the reader just enough to keep clicking to the next page. Or at least that was my intent.
Using a carousel, I had told the story of how Van Halen, the 70s and 80s rock band that were known for their high-end stage sets, came to have a clause in their touring contract that insisted on a bowl of M&M’s backstage with all the brown ones removed. Worried that a screw-up by a careless stagehand may cause serious injury, the brown M&M’s were the band’s tripwire, a quick tool to tell them when they needed to stop everything and do a thorough check of the staging. This is how you limit your exposure to risk was the business instruction I had eked out of the story.
By evening, on to my feed have jumped on brand storytellers, customer service professionals, creative directors, and professionals of every ilk. They are decanting their own experiences of using tripwires—when I helped manage a hotel, in college I was part of a group, the 510 album still crushes…
The next day, the post is raging. Somewhere along the way, it catches the eye of someone in the Van Halen fan group. Soon, grizzled fans are chiming in with names of the stage manager in charge of looking at Van Halen contracts, or other riders that Van Halen put into their contracts that earned them the prima donna label, or how David Lee Roth was a bonehead.
Barely a couple of months before this, I was struggling. The closer I got to the end of an ebook project the more aggressively I would fight myself. Who will read this? It’s too long. You need more pictures, more graphs, more this, more that. I was part of a group that liked fellow LinkedIn program member posts to boost reach. I kept myself on standby for the posts of an influencer who was trying to crossover from Twitter to LinkedIn and had offered me the opportunity to be a part of the influencer’s “LinkedIn pod.” The ask, relayed to me by her executive assistant? Comment right away on posts of the influencer and get more eyeballs and more profile views and more followers for yourself.
My expectation of an instant dopamine hit from the writing process did not seem odd at that point. Nothing I knew in real life matched the speed of the feedback loops on social media.
All of that seems justified now by midweek as I see all these followers, connection requests, and attention pouring in. I’m wondering if I’m just being prissy. This is what it takes to build a brand, after all. I cannot remember the self-doubt; it all seems so clear now. I’m going to make it as an influencer.
By the weekend, LinkedIn has featured me in its weekly digest, leading to a flurry of private messages and public comments in that news cycle. I’m getting contacted by people to do my personal branding. A couple of brands ask me to endorse their products. People are asking me for hacks to go viral. I feel like I’m on the cover of the Internet.
I cash in.
I start writing threads on Twitter. (Don’t put all your eggs in one platform)
I start sketching. (Everybody agrees the algorithm loves images)
I experiment with video. (It is the future)
My writing, until that point, has been a lot of thinking and a little typing. The pushing of the keys on my laptop takes a tiny fraction of the time spent thinking about what to say and how to say it. Slowly at first, and then quickly, my process changes. My relationship with writing is up for debate. I’m gripped by the productivity mindset. I spend less time thinking and more time banging out words. It’s a more productive form of writing, I tell myself. The algorithm rewards consistency. Post everyday. I consider regurgitating my posts into different formats to see what sticks. I consume less longform content and more popular social accounts to see what is in sync with the algorithms.
More and more, my enjoyment from the process of writing is algorithm-mediated. If my last post has got traction, I’m happy. If it has bombed, I’m scratching my head. On any day, when office work is pedestrian, I switch identities with the switch of a tab. Scrolling through my feed, responding to comments, I feel better. I feel renewed by this new virtual world. But when I meet silence, I think of what I can put out that will get me back the missing attention. I no longer have my remote. It’s out there somewhere in the ether in the hands of strangers.
The pressures of building a brand side-swipe me. Moment to moment there are emotional spikes; day to day I do not know how to process them. I realize I don’t like making carousels any more than I like doing dishes. It carried the promise of the reward. Now it doesn’t seem worth it. Neither does making videos or running banal polls. I get tired of selling Doritos. I miss growing corn.
By the middle of 2023, I have three unpublished ebooks on my computer. I’m posting sporadically on LinkedIn. I’ve given up on Twitter and YouTube. Even Substack feels like a chore. I find myself staring at the barren bed of a once-deep lake.
The other way to be happy
There are two ways to be happy. One is to make our external conditions match our goals. This is what we as a species have been trying to get right through recorded history.
If only we could provide ourselves with food, shelter, and clothing, we thought, we would be happy. Once that happened, we chased power, social status, money, and sundry material comforts hoping that having any of those things would bring us happiness. It did but only for a moment and then we found ourselves back on the treadmill. Back to the struggle to make our external conditions match our wants and bring an abiding equilibrium to our lives. And before we knew it we were reacting reflexively to stimuli (I want that! And that and that!) and those goals just kept on coming much faster than our social reality could keep pace with.
Happiness today is a well-beaten drum. Talk of it runs the risk of triggering our inner cynic. The cynic label is a lazy one to slap on. In reality, we’re retired idealists. We thought there was a formula for happiness and that we had it pat down. Now we’re miserable even with our high-speed broadband and ten-minute groceries.
The other way to be happy is to reclaim our experience from the grip of our social environments. It is to control how we experience external conditions such that they serve us in the accomplishment of our goals. Instead of constantly trying to tweak the environment we live in so that we feel safer and more comfortable, we develop the ability to find joy and purpose regardless of what’s happening outside in the world.
This second way to be happy is age old, too. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his diary, “If you are pained by external things it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that power now.”2 This power is both within our grasp and yet slippery. It is so because it demands of us a fundamental shift in our thinking: Stop believing that what matters most in our lives is what will happen in the future and start paying attention to the moment now.
Stop working for the good life that will come to you as a reward in the future; start living in the present moment.
This secret to optimal human functioning is no secret. But one man did the most among all to explore the contents of a life well lived. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Me-High Chick-Sent-Me-High) found out that happiness is not a special guest waiting for us at some future finish line but a companion that, when accessed, elevates the experience of our journey.3 Upon his death in 2021, a former student of his described his work as “like a flashlight in a dark tunnel.”
Csikszentmihalyi was five when WWII broke out. Some of his earliest memories are seeing grown-ups languish through the War years. With their jobs, families, and homes taken away, they seemed irreversibly diminished. A fistful of men and women, young Csikszentmihalyi noticed with curiosity, had exactly the opposite experience—they flourished in their inner lives even in all that bleakness around. They were happy.
This disparity mattered all the more to Csikszentmihalyi because of his own circumstances. He had lost one of his half-brothers to the War. His father who had been appointed Hungarian Ambassador to Italy had been removed from the position after the War and, after the communist regime took over in 1949, his family had been banished from Hungary. Taking shelter in Italy, the family had opened a restaurant, with Csikszentmihalyi dropping out of school to help run it.
By sixteen, Csikszentmihalyi had figured out that understanding human psychology was the key to making sense of the variety in human responses to the same living conditions. At the age of twenty-one, he took the plunge. He hauled himself to the University of Chicago to study psychology.
Within five years, the young Csikszentmihalyi had come up with a rudimentary method to track the ebb and flow of our feelings. He gave a group of teenagers beepers that went off randomly through the day. The subjects were asked to record how they were feeling and what they were doing at the time of the beeps. Most of the logs suggested that the teens were unhappy, but Csikszentmihalyi found that when they were engrossed in a challenging task, they tended to enjoy themselves more. During these positively recorded times, the teenagers weren’t having a pleasant experience the way they would at a pool party. Rather, they were immersed in the doing of the task to an extent they forgot themselves. In these early results, Csikszentmihalyi found the nub of a much broader and deeper idea:
Yes, happiness comes from living each moment for what it is, but it is not passive; happiness needs preparation.
Thirty-odd years later, he published Flow, his masterpiece on the optimal experience of living, in which he wrote:4
The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.
In all his research work and later on in his books and talks, Csikszentmihalyi kept coming back to the same question: how can human beings enjoy the inevitable struggle in their lives?
By the end of 2022, this question had acquired a special gravity for me. As I was cutting my teeth as a creator-influencer online, I found myself bumping heads with my new life. I was having difficulty adjusting to a reality that I had coveted. Social media seemed to make me a jumpy monkey. In my moment of doubt, I looked for something to hold on to, something that would hold meaning for me no matter what. That was my introduction to the idea of accessing this state of effortless attention. This essay doesn’t so much tell my story as it uses my experiences as a jumping-off point in the search for a recipe for deep happiness.
Just look inside, stupid
“As people move through life,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, “passing from the hopeful ignorance of youth into sobering adulthood, they sooner or later face an increasingly nagging question: ‘Is this all there is?’”
This question conceals more than it reveals. When people from any past generation have come to consider themselves as living in the most updated version of human civilization, because they had access to knowledge and technology that their ancestors did not, they have come face to face with this question: Is this all there is? Yet, each such generation has also convinced itself that the next one will be the lucky batch graduating from the school of civilization. The next crop, their own children and grandchildren, will make enough progress from battling plagues and famines and sorcery to infections and epidemics, to reach the horizon.
Humans have accepted such generational kicking of the can in the search for happiness. Every once in a while, there comes a time of such accelerated change that a single generation, having seen their standards of living go up so sharply or their ways of life reconstructed so thoroughly, has a glimpse of its own future.
I belong to such a generation. My life in the last thirty years has transformed at two different levels. I can lay claim to being one of India’s liberalization children, to borrow a phrase from journalist Malini Goyal. I was a child when India decided to open its doors and offer up its resources to the global market starting 1991. And second, I grew up in an analog world and now find myself as a grown up riding out a digital world. I’m a digital migrant—a cultural species unto itself.
Being a member of the liberalized brigade meant moving from a time of scarcity of resources and abundance of time to abundance of resources and scarcity of time. For me it meant going from the neighborhood tailor to Myntra; from spending afternoons separating the wheat from the chaff to buying packaged multigrain atta in quantities of my choosing; from appreciating Gulzar’s celebration of frugality in the lyrics of the song Thoda Hai Thode Ki Zaroorat Hai to, today, commiserating for that time when Indians had to cool their heels on a waitlist for years for a Bajaj scooter.5
Yet it is also a general truth today that…
We’ve more variety in jobs than ever before, but we question the meaning of work more than we ever have.
We’ll meet more psychiatrists in our lifetimes than any previous generation.
We’ve access to the most pleasures but they mean little.
We’re richer and more anxious than before.
We’re going to live longer, die lonelier.
We’re more polarized than ever.
All convenience and comforts notwithstanding, the question stands resolute: Is this all there is?
“This paradox of rising expectations,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, “suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way.”
Csikszentmihalyi’s conclusion, not unlike the great thinkers of the past, is that happiness comes from within. The method to happiness is the process of learning how to use our “psychic energy” to best overcome circumstances. Part of the challenge with twenty-first-century life is that we have lost some of our tolerance for discomfort. We’re a little less used to staying hungry, to being bored, to being patient. Plus we have built a social environment that constantly reminds us of our hunger, our boredom, and our loneliness.
When he started his explorations into the human mind, Csikszentmihalyi may have been looking for a toolkit for survival during harsh times but perhaps even he couldn’t have imagined how relevant it would be, at a time of abundance like today, to be able to access a state of deep enjoyment.
He picked a word for such deep enjoyment: flow.
Flow
Flow… the word is confusing at first. For a long time, I had thought of flow as “going with the flow.” What to put your mind to? Dunno. Just go with the flow. Live in the moment. Embrace the now. Except that surrendering yourself to what surrounds you is ceding control to the chaos around. Here, we say to the outside world, take my remote. Press all the buttons you want to and watch me dance.
Flow is a state of total involvement. It is immersion into the present moment. That sense of utter absorption in the task at hand that makes us forget ourselves. We’re self-directed, we don’t hesitate. We control our consciousness by exerting control over our surroundings. In doing so, we know exactly what to do next. We’re in the zone. We’re in flow.
What people do to experience flow are all different. Some play the piano; some, the guitar; some play chess; and some play with words. Play—is that the connection? We know flow turns work into play. But Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues, having recorded testimonies from farmers and sheep herders and dancers and surgeons and rock climbers, deduce that to experience flow we don’t have to play an instrument or play a sport. This suggests that while certain activities, such as sports, may be better designed for flow, experiencing it requires us to commit our attention to them. The experience of flow is accessible to one and all.
Regardless of what activity puts us in flow, the characteristics of flow, like ingredients in a recipe familiar to all mankind, are the same:
We’re doing something we believe we can accomplish.
The task demands our full concentration.
It has clear goals and offers immediate feedback.
It pulls us into the moment, making us forget our past and our future.
We exert control on the situation without worrying about failing.
We lose all preoccupations with the self.
We lose our sense of time.
As I type out this list, what strikes me first is the subtractive nature of this recipe for flow. There’s so much that pulls us away, which we must throw out: distractions, worries, anxieties. Call these the enemies of flow. How these enemies of flow show up too is tightly coupled to the way we live our lives today. The question of finding flow thus becomes a question of lifestyle design. How can we create for ourselves lives that are conducive to flow? What to weed out from our lives?
1️⃣ Making time your enemy
Imagine learning to swim in a pool full of other learners like you. There’s no coach so you’re on your own. Without formal instruction, the novice swimmers soon start coming up with their own strokes. They develop their own technique to move across water. Some are better, some worse. Minus guidance or goals, learner behavior is arbitrary, chaotic.
Now imagine the learners being captured on camera and beamed across the world in this Truman Show-esque pool.6 The swimmers now have names strapped across their suits and they all care about the goggles and the suit they have on. They’re worried about looking funny on camera. (Who wouldn’t?) So they experiment with caution. What they see others cheered on for, they imitate but not so obviously that they can be called out for being unoriginal. What they’re applauded for, they double down on.
Soon, an urgency sneaks in. The swimmers want to set themselves apart. They want to be known for their own distinct style. This creates tremendous opportunity for anyone who can stand out from the crowd and tremendous pressure for everyone else in competition. The values of hard work and persistence recede to the background because it is not clear those are virtues any more. Who decides what is worth investing time in? It is not clear.
Csikszentmihalyi uses the French word anomie, or lack of rules, to describe such a situation:
When it is no longer clear what is permitted and what is not, when it is uncertain what public opinion values, behavior becomes erratic and meaningless.
As a writer online, I had all the freedom. All that abundance, minus guardrails, left me unmoored. As I was making sense of social platforms to publish and broadcast my writing on, I found myself in the uncertainty of freshman year, as the Americans call it. I started to look for models to follow. I searched for a rulebook to ace. I wanted to be the first one to say something new or profound, much like the reality-show swimmers were locked in battle to come up with new strokes to set themselves apart.
In the absence of norms, flow became elusive.
My writing, as I imagined it, was the imprint of my will on the world. But instead I faced a deep anomie, of the blind-leading-the-blind variety. Should I post when inspired? Or should I show up everyday? The algo loves comments, so maybe I should end my posts with a question. Ugh… so tacky. Maybe I should be authentic and that’s what people will come for. Should I…?
The internal chatter was endless; the urgency was relentless. I demanded the hard currency of success from any investment of time. I forgot to enjoy myself. What does it matter if I’m enjoying it or not, I wondered. Maybe it is like this for everyone. I stopped being the curious apprentice and turned into an imposter expert. This new persona consigned the joys of learning and of apprenticeship to the graveyard.
Like everyone I saw online and envied, I wanted to fast-track my way to a bigger following, to better engagement. Every minute provided me a reminder of the gap between my reality and my desired destination. By wanting to be known as an expert, I had made time my enemy.
Reaching the destination is an event but the journey is where you spend most of your time. If you don’t enjoy the journey, don’t be seduced by the destination, no matter how gainful. Instead of tracking the outcome of money and fame, track the input of hard work and commitment. Focus on getting a little better every day. Build a long chain of small gains.
2️⃣ Chasing happiness on a scale
I became a vice president at my previous company at age thirty-six. In my late twenties, I had quit my job to write a book and make a living as a published author. While I was at it, I was out of work and out of the workforce. The longer I stayed out, the further I slipped down the career ladder. Finally, when I rejoined three and a half years later, my paycheck told me how far I had fallen. My goal was to make up for the lost altitude as quickly as possible. A VP position made for a good aspiration. Making my way up to it in less than six years felt good.
Until it didn’t. I realized there was something I wanted more. I wanted to become a CXO. It was a fantasy. A fantasy not because it had no real bones, but because it was rooted in a wondrous “if only.” If only I could become a CXO, all my problems would be solved. I had discarded the goal I had started with (become a VP) and moved to the next one (become a CXO). I didn’t know it at the time but I was chasing happiness on a scale.
Shreyas Doshi, a startup advisor whose larger views on life and personal development have come to carry heft, describes this reflexive algorithm that governs the actions of people who chase happiness on a scale:7
You see something that others like and you go “I want this!”
You plunge yourself into figuring out “How do I get it?”
Doshi suggests that you imagine happiness as a state, not on a scale. In any case, it is useful to understand how we arrive at the throes of desire, so that we can interrupt the approach.
Yale psychology professor and happiness researcher Laurie Santos has this to say:8
We are products of natural selection, which is a blind process that, if you intentionalize it, it’s going for anything that will get you to survive and reproduce into the next generation. So natural selection is like, ‘double down on all the resources, all the accolades, all the status, all that stuff just in case’. Because we really want to make sure our genes get out there and it doesn’t care about you being happy. It really wants you to be craving, striving, always pushing for more genes in the next-generation individual. So I think we’re built with a mind that’s not necessarily geared towards making us happy.
This wired-to-compare tendency has you looking outside for a model to emulate. It is a basic trait in humans that social media has weaponized. Today you don’t just measure yourself against someone from your neighborhood. You pick the best from your curated social network–a house like your high-flying boss’s, a car like your neighbor’s, and the best returns in the stock market among friends. Wherever you look you see greener grass. The world insists on reminding you of the distance between you and that coveted grass.
How can we escape it? Perhaps we cannot but we can manage it. The Stoics came up with a way—premeditatio malorum. Writer Ryan Holiday talks about how Stoic philosopher Seneca was known to plan for trips by running through the list of things that could go wrong or stop it from happening—“a storm could arise, the captain could fall ill, the ship could be attacked by pirates.”9
Today that is popularized as negative visualization. You remind yourself of the things you value in your life by imagining them gone from you. Perhaps that was Gulzar’s proposal in Thoda Hai Thode Ki Zarurat Hai.
3️⃣ Confusing experience with its manifestation
“But to change all existence into a flow experience,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, “it is not sufficient to learn merely how to control moment-by-moment states of consciousness. It is also necessary to have an overall context of goals for the events of everyday life to make sense.”
Csikszentmihalyi conducted more than eight thousand interviews spanning three decades. From this set of interviews, he extracted two broad kinds of contexts. He called them life themes.
PRESENTED: This is a grand model for life. It comes pre-packaged in prevailing culture. Accepting a presented life theme requires as much judgment as you need to pick a best-selling product from a store. The origin of such a theme is extrinsic to you. It exists outside of you, in society. Because of these reasons, a presented life theme is remarkably shelf-stable, cresting the spirit of the times.
When I was growing up, engineering and MBA was a popular grand model to aspire to. Once I picked the engineer model of life, it followed that I had to learn math and science to qualify for the entrance exam for admission into an engineering college for my undergrad education. I had to subsequently spend four years in undergrad training. Later on, once I decided I wanted to add an MBA to my grand model, I worked on a bunch of specific skills needed to clear business-school entrance examinations. By then, I was so weary of the idea of being told what to study and whom to lock horns with, that I gave up pursuit of my grand model even before I joined business school.
Many may nurture the goal of having so many zeroes in their net worth but upon pursuing it may discover that they hate the experience of it. This realization is often accompanied by another one—they have invested too much into the project to then give it up. A lot of mid-life and mid-career crises come down to this dilemma. A common symptom of this is the vanishing of options for you. I would hear myself say things like “I have to” and “I should.”
DISCOVERED: There’s another way to pick a life theme. Try a bunch of things. Find out what resonates with your temperament and your skills. Work backward from what resonates. Work out the things you need in order to have more of that feeling of resonance. Piece by piece.
The end result is a life unique to you because it considers the things that matter to you and only you. Call this the form of your life. “The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem,” as says Christopher Alexander in Notes on the Synthesis of Form.10
Specimens of this life theme are notoriously perishable—what you’re trying to define has no commonly understood label and may be unique to just you. Most of us think we know the form we want in our lives. I did too for several years. We think that if we had enough of this or more of that, our lives would transform miraculously.
When it comes to describing what we want in life, we’ve a tendency to focus on the form and not the context. The form has shape; it has color and texture. We are drawn to the form like fruit flies to fruit.
“I want to be a CEO by forty.” — I want the respect of my peers.
“I want to travel the world.” — I want relief from the burnout I feel in my current job.
“I want to be an entrepreneur.” — I want autonomy in my work.
In each of these examples, the expressed form on the left turns out to be a red herring. It is not enough in and of itself because what you truly want is lodged deeper. It is closer to the context on the right. Is becoming a CEO the best way to earn respect for you? And what if you don’t like managing people or you hate putting your foot down to break a deadlock?
Which life theme should you pick?
When I was younger, I used to be starry-eyed about only doing things I loved. It was perhaps my way of rebelling against being told what to want. Yet, I didn’t know what I truly loved. This is a classic conundrum for the youth and the self-unaware. In recent years, I’ve come to understand that it is less important where you start—something the world values or something you love doing. Whatever be your on-ramp, what matters is whether you’re doing the work to merge with the highway of your life—your vision.
What the vision is is not important at all, as you will see next; what matters is what it does to you.
4️⃣ Needing the world to stroke your ego
On certain days, as I would scroll through my feed, I would find myself awash with emotion. I would perk up or slouch depending on how my last post had performed; be curious or envious depending on how my peers were doing. I would take one glance at someone’s reading list and be reminded of my incompetence, or, if I was familiar with the titles, search for ways in which I could commoditize my reading list into engagement.
As this tendency deepened into a habit, it fed a sense of unworthiness in me. I started to believe I’m good enough IF my followers are this, my comments are this, or my impressions are this. I felt compelled to do what I could to get those metrics up, or risk losing my self-worth. Psychologists have a name for this: conditional self-worth.
While I was going through this experience, it was not lost on me that I had the exact opposite prior experience of writing online, and I enjoyed it. From 2006 for about five years, I maintained a blog in a corner of the internet.11 That corner was my lab—I dabbled in prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. Dabbled is probably not the right word given the amount of energy I gave to the blog. It was both a celebrator and a fixer of my life—work, romance, friendships. I wrote for myself and for no one else.
What was the difference between the two spells? Anonymity.
Just as mass production of sugar transformed our lifestyle and exploited our biological attention to food, mass production of social approval via social media platforms has exploited our survival instincts as a herd species. The like button has come to be both a trophy and a noose. Living in the public eye, much like those swimmers, has stoked our self-consciousness and self-centeredness alike.
Self-consciousness and self-centeredness come from very different attentional sources but they are united in their ability to preoccupy the self.
A self-conscious person thinks too much about how she is perceived. She thinks about her appearance, her speech, her mannerisms. She worries about offending people or coming across as something she’s not. It comes at a cost. Csikszentmihalyi writes:
A person who is constantly worried about how others will perceive her, who is afraid of creating the wrong impression, or of doing something inappropriate, is also condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment.
A self-centered person passes every interaction through the sieve of her own interests. Everything is a means to her end. She grabs all the oxygen in a room for herself. David Foster Wallace, in his 2005 commencement speech This Is Water to the graduating class at Kenyon College, called self-centeredness our “default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.”12
Social media was fattening up my self-orientation. Whether bashful or narcissistic, my preoccupations impaired my ability to enjoy life. They ate away my attention such that I had less to give to the experience at hand. I was too wrapped up in myself—either wondering “what’s the world thinking of me?” or “what’s in it for me?”—to lose myself to what was before me.
Ultimately, I concluded that while getting to the finish line of my desires may bring me pleasure, it is only going through the journey of accepting myself for who I am that would bring me happiness.
Conditions for flow
There are two kinds of change.
In the swimming pool metaphor, imitation (of those better than you) leads to aspirations (become better than them) and aspirations escalate in a cycle of rising expectations (become an expert) that leads to disorder in the mind (become an expert quickly). Caught in this cycle, you’re always unhappy with your situation. You want to escape it. You tell yourself goal pursuit is about living in a state of anxiety. Ultimately, when the suffering gets too much, you feel disillusioned. You scale back your ambition or you abandon it altogether. You step out of the pool. Such change is an escape.
When you have a clear and compelling vision in your life, you want to change too. But it’s not an escape you seek. It is growth. You want to swim better. You stay in the pool because you’re having so much fun. You feel ready to face challenges that move you toward your vision because that very process renews you.
As Robert Fritz, author of The Path of Least Resistance, says, “It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.”13
A compelling vision is like a lens through which you see your life. It gathers your attention like a beam of light and converges it with intention on the task at hand. With access to such energy, you can submit yourself to a state of deep immersion, or flow, as you engage with the activity. To learn to be in flow, therefore, is to learn how to submit yourself to the moment and to nothing else.
This is no mean feat, as Csikszentmihalyi believes:
This challenge [to experience flow in everyday life] is both easier and more difficult than it sounds: easier because the ability to do so is entirely within each person’s hands; difficult because it requires a discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present.
Now that thanks to your vision you have given yourself “an overall context” to infuse meaning into your everyday actions, how can you design a life where you find rewards in the experience of each moment? Here are some questions you can ask:
Do I have clear goals? Do I have access to feedback?
This has a much more obvious answer for certain vocations such as sport and a much less obvious one for open-ended pursuits like those of the arts—painting, dancing—or even business. It is true that a scorecard for painting and one for chess are chalk and cheese. That one is harder to design than the other. Yet, painters will tell you that even if they may not have one final image in mind they’re working toward, they have a keen sense of direction. They may not have a GPS accurate to the nearest meter, but they have a compass that guides them to their North Star.
Neil Gaiman in his commencement speech Make Good Art delivered to the University of the Arts Class of 2012 shares his method for tracking progress:14
Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be – which was an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics, making good drama and supporting myself through my words – imagining that was a mountain, a distant mountain. My goal.
[...]
And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain. I said no to editorial jobs on magazines, proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if those job offers had come earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at that time.
Feedback loops in goal pursuit with time. Some pursuits are wrapped up within the hour, some span years. Self-contained satisfaction comes not from goal achievement as much as from seeing yourself inch closer to the finish line (climbing a mountain) or from seeing that your efforts bring order each time (tending to a garden).
Even with the assurance of a vision, goals are sometimes obvious (a game of tennis) and sometimes more open-ended (a piece of painting). They may operate under different time frames too. But without goals our actions follow the principles of Brownian motion.
Do I have challenges that match my skills?
The level of challenge and the level of skills are locked in a perpetual dance. When the challenge picks up the tempo, skill has to follow or else there will be anxiety (“I don’t know if I can keep pace”). When your skill picks up, you have to set yourself a bigger challenge to avoid boredom (“This is meh”). Between anxiety and boredom lies the channel for flow—that magical zone where you feel you have just the right level of skills to match the challenge before you.
The dance has to keep recreating itself, adding dimensions to the complexity and thereby to the satisfaction derived from the activity. You cannot enjoy doing the same dance at the same level for long. You raise the tempo and before you know it you’re struggling to match the pace. As you practice, slowly, your sense of rhythm improves and your body reciprocates. The anxiety lessens, the fun returns. It feels even better than when you first started because you’ve put in the effort and you’re now seeing the results. You’re enjoying yourself, though this is hardly a stable situation. At some point, boredom will set in and you’ll have a choice to make—should I raise the bar?
You could be in flow at multiple levels of match between challenge and skill. An amateur and an expert may both enjoy honing their craft when the level of their challenge just matches their skills but they do not share the same experience. The higher the match level, the deeper the experience. There’s a difference between a tight game of chess between two evenly matched professionals and two amateurs.
Can I deeply concentrate on the actions I take toward my goal?
You can have clear goals, get quick feedback, and feel perfectly matched with the scale of the challenge and still have a piddling experience if you are unable to direct your complete attention to the task at hand. Csikszentmihalyi explains:
A professional athlete might be “playing” football without any of the elements of flow being present: he might be bored, self-conscious, concerned about the size of the contract rather than the game.
The ability to lose oneself in the moment comes from the ability to make the most of any circumstances without worrying about your own interests. Self-seeking behavior draws attention away from the task itself. It has you negotiating your internal chatter of doubts and questions. It keeps up your radar for perceiving external threats. This disturbs order in consciousness.
At this point, a misconception may emerge about flow, which Csikszentmihalyi calls a “mechanistic fallacy.” It is this: if challenges match high skills in pursuit of a clear goal and with room for feedback, there will be flow. All these are objective conditions (level of challenge, skill, feedback, goals) that are supposed to bring order to the mind, but the mind is still free to march to its own beat.
Now that we can identify the enemies of flow as well as the conditions that are suited to it, it is worth considering the shape we can give work—an artificially constructed habitat where we spend half our waking hours—to make it more meaningful.
Work as flow
Most knowledge work has built-in structure. It has goals and rules and feedback loops. These are all ingredients for flow. On the surface such work is tailored for flow. Look deeper and you may pick out fault lines.
First, autonomy is at the heart of flow. Csikszentmihalyi writes:
When we feel that we are investing attention in a task against our will, it is as if our psychic energy is being wasted. Instead of helping us reach our own goals, it is called upon to make someone else’s come true.
For close to fifteen years, I was paid for a certain kind of knowledge work. I remember the feeling at the end of some work weeks of having subtracted one more week from my life. Of simply watching my life pass me by, like a passenger in my own vehicle.
Csikszentmihalyi serves blue-collar examples of a farmer in the Alps, a welder in Chicago, and a butcher in China to show what happens when a worker’s relationship to their work is stimulating.
The most fun I’ve had while being paid for it was a two-and-half-year phase between 2017 and 2020 when I got stuck into an idea for a new business and saw how far I could take it. I clocked the most hours during that period while also feeling the most energized. Burnout does not happen because of working too hard. It happens when you feel you have little say over your journey. I had plenty of say-so as I built a team and a line of services from the ground up.
Second, work is defined by a structural conflict. Without goals and metrics, it is hard to organize work for workers. Once you chase goals and metrics, you’re too busy managing them. Managing the business of counting what can be counted stops you from losing yourself in the work by constantly reminding you of where you need to be and how short you are of the target. This in itself is not bad. It is the overall context within which it is done that gives it the air of a pronouncement of (in)competence rather than an occasion for learning.
At most jobs, you’ll be working in the service of someone else’s vision. If you’re lucky, you may feel a kinship with it from which may emerge a deeper commitment. And when you do, each day may present itself as an opportunity to move towards a cherished destination. But a vision match is not a necessary precondition. More often, you may see a work setback as a reminder of the constraints you work under and you may feel compelled to come up with a convincing explanation for the gap between your current reality and the supposed finish line.
Building on Csikszentmihalyi, two complementary strategies to get more out of work:
1️⃣ Ask yourself: Am I solving a higher class of problems today compared to yesterday?
Csikszentmihalyi writes, “On the one hand jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities…”
Imagine yourself at the foot of the stairs on the ground floor of an infinitely tall walk-up. The immediate challenge before you is to climb the flight of stairs to the first floor. What happens when you do that and you find yourself on the landing of the first floor? You now have another flight of stairs to climb, this time to the second floor. On and on it goes. No matter what floor you’re on, you have another one higher to walk up.
Those who complain ‘Man, we’re on the thirty-sixth floor and still there’s more climbing to do’ hate the process of climbing. They just want to get to their destination. Those who enjoy the process notice that the view from the thirty-sixth floor is different from the view on the ground. There’s so much more complexity to you having experienced the view at different levels. That map of how far you have come is often enough to give you a lift, even though there’s more climbing to be done. The satisfaction of being in this type of situation feels earned.
Sometimes, though, perfectly driven workers keep finding themselves on the ground floor too often. They work hard to climb a couple of floors, and then something happens—some org restructure or some shift in strategy or some process reengineering—and they’re back to ground zero. Again and again it happens for project after project because there’s some bug in the organization’s operating system that is left unfixed. At some point, these people start wondering, for what is all of this climbing? Should I even bother to climb when I know the consequences?
Their issue is not with climbing. It is with making the same climb over and over again. This is the tedium of modern knowledge work that feels tragically typical to many.
I love writing because writing offers infinite levels of complexity. No matter how seasoned a writer you are, in John McPhee’s words, Square One does not become Square Two and Square Three, just Square One squared and cubed.15 No matter who you are, writing offers you the next level to explore. It does so with minimal contingencies. It is all left to me, the writer in control.
2️⃣ Don’t passively crave meaningful work; look for complexity and meaning in the work you do.
“But it will also be necessary to help people develop autotelic personalities….” The second strategy Csikszentmihalyi proposes is to work on your approach to work. Reframe constraint into opportunity. Stop expecting your job to provide you with lasting satisfaction and take on the responsibility of uncovering the potential for flow in what you do.
More variety and scope for growth exist in jobs than most are willing to discover. The better you get at what you do, the more room for growth you will find. “Because optimal experience depends on a subjective evaluation of what the possibilities for action are,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, “and of one’s own capacities, it happens quite often that an individual will be disconnected even with a potentially great job.” This is the disconnect that afflicts both serial adventure-seekers who feel deprived of the new and routine domain specialists who are unnerved by change that is too frequent by their cycles.
Our “subjective evaluation” decides not just the level of enthusiasm for work but also for life. While most claim they would be happy if they didn’t have to work again, to some, work is life support. “Picasso enjoyed painting, but as soon as he lay down his brushes he turned into a rather unpleasant man,” writes Csikszentmihalyi. Flow in one part of life does not naturally spill over to the other parts. You have to make it happen. The onus is on you to find a purpose that justifies your entire life, not just a part of it.
While these are some conditions that are suited to the experience of flow, meeting them opens up the possibility of an experience of flow, without guaranteeing it. There’s another trait that has a telling effect on the ability to effortlessly attend to the task at hand. Csikszentmihalyi calls it “an individual’s ability to restructure consciousness so as to make flow possible.”
Doing something for the sake of it
During the War, most adults young Csikszentmihalyi observed saw survival as an end in itself. Their attention seemed to be taken by their objectively calamitous situation. A few, though, used survival as a stratum on which to build a meaningful life on. They kept busy, immersed themselves in the everyday, and did the best they could.
Csikszentmihalyi calls such individuals autotelic.
The word autotelic brings together two Greek words: auto meaning self and telos meaning goal. It refers to an activity that is meaningful in itself, without needing to lead to a future reward. The opposite of it is exotelic, where you engage in something expecting a future benefit. The autotelic person doesn’t do anything differently from others—the doing of the activity remains unchanged. Only the intention behind what she does changes. She does something because it is worth doing for itself.
Physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman lost his wife and first love to tuberculosis when she was in her twenties. In the months leading up to her demise, they would correspond in letters because Feynman was cloistered at Los Alamos working on the atomic bomb project. Read his account of those War years with a dying wife at home and you would not find meaning amiss. He was busy with his physics.16 Perhaps Feynman was the type of personality that captured the imagination of Csikszentmihalyi during those War years.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld repeatedly says that he would do comedy for nothing else other than the experience of making strangers laugh. Autotelic personalities like Feynman and Seinfeld are the exceptions. “Most things we do,” writes Csikszentmihalyi, “are neither purely autotelic nor purely exotelic, but are a combination of the two.”
Most enjoyable activities do not delight us from the get go. Léon Marchand, the winner of four golds at the 2024 Paris Olympics, gave up swimming between years seven and nine because he found the water too cold. But then, something may have changed. One day something he tried may have brought about a tiny improvement that when fed back to a young Marchand may have made him more motivated to try more, bringing in another small gain. Slowly, the time he spent in the pool would no longer be dictated by the water temperature but by his own ability to follow this map of possibilities of what more he could do in the water. At that point, swimming may have become fun, even addictive.
Your ability to control your mind so as to extract meaning from the task at hand may be contingent on social conditions (war or peacetime), your neurological health, or family situation. But few are ruled out completely from the joys of flow. Almost everyone has the ability to transform ordinary experience into something meaningful. Nothing that comes in the way of our happiness is inevitable or necessary. We each have the power to keep the driveway of our happiness clear. Flow has the power to link each of us to a powerful meaning system—the joy of immersion in the moment. It is not so much what we do to spend our time that reflects our inner state; it is what it means to us. Our lives become exalted not when we achieve success or occupy coveted positions or are blessed with unique talents, but when we have access to experiences that are, first, in line with our vision in life and, second, lead to the growth of the self. For that, in the homestretch, we must remove our own interfering selves and be one with our pursuits.
The interfering self
In the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes, “When you’re not dominated by feelings of separateness from what you’re working on, then you can be said to ‘care’ about what you’re doing. That is what caring really is: a feeling of identification with what one’s doing.”17
Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow as a state of union with the activity echoes with Pirsig’s thoughts on caring about what you’re doing. He says:
…when an activity is thoroughly engrossing, there is not enough attention left over to allow a person to consider either the past or the future, or any other temporarily irrelevant stimuli.
Testimonials from Csikszentmihalyi’s subjects overlap on one thing: flow makes you forget yourself. This runs contrary to everyday life where we’re constantly putting ourselves in the path of every incoming threat to size it up and work out how to confront it. Couple this tendency with the special power of social media to issue moment-to-moment reminders to the self and it is no surprise that the experience hacks our brain and leaves us utterly spent by the end of every day.
I do not regret the three years I spent out of work writing a manuscript that hasn’t yet seen the light of day, twelve years and running, because that time helped me discover my love for writing. I realized that writing to me was about solitude and precision, and that I enjoyed the experience of both. I didn’t mind the discipline needed to lock my doors and create order from the chaos in my head. On days when the words flowed, I wouldn’t even call it discipline that turned the pages. What I didn’t like was the networking, the soliciting of an agent, and—thanks to the idealism of youth—someone telling me what my style should be. Perhaps I could have designed a writing life with more of the good stuff and less of the not-so-good stuff. But I didn’t. I couldn’t because I let myself get in the way.
Human beings, from the time of the paleolithic man, have evolved to run simulations in their head to then come to a conclusion about whether something is worth doing. If the brain decides it is not, it doesn’t release the motivation needed for the effort. That’s how the brain decides it is a much better idea, to borrow a visual from writer Cal Newport, to throw a spear at a woolly mammoth than to jump on its back and try to bash its giant head with a rock.18
The thing with intellectual pursuits is that the brain hasn’t evolved for them. Knowledge work is too recent for evolution to lend a helping hand. Our brain doesn’t know what to expect. If you have never written a book and don’t know anyone close who has, your brain has no idea what to map the writing-a-book project to.
On such occasions, we can let our own selves intrude into our thoughts a little too much and whisper into our ears a few too many words. The only way to know is to try. Of course, if you’re repeatedly running up against procrastination, that may be your brain telling you it’s not a good idea. But most of us stumble at smaller hurdles. We look at ourselves from the outside in and we wonder if there’s respect and admiration in how the world sees us and we get cold feet.
Back in 2022, a good decade after my last notable writing project, maintaining my digital persona thwarted my attempts at mastery even before my pursuit had gathered enough integrity. I was too conscious of myself. Somewhere, I heard others tell me that hard is stupid. I didn't want to be stupid so I went for the easy and the cheap. In the bargain, I forgot that hard is meaningful. Not when it is just hard, like running a marathon is, but when it is tied to what I’m striving for. Seinfeld advocates such pursuit of mastery.
That’s how I look at [it]… what you should do with your life. It’s all beautiful but not really until we do something with it, Make something, do something. The hard is the good.
In the process of doing something hard, failure is inevitable. So is growth, and flow is a sure forerunner for growth.
The changing self
Is the self carved in stone and waiting for us to discover it so that we recognize its one unvarying form? Or is the self something we put our chisels to every day?
Time and again, Csikszentmihalyi returns to the idea of a growing self. An experience of flow expands, deepens the self, he hears from the multitudes of research subjects he speaks with.
Your life is a series of experiments to ultimately figure out who you are, where each experiment has the power to change you a little bit. The artist chases the unveiling of the true self without realizing that underneath the surface her art is shaping her. An expanded self reveals itself through new skills, new taste, and an ability to notice new possibilities.
Ultimately, I’m happy for the experience with social media. As an experiment, though unintended, it produced results. Perhaps not what I wanted it show me at the moment but invaluable evidence still. It taught me that the voice I need to hear when I sit at my computer is the voice of my craft and of my growing self. It told me that only when I’m attentive to that inner voice, only when I can separate it from spurious rationalizations, can I truly discover what makes me come alive. The point of this discovery is not to hang on the mantelpiece some fixed form of who I am but to actively participate in the making of my future self. I find myself in my work only for the work to shape me anew. Doing this, day in and out, is the only way to reclaim my experience from the approval and manifestations of others and from my own self-sabotaging pathologies.
In all of this, what of the self? The need to worry about the self fades when one is immersed in a continuous cycle of discovery and design. There’s no occasion to question my adequacy because I’m not sitting at a distance and wondering about what form my life should assume. I’m right there, inside the frame of my life. Whenever I stop to take a breath, I see myself chisel in hand, sweat dripping from my brow, and I know I’m alright.
That is nothing but flow.
🙏Many thanks to Himanshu Bora, Tyagarajan S, and Karthik Ballu for reading drafts and sharing their inputs.
Just brilliant. A lot of relatable situations and connections to various aspects of life.