RSS Feed
RELEASE YOURSELF TO THE CHURCH! TO THE STATE! TO APPLE CORPORATION! Or Flow.
There’s a lot of buzz about how ridiculous it is that people are waiting in 10 hours to get Apple’s new iPhone. How lucky for me that I have just recently been reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Also, I’ve now discussed and read him enough that I can finally spell his name without having to look it up. Let’s first talk about some important ideas that he offers.
Even though civilization has been getting increasingly advanced, we aren’t getting any happier. People spend their lives working for a future, and when it arrives, they say WAIT A MINUTE – what happened to the LIFE I was supposed to be living? Surely this couldn’t be ALL THERE IS? So some of them turn to drugs and alcohol in response to their frustration. I know I did for a long time – and probably will continue to do so in the future, from time to time. Others become spiritual seekers, going through Landmark Education, spending years in monasteries, attending personal development workshops by Steve Pavlina, changing their name and growing their hair out and doing Yoga. They attempt to apply eastern teachings that made sense thousands of years ago to help them deal with the bullshit circumstance of modern America.
So what do we do if we want to be happy?? We’re kind of FUCKED, aren’t we?
Sort of.
I need to get into theory to explain it better.
I’ve been talking a lot about the ego here on this blog. And Csikszentmihalyi presented some ideas that really enhanced my understanding of it. (how funny, because enhancement is such a dualistic notion, but fuck it, let’s get real, I’m not enlightened yet). Here’s how I currently understand the ego:
Hopefully my drawing skills will improve once I finish the Ekman book on microexpressions
We have an ego/self-image that revolves around a set of goals getting completed. Therefore, the ego almost always lives in the past or the future, not the present moment. The ego constantly filters attention for things that are in line with its beliefs. Our experience, which is shaped by attention, then either satisfies the desires of the ego, or it fails to satisfy the desires of the ego. If it succeeds – then we win and experience an incredible high. If not, however, we are filled with pain. Horrible suffering.
Typically, we are not actually in control over our ego and goals. They are set for us by society and social conditioning. This is either our cultural context or our life history. In communist Russia, the ego goals might be to work in the factory in service to the state. Unfortunately, this is a really shitty goal because it does not provide opportunity for happiness (goals of the state aren’t aligned with personal biological drives; Emile Durkheim would call this anomie). And the work provided doesn’t encourage flow. More on flow in a second, though, because there’s something I want to address first: a comment on Hacker News.
Apart from the developers [who lined up to buy the iPhone because it gives them a competitive business advantage], does it hint at a certain emptiness in those people’s lives?
Yes, it does, but it’s unfair to single them out as a group. They are simply satisfying a certain identity criterion: if they have the phone, it works into their ego self image of somebody who has the phone; they are part of their tribe. The exact same game is played by people who drink alcohol and then enjoy the ritual of complaining about their hangovers the next morning. So how do we form these ego images? By the psychological principle of shaping.
Shaping: when little bits of behavior are rewarded over time, chained together to create entirely new complex behavior, ultimately evoked through the LAW OF EFFECT [behavior that leads to pleasure is encouraged, behavior that leads to pain is discouraged].
Gross oversimplification, but tell me it’s not accurate: You’re a successful young adult. You go to the bars and try to hang out with one group of people with lots of cultural capital, but you get snubbed. You hang out more with the Geeks, they accept you, technology is valued in their subculture, so if you want to be popular in your group you try to make sure you are excellent with technology. This might include making sure you are one of the first to get the iPhone. Social acceptance yields elevated dopamine in the striatum, an area of the brain largely responsible for reward and motivation.
OK, OK- so we’re all slaves to our arbitrary self-image/identity. Different self-images might be evaluated as more desirable than others depending on the external rewards that they deliver and the ease of facilitating validation of self-image. For example, a self-image of a healthy athlete might be good because it would motivate you to exercise and therefore extend your life, but a self-image of a beautiful person might be bad because unless you’re actually beautiful you’re not going to get any external validation and you’re going to be living an awful life filled with rationalizations; either way, getting old will be a real bitch, too.
The biggest problem with reliance on self-image to be happy is that most self-images require external validation and your level of happiness is going to be a sinusoidal rollercoaster depending on how the unpredictable chaotic environment is treating you. So what SHOULD you do, practically speaking? Try to give yourself a self-image of something motivated by things that you CAN control, such as taking action. Make friends with people who support and validate this new identity. Try to find self-esteem by grounding yourself in reality – something that the vast majority of people simply don’t do. How can one find this elusive self-esteem? A partial answer is to control the thoughts that go into your head.
All day long we are bombarded by inaccurate thoughts and judgments, and they make us unhappy. If they’re irrational, they’re distorted by the ego. Correcting irrationalities helps destroy the ego. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius writes, “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 judgment now.” Wow, wise, but a lot easier said than done.. our minds are entrenched with strong neural wirings of thoughts we’ve had on automatic repeat for years. I’m currently working on a FREE WEB APP to help you combat automatic negative thoughts and change the contents of your mind and therefore your reality. I’m devoting a lot of effort to this because I think this is something that can actually improve our lives. In psychiatry, it is known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and has been demonstrated equally effective as LEXAPRO in treating depression. Of course, I will post it to this blog when it is ready.
But let’s get back to FLOW because there’s a lot to talk about. Remember how I said yes- we’re kind of fucked if we want to be happy – that’s not entirely true. There are things we can do; we can find pleasure and we can find enjoyment.
PLEASURE is anything that satisfies our basic human needs. This comprises eating, drinking, sex, and sleeping.
ENJOYMENT comes from the practice of a well-rehearsed skill. The skill could be anything from tennis to basketball to programming to business dealmaking to walking to looking around to listening to music. You see so many people who want to make a change in their lives, but can’t. Somebody on Hacker News recently said he wanted to work with water, but can’t stop being a programmer because he enjoys it so much. He’s addicted to the flow states.
The state of FLOW, also known as being in the zone, occurs when your level of skill meets an appropriate challenge. When you are in FLOW you are firing on all cylinders; you achieve incredible performance, feel great, and forget your sense of “self”.
Did you know that the human mind can only process about 7 discrete pieces of information at any given moment? If you want to promote encoding/enhanced memory recall/high task performance, then you should disable your “background tasks” and give something your full attention. If you’re trying to listen to someone and 1/7 of your resources are involved in thinking about what you want for lunch, then you aren’t going to be dedicated fully to listening to them and your conversational performance will suffer. Stress is another thing that eats up mental resources, though I’m not sure how, exactly – I can’t quite model it by saying “stress eats up 2/7 of your 7 resources.” Also relevant: when we become more proficient (skilled) at something, deciphering it takes fewer resources. So if I am a chess expert and I look at a chess board, I am going to be able to notice more things, because I “chunk” different pieces into memory. Something that costs you 3 bits might only cost me 1 bit.
So complete absorption leads to flow, that great feeling, because all your resources are dedicated to it: the task is precisely challenging enough to engage all of your resources, and nothing more. Since all of your resources are engaged in the task at hand, you no longer feel self-conscious because there’s no “bit” available to mull over your ego or self-image.
Flow also creates an ordering of your consciousness. Since you have no ego, your thinking is more logical. Ordering of consciousness is intrinsically pleasant because it is similar to a state of self-esteem. Also, every time you experience flow, you become more complex as a person: you become more differentiated (because you are more skilled) yet also more integrated (because flow leads to loss of “self”.)
Csikszentmihalyi hypothesizes that S.M.A.R.T. goals can lead to flow. For more information, see this post on the what makes games fun.
Although Flow leads to happiness, it’s clear that American cultural values do not. Someone else on Hacker News commented:
Sure, [consumerism] is the way life is for many people, but … to think that Apple intentionally makes thousands of humans waste hours of their life doing something they hate.
The Apple marketing machine created a tribe, giving to the rise of superfans whose identity/self-image hinges on being one of the first to own a new product. I don’t know if it’s Apple you should really blame, though. You should blame our culture for allowing the media to manipulate us, brainwashing us, shaping the behavior to work jobs we hate so we can buy things so we can be happy. Media conditioning plays on our innate drives, associating positive possibilities (sex, social acceptance/popularity) with consumer products. Growing up in America gives you a certain set of engrained values that just DON’T WORK: they don’t order reality in an effective way (too much rationalization and cognitive dissonance, because if you really start to question things, you see that the system is fucked, and can no longer be a part of it) and they lead you towards a probably unhappy life, even if you do everything “right” (Ivy League college, high paying job, marriage, kids…etc. But watching TV, the #1 American pastime, is not real enjoyment because it is rarely a skillful activity!) However, even though the values are fucked, it’s much easier to just receive guidelines instead of having to think for yourself – that takes up so much energy.
It’s easy to just submit to the values of the state and consumerism; no thinking is involved, plus, everybody else is doing it, so something about it must be right [social proof]. Unfortunately, this does not work. Submitting to a religion can be helpful for a time (as they say it is the opiate of the masses); it can lead to a feeling of connectedness not unlike flow. Unfortunately, for the critical thinker, it is impossible to submit to a religion because religious doctrine creates too many logical conflicts and introduces too many opportunities for cognitive dissonance.
What to do to be happy and complex?? Try to practice skill in everything you do; when you do anything, give it your complete attention, and try to do it as best as you can. This even includes walking down the street. And I really recommend you read Flow.
Follow @zburt
Subscribe to the blog via email.
AwesomenessReminders is owned and operated by me, Zachary Burt.