Flow: Let’s Get Serious about Leisure

June 5, 2013 By 2 Comments

Do you take your leisure seriously? If not, you aren’t going to get flow which I described last week. Contrary to popular belief, flow is not the easy-peasy feeling you get when plopping down on the couch to watch an old movie or the NBA Finals. Flow also is not the exclusive property of musical or spiritual virtuosos who seem to just forget the world around them as they wrap themselves in beauty or prayer.  Flow happens when your work or leisure expand your consciousness, producing and optimal psychological state fundamental to happiness.

Why do we need to be serious about flow? Positive psychologist Martin Seligman convinced me that if you don’t get flow most days, you probably will never be happy. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, states that if you know how to flow, you can expect to be happy practically no matter what, including during times of  serious adversity.

Robert Stebbins

In reply to my blog last week, I heard from a leading sociologist who studies leisure, Robert A. Stebbins of the University of Calgary, whose researched has focused on ‘serious leisure’, ‘casual leisure’, ‘project-based leisure’ and ‘optimal leisure’. Stebbins properly cautioned not to think of flow as just another name for leisure, pointing out in his email that “most leisure activities allow for instances of flow, but that flow is only part of what their participants experience.”

In the November 2010 issue of the Leisure Studies Association Newsletter, Stebbins lists the 8 components of flow as defined by Csikszentmihalyi and examines how various forms of leisure do or do not meet those conditions of flow. In order to meet Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow, an activity must meet these 8 criteria:

1. sense of competence in executing the activity;

2. requirement of concentration;

3. clarity of goals of the activity;

4. immediate feedback from the activity;

5. sense of deep, focused involvement in the activity;

6. sense of control in completing the activity;

7. loss of self-consciousness during the activity;

8. sense of time is truncated during the activity.

One important ‘serious leisure activity’ that does not meet the strict critiera for flow is what Stebbins calls the liberal arts hobbies. What is serious leisure? Stebbins defines serious leisure as:

“Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity sufficiently substantial, interesting, and fulfilling for the participant to find a (leisure) career there acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience” (Stebbins, LSA newsletter, November 2010).

Surfing or volunteering is certainly leisure, but it’s not serious leisure by Stebbins’s definition. What are liberal arts hobbies, which is serious leisure? According to Stebbins, in liberal arts hobbies, “their goal is acquisition of a body of knowledge and understanding of, for example, one or more arts, sports, foods, beverages, languages, cultures, histories, sciences, philosophies or literary traditions.” Liberal arts hobbies are not mastered for another purpose; the topic is pursued as an end in and of itself.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

For example, my father collected 2,000 books in his lifetime on a variety of specialized topics, including chess, archeology, classical music and languages. Whenever I traveled to a foreign country, my father asked me to bring him chess books written in foreign languages. Although he was an avid chess player, my dad didn’t want to learn about chess in different languages so he could compete with someone from another country. Rather, he just found immense enjoyment studying languages and chess together—something that really puzzled me until I read about flow. My father definitely was what Stebbins calls a liberal arts hobbyist, and he had what Csikszentmihalyi calls an autotelic personality, understood as someone with a innate curiosity to master things just for their own sake and the ability to concentrate on those things for long periods of time.

The range of topics my father studied always amazed me; now I realize it wasn’t just the topics he studied which interested him but the experience of gathering knowledge as an end in and of itself which fascinated my father. My father also knew the difference between serious and causal leisure, as he would often tell me with a big smile and excitement in his eyes, “Let’s turn off the TV and do math.” In teaching me algebra when I was 6, my dad not only taught me math, he taught me to enjoy the pursuit of knowledge as an end in its own right, which may be what led me to become an academic.

However, as Stebbins rightly points out, liberal arts hobbies don’t require control  (component #6 in Csikszentmihalyi’s definition of flow). Hence, Stebbins cautions that not all leisure should be called flow. Stebbins also points out that causal leisure, such as aerobics and game playing, may not be complex enough for flow.

Even if not all leisure is flow, could it be that leisure (in all its forms) is one important building block of flow? Although I can see the need to get serious about our leisure, we can’t be too serious about our flow all the time, can we? Doesn’t casual leisure build up the capacity for serious leisure?

Take together, Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow and Stebbins’s concept of serious leisure, such as liberal arts hobbies, reassures me that my own passion for being a professor stems from a desire to know and master a topic just because I enjoy it. I’ve always thought that being a professor was a vocation, even though to some it seems like a vacation because I enjoy it so much.

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Flow: Order in Consciousness

May 29, 2013 By 3 Comments

Did you know that you can actually increase your ability to enjoy the things in life that produce the greatest satisfaction?

When I read Martin Seligman’s PERMA concept of human flourishing (Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement) I simply presumed that Type-A, achievement oriented people like me are too busy doing our work to get into flow (another word for engagement). “Flow must be what creative types, like artists or actors, experience,” I naively thought. To learn more about flow, I recently perused one of the books from the reading list I developed for my positive sociology class, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Czikszentmihaly.  To my delight, I learned from Czikszentmihaly that the reason I can dedicate so many hours of solitary  reading and writing is because learning new things is the primary way I experience flow.

What exactly is flow? According to  Czikszentmihaly, flow is “joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life” (Flow, p. xi). How do we achieve flow? By fighting against psychic entropy (or chaos in our thoughts) by striving for order in our consciouness. When we have order in consciousness, “the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly” (Flow, p. 39).

As Czikszentmihaly describes in this TED lecture, he and his colleagues have interviewed thousands of people from business leaders, to Benedictine monks, to star athletes in order to understand what conditions lead to flow. But experiencing flow is by no means limited to extraordinary people or unusual circumstances, it’s something we can all attain if we understand what flow is and how to experience it.

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Why is flow important to well-being? In modern societies, we have nearly unlimited choices and autonomy, which, as I’ve written about before on this blog, can paradoxically lead to boredom and wasted opportunities. To make the most of our freedom, Czikszentmihaly argues that we must learn to find purpose in our daily activities and how to experience enjoyment while doing those activities. Whereas I thought only certain activities like music or sports create flow, Czikszentmihaly points out that flow is not inherent to any particular activity; rather, we achieve flow as a result of our attitude towards that activity.

We need flow to be happy  because a disordered, wandering mind is the opposite of a virtuous and happy life.

“When a person is able to organize his or her consciousness so as to experience flow as often as possible, the quality of life is inevitably going to improve…even the usually boring routines of work become purposeful and enjoyable…Flow helps to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered… The self becomes more complex as a result of experiencing flow” (Flow, pp. 40-42).

One of my favorite saints, St. Ignatius of Loyola (who Czikszentmihaly discusses), taught about internal order of our consciousness through prayer and discipline. One place I most easily find flow is the Catholic Mass. The progression of the liturgy helps my wandering brain to get into flow, and in that flow, I experience internal order and peace.  Every aspect of the sacred liturgy—my bodily motions, singing, vocal prayers, and receiving the Eucharist—does exactly what Czikszentmihaly says it should—focus my attention on something else and order all of my senses towards one goal–union with God through prayer.

Mihaly Czikszentmihaly

I was relieved to be corrected in my mistake of thinking that my work is only about achievement. Part of the reason I have persevered in academia is that I experience flow in my work, which Czikszentmihaly says is crucial to a high quality of life. For academics, mastering a subject we are studying is not not unlike what others experience from climbing Mount Everest or surfing the Big Eddy—writing a dissertation, a book, or even a short (but awesome) blog is hard to do, but when it’s over, you feel like a champ.

Wait a minute, you might wonder, isn’t flow something we get through leisure? if you ask people what they want to expand their enjoyment in life, especially when it comes to something mushy like flow, they would probably say “more time off from work!”

More time off from work for leisure in theory could increase our flow, but Czikszentmihaly argues that “one of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is this great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment,” (Flow, p. 83). is also very clear that most of us use our leisure time very unwisely. Perhaps the worst thing with leisure time is to vegetate brainlessly in front of the TV or mindlessly read everyone’s Facebook posts. But Czikszentmihaly is also skeptical about only engaging in sports as a spectator rather than as a participant.

Why? Our leisure time, according to Czikszentmihaly, produces flow when we are a) challenged but also rewarded; b) feel like we have expanded our skills, our ability to experience new things. When was the last time when watching a TV show,  a movie, or even watching the finals of some sporting event, made you think, “Gee, I just grew as a person!” The entertainment of TV and watching sports is appealing because it provides immediate sensory excitement and feedback, but does little to expand our ability for optimal experiences. The same goes for for casual sex, Czikszentmihaly says. Having sex with a relative stranger or watching pornography may indeed stimulate our sexual appetite and satisfy the momentary sexual urge, but only committed love of a whole person (which can encompass the sexual dimension) expands our capacity to love.

In other words, when it comes to pleasures, it’s not just “use it or lose it” it’s “expand it or waste it.” Czikszentmihaly’s concept of flow challenges us because simply using some capacity we have without trying to deepen the experience from that activity will lead to entropy—the gradual loss of our ability to enjoy that activity at all. Our approach to any leisurely pastime or pleasurable activity should be one of expanding our capacities for experiencing flow.

So, instead of watching movies, TV or sports, this week I’m increasing my flow in various ways. In my leisure time, I turned attention away from the TV and towards Scrabble—a game that requires creating words out of letters, learning the rules of the game board, and competing with another person. I also invited some friends over to eat pizza and for a friendly match of wiffle ball—a game that is easy to master (hence people of all abilities can flow while playing) but nonetheless requires coordination, competition, and a good sense of humor.

If you want to increase your well-being through flow, I have two suggestions. First, you must see your work—whether your do manual labor, intellectual labor or household labor—as a chance to expand your consciousness. (If you are barking at me saying your work doesn’t allow for flow, please read Czikszentmihaly’s chapter on the factory worker who experiences flow. It’s not your professional work or your vocation to homemaking that is getting in the way of your flow—he says it is your attitude towards your daily work). Second, you should pay careful attention to how you use your leisure time. Don’t unwittingly dampen your consciousness by watching mindless TV shows or talking about your neighbors, but expand your ability to enjoy things like theater, music, sports, and liturgy. You may even want to pick up a great book like Flow and discuss it with your friends and family.

 

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“No More Choices, Please!”

May 1, 2013 By 2 Comments

Barry Schwartz

Have you ever felt overwhelmed at the number of choices to buy a salad dressing at the grocery store? Have you ever failed to choose a health care or retirement option just because, well, there were so many options that you couldn’t pick one? Have you ever searched and searched for the perfect pair of shoes, the best dress for a special event, or a new car, and then made a choice but still felt like maybe you could have found something even better?

If you answered “yes’ to any of these questions, then you are suffering from what Swarthmore psychology professor Barry Schwartz calls “The Paradox of Choice.” As he recounts in this TED lecture, Schwartz suffered so much agony when buying a pair of jeans that he decided to write a whole book explaining how Americans mistakenly think that more choices means more freedom and that more freedom means more well-being.

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One of the first-year students in my positive sociology seminar wrote a review of Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, and to my amazement my students were so persuaded by his arguments about the negative effects of too many choices on our well-being that they all shouted in a chorus at the end of class, “No more choices, please! Save us from our misery!”

One student admitted (somewhat embarrassed) that she was having trouble picking out her new glasses. She had already taken 3 female friends with her to pick out new frames; but still feeling unsatisfied, she invited 3 male friends. This same student lamented how others’ inability to choose made her miserable, “I mean, I really hate it when a guy asks me out on a date and then asks me to choose where to go!” Another student chimed in, “My stepmother always wants to buy me the perfect Christmas gift. So we go shopping for days and days and I pick out lots of things I like. But she can’t make a choice, so I end up getting nothing even though I told her I really, really wanted something!” A third student said, “No one wants to make plans when we go out with our friends because no one wants to be responsible if we don’t have fun.”

After our engaging class discussion, the student who had led the class discussion asked me, “So do you want to read this draft and discuss it on Monday? Or do you want me to revise it over the weekend and send you a new draft before we meet to discuss it?” My immediate reaction was to say, “Whichever you choose.” But when her face sunk, I quickly realized I was doing what Schwartz calls abdicating authority–when a professional such a doctor or a professor won’t tell a patient or student what to do. I corrected myself saying, “You want me to tell you what to do, don’t you?” and she nodded her head.”So why don’t you outline some revisions you think you could make, and we can discuss this draft and your plan for revision on Monday.”

Schwartz offers three main reasons for the paradox that having so many choices makes us unhappy: 1) Paralysis. We have so many options we don’t pick any of them. Just ask yourself–when was the last time you went to the store to buy something supposedly simple, like dishwashing liquid, and felt so overwhelmed by the choices you just walked out of the stores? 2) Opportunity Costs. When we have seemingly endless options,  we find it hard to be satisfied with what we do choose. Even worse, when do make a choice, we can always come up with an ‘imagined alternative’ that reduces our satisfaction with even our good decisions. Regret, not happiness, goes up when we have too many choices. 3) Escalation of Expectations. Even if we objectively make a better choice than we could have before we had so many choices, we feel worse. Why? Well, those shoes I bought last week may be the best pair I’ve  ever had, but with so many great shoes at Nordstrom’s, Macy’s, and on-line how do I know I got my dream shoes, the absolutely perfect pair of shoes I want to wear until the end of my life? To explain this regret-at-having-it-so-good-we-feel-worse, Schwartz quips in his TED lecture, “Everything was better when everything was worse.” We have become such perfectionists that we are never pleasantly surprised by what we have.

Margaret Archer

Much research in psychology, sociology and particular economics falls into this problem: our concept of the human person is a being who uses his or her reason to satisfy his or her preferences (i.e., the utility-maximizing rational choice actor). Sociologist Margaret Archer, in her book Being Human: The Problem of Agency, argues that satisfying preferences is not the same as satisfying the person. The human person, Archer persuasively argues, is driven by ultimate concerns, such as concerns for love, beauty and truth. We can’t satisfy those concerns no matter how many choices we have, as human persons ultimately are capable of imagining a better, happier, more beautiful world than any choice we have in front of us, an imaginative power Archer argues is key to positive social transformation.

Perhaps the most important lesson my students learned in positive sociology, as they told me, is that the the human person finds deep satisfaction through strong relationships with others and by having a deep sense of meaning in which one’s purpose in this life is tied to a larger narrative. Deciding where to go out on Friday, where to go out on a date, what glasses to buy, and what classes to take makes my students unhappy rather than happy. Given that I had never taught positive psychology or positive sociology before, my students ended the semester pleasantly surprised with what they got, probably because they had no idea what to expect and because they learned had many practical lessons for how to be happier.

 

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Is Tocqueville Still Relevant?

March 20, 2013 By 5 Comments

It is with a bit of trepidation that I begin discussing with my students in positive sociology this week Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Is a work written in the 1830s relevant nearly 200 years later? When I assign readings from 1985 my students say, “Gee, this is old and out of context,” so how will they respond to a book from 1835? Will they dismiss Tocqueville’s insights or writing style as irrelevant to their everyday concerns and the concerns of our nation?

As the book’s title suggests, Tocqueville ventured to the U.S. from France to find out: what makes American democracy work? The 600-page volume he produced is quite likely still the best assessment of American culture that has ever been written. In this masterpiece that has now become a foundational piece for cultural literacy, Tocqueville writes as a foreigner (he was a Frenchman) and to foreigners (his book was originally published in French for a French audience) about what cultural and social forms distinctly American, and how those distinct American social and cultural traits uphold the great American experiment in democracy.

Today, most Americans take our democracy for granted and hardly realizing, as my graduate school instructor from Princeton University Paul Starr put it, what a bunch of radicals the American revolutionaries were and how most of the world at the time flat-out rejected the idea that the masses were deserving of liberty or capable of self-rule. Today, the word democracy gets thrown around in our domestic policy debates and most certain in our foreign policy debates.

As I chatted with Beau Weston, the Van Winkle Professor of Sociology and Centre College (Kentucky), we talked about how Tocqueville was trying to persuade French aristocrats that democracy can really work. Liberty, many European aristocrats at the time thought, could only be entrusted to the educated, the landed, well, to other aristocrats like them who had been given their liberty and their superior social position by their God. Aristocrats believed that society had to be organized top down, with the church, kings and aristocrats exercising special rights and abilities to make society cohere. The needs or rights of individuals didn’t matter too much; the masses needed order, not liberty, to thrive.

At around the same time as the American Revolution, the Scottish moral philosopher (who is better remembered as an economist) Adam Smith wrote two extraordinarily influential works: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). The noted economic history Jacob Viner points out how in these two works Smith argues that humans are all endowed with natural liberty, and that such natural liberty gives rise to social order (Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 35, No. 2, April 1927, pp. 198-232).

It’s overly simplistic to say that Smith wrote that the pursuit of self-interest produces the common good; Smith saw very clearly the dangers of self-deceit and corruption. But Smith’s enduring insight was that that social order can arise from the free cooperation of individuals, that competition in the economic realm could lead to cooperation. This ideal of upholding natural liberty as a path to social cooperation is deeply embedded in American culture, history and institutions.

Tocqueville set out to demonstrate to Frenchmen that political liberty could really work, that you can make a great nation out of people who are pursuing their self-interest. Hence, I assigned sections of Tocqueville to my students in order to get them to reflect on questions such as: How do we develop a society that finds a working balance between self interest and group interest?  How do we get people to care about the common good beyond their own self-interest or even their own group interest? How do we get group competition to be good for the common good rather than bad for the common good?

Robert Bellah

Thus far in my positive sociology class, we have discussed the many useful insights from positive psychology. But, as Martin Seligman admitted when I met him, positive psychology remains profoundly individualistic. We have also read Jonathan Haidt’s important book The Righteous Mind. As Robert Bellah and I discussed last week, the narrative of American individualism is so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to get students to see themselves as shaped by collectivities and to see that their actions contribute (or detract from) collective goods. Haidt’s beautiful writing, poignant examples and mass of empirical evidence convince students that society is both made of up people who are fiercely self-interested and groups that are just as fiercely loyal, cohesive and competitive.

Haidt leaves us off, however, with a weak vision of the common good. As noted Stanford moral psychologist William Damon points out in his review of The Righteous Mind, Haidt largely concludes his work by calling for tolerance among competing moral matrices. But he fails to explain, according to Damon, why tolerance should be a universal moral standard or how tolerance will get us to desired outcomes.

Damon writes:

“Except for short-lived interludes during periods of national consensus, American politics typically has been fiercely partisan. The genius of our democracy has been its capacity to regain a sense of solidarity, even reconciliation, after a resolution of divisive contentions among interest groups with opposing views. The struggles have not always been harmless, and they are almost always unpleasant to live through. But who is to say that noisy struggles have not been needed for steering the nation on the right course over the long haul? Sometimes a nation’s citizens must take oppositional stands in pursuit of a better way.”

Robert Bellah also insisted to me last week that contesting moral claims made by our leaders is a central purpose of living in a democracy. I never appreciated the freedoms we have in the U.S. until I spent long amounts of time in my mother’s homeland of Cuba, which has been communist for more than 50 years. Seeing people trapped under totalitarianism in Cuba, I learned a hard lesson about the U.S.: we are either active creators of our social and political systems, or we become passive takers of liberty and prosperity that so much of the world would give anything just to taste. People risk their lives to come to the U.S. on rickety boats from Cuba and through the dangerous deserts of the Rio Grande to seek freedom and prosperity.

Today, American democracy needs to not just assert but to demonstrate its superiority to other political systems, such as theocracy in Iran, military dictatorships in Africa, and limited democracies in much of East Asia. I worry that many of our students are taught to criticize our system rather than both criticize and praise it. Please note: I am not saying students should not criticize American political and social systems, but I am saying that criticism without some view of a positive solutions is of limited use. We must know our nation’s strengths if we want to engage in the type of informed criticism and civil contestation that eminent scholars like Robert Bellah or William Damon are calling for.

I’m hoping that my students embrace Tocqueville as a way to analyze their own experiments in pursuing self-interest and collective goods on the university campus. If college is just about credentials or knowledge, why do American universities relentlessly encourage group activities like sports, theater, newspapers, debate clubs, and dorm associations. Why are intramural sports at UNC, Princeton or Yale so competitive, so conducive to bonding and so much fun (even if the athleticism leaves much to be desired)?

With regards to religion, today’s generation has been called a generation of seekers. They are willing to try on new religious communities like trying on new shoes. Loyalty to one’s religious denomination has never been as low as it is today in the U.S. But I dare say that this generation is a generation of seekers not just in religion but also in groups more generally.

Today’s college generation is not just seeking for groups, they are groping for groups. As one of my freshmen said, “Gee, positive psychology tells me that my life will be meaningful if I have a purpose in life, but how do I find purpose on my own? I don’t belong to any religious tradition, I don’t really believe strongly in anything, and I don’t belong to any groups on campus. I feel lost, like I’m just following some roles with no purpose. I would love to just follow a group. I don’t want to have to  figure out the meaning of my life all on my own.”

Today’s obsession with competitive college sports is clearly a sign of group seeking. As one of my students discovered when she attended a basketball game in her hometown of Miami, some people call themselves “bandwagon fans” and show up painted in the colors and symbols of whatever college basketball team is on a currently winning all its games. The University of Miami has had an unusually strong season in 2013, so the game she attended was full of these bandwagon fans that have no ties to the city of Miami nor to the University of Miami. They simply want to associate with a winning team and participate most actively in all the rituals that comprise college basketball.

One of the main things I hope my students get out of Tocqueville is an ability to see their group seeking as a fundamental tendency of human nature, and when channeled properly, that group participation–even fierce loyalties to groups and inter-group competition–is one of the features that makes American democracy work. If Tocqueville can convince students that self-interest and group interest can build towards the common good, the next question then becomes: under what conditions do self-interest and group interest contribute to the common good rather than becoming destructive?  This is the question Tocqueville set out to answer, and a question we must be ready to take up again today.

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