Book Review: Finding Flow

Today I finished reading my latest subway-novel, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (1997). Finding Flow is Csikszentmihalyi’s follow up to his very successful book, Flow; it is supposed to be the practical application of Csikszentmihalyi’s research.



“Flow” is that emotional/psychological state when you are so engaged in an activity, with undivided attention, that you you lose yourself in it -- lose all concept of time. Surprisingly, Csikszentmihalyi’s research does not show that people that engage in lots of flow-activities are necessarily happier. He does assert (although the research is lacking) that people who engage in many flow-activities have a better quality of life.

I will accept Csikszentmihalyi’s assertion that people that have “engaged” lives are more likely to have a better quality of life.

Unfortunately Finding Flow is not really a practical DIY-guide. I found it to be out of sync with its target market. There is some valuable information in it, but you have to read through all kinds of statistics and anecdotes to get to it. And even when you find it, it is not clearly highlighted for ease of use.

Here is the gist. The following are mostly paraphrased quotations.

• Get into the habit of doing everything with concentrated effort; with skill rather than inertia. (Even if it is doing the dishes.)
  
• Make an effort to spend some time everyday in doing or learning new things; or doing those things which you enjoy doing but don’t find the time to do.
  
• If you are interested in something you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it.
  
• The important thing is to enjoy activities for their own sake, rather than doing activities for their end goals. (E.g. Run, because it is nice to run, not because you want to get to the goal line.)
• Goals are important, not in order to achieve them, but to help you in not getting distracted.
• Thinking too much about on yourself and your issues will make you depressed. Focus your attention outside of yourself.
• Quality of life is improved if we learn to love those things that we have to do. (E.g. Learn to love doing the dishes.)
• Avoid things that contribute to entropy. Participate in things that combat entropy.
  

I was disappointed with this book. Maybe my expectations were off-track, or the book’s marketing, as a type of psychological self-help book, was misleading. I’m keen to think the latter. What really irritated me about Finding Flow is that it turned into an evolutionistic-New Age propaganda attempt, sugar-coated with some statistics and extrapolations. I also got the idea that Csikszentmihalyi had so little new to say on the topic that he had to fluff-up this book with unnecessary blah-blah.

...ooOoo...

My next subway book is Die Nihilisme: Notas oor ons tyd ("Nihilism: notes on our zeitgeist") by Danie Goosen.