CHAPTER TWO
Cause Two: The Crippling of Our Flow States
On the first day of my mental free fall, I walked down the beach and saw the same thing that had been scratching at me since Memphis. Almost everyone was staring at their screens. People seemed to be using Provincetown simply as a backdrop for selfies, rarely looking up, at the ocean, or each other. Except this time, the itch I felt wasn’t to yell: You’re wasting your lives, put the damn phone down. It was to yell: Give me that phone! Mine!
Every time I switched on my iPod to listen to an audiobook or some music, I also had to switch on my noise-canceling headphones, and they would say: “Searching for Johann’s iPhone. Searching for Johann’s iPhone.” The Bluetooth was trying to connect, but it couldn’t, so then it would say sadly: “Connection cannot be made.” That was how it felt. The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent. When my phone was taken away, I felt like a large part of the world had vanished. As that first week ended, its absence flooded me with an angry panic. I wanted my phone. I wanted my email. And I wanted them at once. Every time I left the beach house, I instinctively patted my pocket to make sure my phone was there, and I always felt a lurch when I realized it was missing. It was like I had lost part of my own body. I turned to my piles of books, thinking idly of how, all through my teens and twenties, I would spend days on end lying in bed, doing nothing but reading in one great gulp. But in Provincetown up to that point, I had been reading in a rushed, hyperactive way—I was scanning Charles Dickens the way you might scan a blog for vital information. My reading was manic and extractive: Okay, I’ve got it, he’s an orphan. What’s your point? I could see this was foolish, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t slow my mind in the way that yoga slowed my body.
At a loss, I took to taking out my comically large medical-device phone and stabbing at its massive buttons. I stared at it helplessly. An image came into my head of a wildlife documentary I had seen as a kid, of a penguin whose baby died. She kept nudging it with her beak for hours, hoping it would come to life. But no matter how much I prodded it, my chunky Jitterbug could not access the web.
All around me, I could see reminders of why I had cast aside my phone in the first place. I sat in Café Heaven, a lovely little place in the West End of Provincetown, and ate an eggs Benedict. Next to me there were two men in, I guess, their mid-twenties. I shamelessly eavesdropped on their conversation while pretending to read David Copperfield. It was clear they had met on an app, and this was the first time they had seen each other in person. Something about their conversation seemed odd to me, and I couldn’t place it at first. Then I realized they weren’t, in fact, having a conversation at all. What would happen is the first one, who was blond, would talk about himself for ten minutes or so. Then the second one, who was dark-haired, would talk about himself for ten minutes. And they alternated in this way, interrupting each other. I sat next to them for two hours, and at no point did either of them ask the other person a question. At one point, the dark-haired man mentioned that his brother had died a month before. The blond didn’t even offer a cursory “I’m so sorry to hear that”; he simply went back to talking about himself. I realized that if they had met up simply to read out their own Facebook status updates to each other in turn, there would have been absolutely no difference.
I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention—it’s where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego. I don’t say this with any sense of superiority. I am embarrassed to describe what I realized in that week that I missed most about the web. Every day in my normal life—sometimes several times a day—I would look at Twitter and Instagram to see how many followers I had. I didn’t look at the feed, the news, the buzz—just my own stats. If the figure had gone up, I felt glad—like a money-obsessed miser checking the state of his personal stocks and finding he was slightly richer than yesterday. It was as if I was saying to myself, See? More people are following you. You matter. I didn’t miss the content of what they said. I just missed the raw numbers, and the sense that they were growing.
I found that I had started to panic about irrational things. I kept wondering how, when I left Provincetown and took the boat back to Boston, I was going to get to my friend’s house to retrieve my phone and laptop. What if there were no taxis at the dock? Would I be stranded? Would I never get to my phone? I have been around a lot of addiction in my life, and I knew what I was feeling—the addicted person’s craving for the thing that numbs their nagging sense of hollowness.
One day, I lay on the beach, using puffy dried seaweed as a pillow, trying to read, and I started to angrily reproach myself for not being relaxed, for not being focused, for not starting to write the novel I had been planning for so long. Here you are in paradise, I kept saying to myself; you ditched the phone; now focus. Focus, damn you. I thought back to this moment when, over a year later, I interviewed Professor Gloria Mark, who has spent years studying the science of interruptions. She explained to me that if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions. I kept looking at things and imagining how I would describe them in a tweet, and then imagining what people would say in response.
I realized I had, for over twenty years now, been sending out and receiving signals with large numbers of people all throughout the day. Texts, Facebook messages, phone calls—they were all little ways in which the world seemed to say: I see you. I hear you. We need you. Signal back. Signal more. Now the signals were gone, and it felt like the world was saying: You don’t matter. The absence of these insistent signals seemed to suggest an absence of meaning. I would start conversations with people—on the beach, in bookstores, in cafés—and they were often friendly, but the conversations seemed to have a low social temperature compared to the web-based ones I had lost. No stranger is going to flood you with hearts and tell you you’re great. For years I had derived a large part of my meaning in life from the thin, insistent signals of the web. Now they were gone, and I could see how paltry and lacking in substance they were. But, still, I missed them.
I now faced a choice. I told myself: By leaving that world behind, you’ve created a vacuum. If you’re going to stay away from it, now you need to fill the vacuum with something. It was only in the third week—after feeling wretched—that I began to find a way to do this. I found a way out of my funk by returning to the research of a remarkable man who opened up a whole new field of psychology in the 1960s, and whose work I had studied over the years. He made a breakthrough—this man identified a way human beings can access their own powers of focus, in a way that makes it possible to concentrate for long periods without it feeling like a huge effort.
To understand how it works, I think it helps to first hear the story of how he made this discovery. I learned a lot of this story from him directly, later, when I went to visit him in Claremont, California. It begins with him as an eight-year-old boy, fleeing Nazi bombs at the height of the Second World War, in a city on the coast of Italy, alone.
Mihaly had to run, but he had no idea where to go. The air-raid siren was making a familiar shrieking sound, warning the townspeople that soon there would be Nazi planes overhead. These planes were flying from Germany to Africa, and everybody in the town—even a kid like Mihaly—knew that if the planes couldn’t make it across because of bad weather, they had a plan B. It was to drop their bombs right here, onto this small town. Mihaly tried to get into the nearest air-raid shelter, but it was full. Go next door, he thought, to the butcher’s shop—you could hide in there. Its shutters were down. A few grown-ups managed to find the key, and they all hurried inside.
In the darkness, it became clear something was dangling from the ceiling. It was hanging meat. But they saw this wasn’t an animal—it was the wrong shape. As their eyes refocused, they realized it was the bodies of two men. They recognized them as the butchers themselves, sagging from their own meat hooks. Mihaly ran again, deeper into the shop—only to run into the hanging body of a third man. They had been suspected of being collaborators with the fascists, so they had been killed. The air-raid siren was still sounding, and Mihaly hid there, close to the corpses.
It had seemed to the boy for some time that the adult world had lost its mind. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced cheek-sent-me-high-ee) was born in 1934 in Fiume, an Italian town close to the Yugoslavian border. His father was a diplomat there for the Hungarian government, so Mihaly grew up on a street where people routinely spoke three or four languages. It was a family where people came up with big, sometimes mad projects; one of his big brothers was the first person ever to hang glide from Russia to Austria. But when Mihaly was six, the war began, and “the collapse happened,” he told me. He was not allowed to play outside on the street, so he invented worlds of play within his own home. He would stage elaborate battles with toy soldiers that went on for weeks, planning out every move in this fantasy war. He spent a lot of his nights in chilly bomb shelters, sitting under blankets, terrified. “You never knew what was actually happening,” he recalled. When the all clear sounded in the morning, people would leave politely and go to work.
Italy was getting too dangerous, so his family took him to a seaside town across the border named Opatija—but before long, the town was besieged from all sides. Partisans would come down and kill anyone suspected of collaborating with the invaders, while the Nazis bombarded from the air. “Now, nothing was getting safe,” Mihaly told me. “I never found a stable world in which I [could] live.” By the time the war ended, Europe was in ruins, and his family had lost everything. They got word that one of his brothers had been killed in the fighting, and another, Moricz, had been taken by Stalin to a Siberian concentration camp. “By the time I was ten years old,” he remembered years later, “I was convinced that grown-ups didn’t know how to live a good life.”
After the war, he and his parents ended up in a refugee camp, which he found squalid, and lacking in hope. One day, in these ruins of a life, Mihaly was told that he was going to join a Scout troop for boys in the camp, and he started going out into the wilderness with them. He discovered that he felt most alive when he was doing something difficult, like navigating a steep ascent, or finding his way through a ravine. He thinks this experience saved him.
When he was thirteen, he quit school, because he couldn’t see how all this adult wisdom was going to help him when it had driven European civilization off a cliff. He found his own way to Rome, and he started working as a translator in that trashed, half-starved city. He wanted to get back out into the mountains, so he saved up for a long time to go to Switzerland. When he was fifteen, he was finally able to take the train to Zurich, and while he was waiting around for the transport to the Alps, he saw an advertisement for a psychology lecture. The lecturer was Carl Jung, the legendary Swiss psychoanalyst, and while Mihaly wasn’t drawn to the content of Jung’s ideas, he was thrilled by the notion of looking at how the human mind works in a scientific way. He decided to become a psychologist, but it turned out there were no psychology degrees in Europe. He learned, though, that the subject existed in a distant country he had only seen in the movies: the United States.
Finally, after years of saving, he made it there—only to get a nasty shock when he arrived. American psychology was dominated by one big idea, epitomized by a famous scientist. A Harvard professor named B. F. Skinner had become an intellectual celebrity by discovering something strange. You can take an animal that seems to be freely making up its own mind about what to pay attention to—like a pigeon, or a rat, or a pig—and you can get it to pay attention to whatever you choose for it. You can control its focus, as surely as if it was a robot and you had created it to obey your whims. Here’s an example of how Skinner did it that you can try for yourself. Take a pigeon. Put it in a cage. Keep it until it is hungry. Then introduce a bird feeder that releases seed into the cage when you push a button. Pigeons move around a lot—so wait until the pigeon makes a random movement that you have chosen in advance (like, say, jerking its head up high, or sticking out its left wing), and at that precise moment, release some pellets. Then wait for it to make the same random movement again, and give it more pellets.
If you do this a few times, the pigeon will quickly learn that if it wants pellets, it should carry out the random gesture you have chosen—and it will start to do it a lot. If you manipulate it correctly, its focus will come to be dominated by the twitch that you chose to reward. It will come to jerk up its head or stick out its left wing obsessively. When Skinner discovered this, he wanted to figure out how far you could take this. How elaborately can you program an animal using these reinforcements? He discovered you can take it really far. You can teach a pigeon to play ping-pong. You can teach a rabbit to pick up coins and put them into piggy banks. You can teach a pig to vacuum. Many animals will focus on very complex—and, to them, meaningless—things, if you reward them right.
Skinner became convinced that this principle explained human behavior almost in its entirety. You believe that you are free, and that you make choices, and you have a complex human mind that is selecting what to pay attention to—but it’s all a myth. You and your sense of focus are simply the sum total of all the reinforcements you have experienced in your life. Human beings, he believed, have no minds—not in the sense that you are a person with free will making your own choices. You can be reprogrammed in any way that a clever designer wants. Years later, the designers of Instagram asked: If we reinforce our users for taking selfies—if we give them hearts and likes—will they start to do it obsessively, just like the pigeon will obsessively hold out its left wing to get extra seed? They took Skinner’s core techniques, and applied them to a billion people.
Mihaly learned that these ideas ruled American psychology, and they were hugely influential in American society too. Skinner was a star, featured on the front page of Time magazine. He was so famous that by 1981, 82 percent of the American college-educated public could identify who he was.
To Mihaly, this seemed like a bleak and limited view of human psychology. It clearly yielded some results, but he believed it was missing most of what it means to be human. He decided he wanted to explore the aspects of human psychology that were positive, and nourishing, and generated something more than hollow mechanical responses. But there weren’t many people in American psychology that thought like this. To begin, he decided to study something that seemed to him to be one of the great achievements of human beings—the making of art. He had seen destruction; now it was time to study creation. So, in Chicago, he persuaded a group of painters to let him witness their process over many months, so he could try to figure out the underlying psychological processes that were driving the unusual kind of focus they had chosen to dedicate their lives to. He watched one artist after another focusing on a single image and attending to it with great care.
Mihaly was struck by one thing above all else—for the artist, when they were in the process of creation, time seemed to fall away. They almost appeared to be in a hypnotic trance. It was a deep form of attention that you rarely see elsewhere.
Then he noticed something puzzling. After investing all this time in creating their paintings, when they were finished, the artists didn’t triumphantly gaze at what they had made and show it off and seek out praise for it. Almost all of them simply put the painting away and started working on another one. If Skinner was right—that human beings do things just to gain rewards and avoid punishments—this made no sense. You’d done the work; now here’s the reward, right in front of you, for you to enjoy. But creative people seemed mostly uninterested in rewards; even money didn’t interest most of them. “When they finished,” Mihaly said to an interviewer later, “the object, the outcome was not important.”
He wanted to understand what was actually driving them. What made it possible for them to focus on just one thing for so long? It became clear to Mihaly that “what was so enthralling about painting was” something about “the process of painting itself.” But what? To try to understand this better, Mihaly started to study adults who engaged in other activities—people who were long-distance swimmers, or rock climbers, or chess players. He only looked at first at nonprofessionals. Often they were doing things that were physically uncomfortable, exhausting, and even dangerous, for no obvious reward—yet they loved it. He talked to them about how they felt when they were doing the thing that drew this extraordinary focus out of them. He noticed that although these activities were very different, the way the people described how they felt had striking similarities. One word kept cropping up again and again. They kept saying things like: “I was carried on by the flow.”
One rock climber told him later: “The mystique of rock-climbing is climbing; you get to the top of a rock glad it’s over but really wish it could go on forever. The justification of climbing is climbing, like the justification of poetry is writing. You don’t conquer anything except things in yourself…. The act of writing justifies poetry. Climbing is the same: recognizing you are a flow. The purpose of flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing; you move up to keep the flow going.”
Mihaly began to wonder if these people were in fact describing a fundamental human instinct that had not been studied by scientists before. He called it a “flow state.” This is when you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you lose all sense of yourself, and time seems to fall away, and you are flowing into the experience itself. It is the deepest form of focus and attention that we know of. When he began to explain to people what a flow state is and asked if they had ever experienced something like it, 85 percent of them recognized and remembered at least one time they’d felt this way—and they often said these moments were the highlights of their lives. It didn’t matter if they got there by performing brain surgery or strumming the guitar or making great bagels—they described their flow states with wonder. He found himself thinking back to being a child on the floor of a war-smashed city, planning elaborate battles with his toy soldiers, and then of himself at the age of thirteen, exploring the hills and mountains around his refugee camp.
He was discovering that if human beings drill down in the right way, we can hit a gusher of focus inside ourselves—a long surge of attention that will flow forth and carry us through difficult tasks in a way that feels painless, and in fact pleasurable. So the obvious questions are: Where do we drill to get it? How can we bring about flow states? At first, most people assume they will achieve flow simply by relaxing into it—you picture yourself lying by the pool in Vegas sipping a cocktail. But when he studied it, he found that in fact, relaxing rarely gets you into a flow state. You have to get there by a different route.
Mihaly’s studies identified many aspects of flow, but it seemed to me—as I read over them in detail—that if you want to get there, what you need to know boils down to three core components. The first thing you need to do is to choose a clearly defined goal. I want to paint this canvas; I want to run up this hill; I want to teach my child how to swim. You have to resolve to pursue it, and to set aside your other goals while you do. Flow can only come when you are monotasking—when you choose to set aside everything else and do one thing. Mihaly found that distraction and multitasking kill flow, and nobody will reach flow if they are trying to do two or more things at the same time. Flow requires all of your brainpower, deployed toward one mission.
Second, you have to be doing something that is meaningful to you. This is part of a basic truth about attention: we evolved to pay attention to things that are meaningful to us. As Roy Baumeister, the leading expert on willpower I quoted in the introduction, put it to me: “A frog will look at a fly it can eat much more than a stone it can’t eat.” To a frog, a fly is meaningful and a stone is not—so it easily pays attention to a fly, and rarely pays attention to a stone. This, he said, “goes back to the design of the brain…. It’s designed to pay attention to the stuff that matters to you.” After all, “the frog who sat around all day looking at stones would have starved.” In any situation, it will be easier to pay attention to things that are meaningful to you, and harder to pay attention to things that seem meaningless. When you are trying to make yourself do something that lacks meaning, your attention will often slip and slide off it.
Third, it will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. If the goal you choose is too easy, you’ll go into autopilot—but if it’s too hard, you’ll start to feel anxious and off-kilter and you won’t flow either. Picture a rock climber who has medium-ranking experience and talent. If she clambers up any old brick wall at the back of a garden, she’s not going to get into flow because it’s too easy. If she’s suddenly told to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she won’t get into flow either because she’ll freak out. What she needs is a hill or mountain that is, ideally, slightly higher and harder than the one she did last time.
So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. Once you have created these conditions, and you hit flow, you can recognize it because it’s a distinctive mental state. You feel you are purely present in the moment. You experience a loss of self-consciousness. In this state it’s like your ego has vanished and you have merged with the task—like you are the rock you are climbing.
By the time I met him, Mihaly was eighty-seven, and he had spent more than five decades studying flow states. He—along with scientists all over the world—had built up a broad and robust body of scientific evidence to show flow states are a real and deep form of human attention. They have also shown that the more flow you experience, the better you feel. Until his research, professional psychology in the U.S. had been focused either on when things go wrong—when you’re mentally distressed—or on the manipulative vision of B. F. Skinner. Mihaly made the case for “positive psychology”: that we should primarily focus on the things that make life worth living, and find ways to boost them.
This disagreement seemed to me to lay the groundwork for one of the defining conflicts in the world today. We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B. F. Skinner’s vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment. Many of us are like those birds in cages being made to perform a bizarre dance to get rewards, and all the while we imagine we are choosing it for ourselves—the men I saw in Provincetown obsessively posting selfies to Instagram started to look to me like Skinner’s pigeons with a six-pack and a piña colada. In a culture where our focus is stolen by these surface-level stimuli, Mihaly’s deeper insight has been forgotten: that we have within us a force that makes it possible to focus for long stretches and enjoy it, and it will make us happier and healthier, if only we create the right circumstances to let it flow.
Once I knew this, I understood why, when I felt constantly distracted, I didn’t just feel irritated—I felt diminished. We know, at some level, that when we are not focusing, we are not using one of our greatest capacities. Starved of flow, we become stumps of ourselves, sensing somewhere what we might have been.
As an old man, something strange happened to Mihaly. After the Second World War was over, his older brother, Moricz, had been taken to a Stalinist concentration camp in Russia, and people who vanished into these gulags were often never heard from again—but after many years of silence, in which everyone assumed he was dead, Moricz reappeared. Released at last into a thawing Soviet Union, he struggled to find work; survivors of the gulags were marked as inherently suspect. Eventually he found employment as a stoker on the railways, even though he had advanced degrees from Switzerland. He didn’t complain.
When Moricz was in his eighties, Mihaly went to Budapest, in Hungary, to be reunited with him. Moricz’s ability to find flow had been cut off in the most brutal ways, but Mihaly discovered that, very late in his life, his brother was able, for the first time, to pursue something he had always loved. He was fascinated by crystals. He began to collect these sparkling rocks, and he gathered examples from every continent. He went to meet dealers, he attended conventions, he read magazines about them. When Mihaly went to his home, it looked like a museum of crystals running from the ceiling to the floor, with special lighting fitted to show off their sparkle. Moricz handed Mihaly a crystal the size of a child’s fist and said: “I was looking at this thing just yesterday. It was nine in the morning when I put it under the microscope. Outside, it was sunny, just like today. I kept turning the rock around, looking at all the fissures, the intrusions, the dozen or so different crystal formations inside and around…then I looked up, and thought that a storm must be coming, because it had gotten so dark…then I realized it was not overcast, but the sun had been setting—it was seven in the evening.” Mihaly thought the crystal was gorgeous, but wondered—ten hours?
Then he realized. Moricz had learned how to read the rocks—to see where they came from, and their chemical composition. It was a chance for him to use his skills. For him, this triggered a flow state. All his life Mihaly had been learning how flow states can save us. Now he saw it in the face of his own gulag-starved brother, as they stared together into a shimmering crystal.
The more he studied flow states, the more Mihaly noticed something else crucial about them. They are extraordinarily fragile and easily disrupted. He wrote: “Many forces, both within ourselves and in the environment, stand in the way” of flow. In the late 1980s, he discovered that staring at a screen is one of the activities we take part in that on average provides the lowest amount of flow. (He warned that “surrounded by an astonishing panoply of recreational gadgets…most of us go on being bored and vaguely frustrated.”) But as I reflected on this in Provincetown, I realized that even though I had set aside my screens, I was still making a basic mistake. “To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it,” Mihaly has explained. “We also need a positive goal; otherwise why keep going?”
In our normal lives, many of us try to seek relief from distraction simply by crashing—we try to recover from a day of overload by collapsing in front of the TV. But if you only break away from distraction into rest—if you don’t replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward—you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.
So at the end of that third week in Provincetown, I asked myself: Why did you come here? It wasn’t just to get away from the phone and the Skinnerian reinforcements of constant likes and retweets and shares. You came here to write. Writing and reading have always been the primary sources of flow in my life. I had been nurturing an idea for a novel for a long time, and I told myself I would get around to it one day, when I had the time. Well, I thought, here is the time. Drill there. See if it brings you flow. This seemed to fit perfectly into Mihaly’s model for how to create flow states—it required me to set aside my other goals; it was something meaningful to me; and it was something at the edge of my comfort zone, but not, I hoped, beyond it. So on the first day of my third week, in my panicked funk, I sat on the sofa in my little corner of the beach house. I nervously opened the broken old laptop my friend Imtiaz had loaned me, and I wrote the first line of my novel. And I wrote the second line. And it became a paragraph, then a page. It was hard. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. But the next day, conscious that I had to retrain my habits, I made myself do the same. And so it went on, day after day. I struggled. I disciplined myself.
By the end of the fourth week, the flow states started to come. And so it ran, into the fifth and sixth weeks—and soon, I was hurrying to my laptop, hungry to do it. Everything Mihaly had described was there—the loss of ego; the loss of time; the sense that I was growing into something bigger than I had been before. Flow was carrying me through the difficult patches, the frustrations. It had unlocked my focus.
I noticed that if I spent a day where I experienced three hours of flow early on, for the rest of the day, I felt relaxed and open and able to engage—to walk along the beach, or start chatting to people, or read a book, without feeling cramped, or irritable, or phone-hungry. It was like the flow was relaxing my body and opening my mind—perhaps because I knew I had done my best. I felt myself falling into a different rhythm. I realized then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.
After three months in Provincetown, I had written 92,000 words of my novel. They might be terrible, but in one sense, I didn’t care. The reason why became clear to me when one day, shortly before I left Provincetown, I placed my deck chair in the ocean so the sea was lapping at my feet and I finished the third volume of War and Peace. As I closed its last page, I realized I had been sitting there for most of the day. I had been reading like this, day after day, for weeks. And I thought suddenly: It came back! My brain came back! I feared my brain had been broken, and this experiment might just reveal I was a permanently degenerated blob. But I could see now that healing was possible. I cried with relief.
I thought to myself, I never want to go back to email. I never want to go back to my phone. What a waste of time! What a waste of life! I felt this as strongly as I have ever felt anything. It might seem odd to describe something as immaterial as the internet as heavy, but that’s how it felt to me in that moment—like there had been a vast weight on my back, and I had sloughed it off.
And then I immediately felt uncomfortable with all these thoughts, and guilty. How will this sound, I wondered, when I describe it to people back home? It won’t sound like a liberation to them. It will sound like a taunt. Yes, I managed to get away and find flow in a blissful way, but my situation in Provincetown was so radically different from the lives of anyone I knew—so wildly privileged—that I wondered for a while if it had anything to teach anyone else. I realized that this experience would only be meaningful if we could all find ways to integrate these experiences into our everyday lives. Later, in a very different place, I learned how this could be done.
When I said goodbye to Mihaly, it was clear he was unwell. His eyes were heavy, and he told me he had been sick lately. At one point in our conversation, a little stream of ants began to crawl across his desk, and he stopped and stared at them for a while. He was in his late eighties, and it seemed likely he was approaching the end of his life. But his eyes lit up when he told me: “The best experiences in life that I had, when I thought back on it, came from times when I had been in the mountains climbing…climbing and doing something really kind of difficult and dangerous—but within the scope of what I could do.” When you are approaching death, I thought, you won’t think about your reinforcements—the likes and retweets—you’ll think about your moments of flow.
I felt in that moment that we all have a choice now between two profound forces—fragmentation, or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us. I asked myself: Do you want to be one of Skinner’s pigeons, atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards, or Mihaly’s painters, able to concentrate because you have found something that really matters?