Against Flow
Secular Culture Makes an Idol of Immersive Experience
Secular Americans, influenced by a cocktail of New Age, Western Buddhism, and Silicon Valley, have a tendency of venerating “being in flow,” as if it were the point of life.
Whether you are in flow coding for a startup, climbing a mountain, playing beer pong, reading, teaching, helping the poor, or exploiting the disadvantaged, the important thing is that you are in flow. The substance is irrelevant. What matters is your mental state.
“Flow” is the idol whose altar reads “Do what you love.”
I love being in flow, and I believe that it’s a profound privilege to pursue a life of passion. Mental states offer important, guiding information about how to organize one’s life. But to make flow the end of life is to mistake the symptom for the goal. Flow is not a goal; it’s a bonus.
A life that optimizes for a state of flow may be a more sophisticated form of hedonism, but it’s not necessarily a good life. If you feel stuck, blocked, stumped, dubious—these are not necessarily signs that you are on the wrong track. They may simply be signs that you are—to use another favored Silicon Valley phrase—working on a “wicked problem,” that is, a problem whose solution is not ready-made.
In my view, flow is over-valued.
Even on hedonistic terms, flow is over-valued, because flow is an ephemeral experience. What matters—according to Daniel Kahneman—is not how an experience felt, but how we remember it. But a life devoted to flow may end up leaving one not with a sense of meaning or accomplishment (which often involve challenge and adversity) but with a sense of “What did I do with my life?”
By all means, seek out projects that afford flow-states; but don’t let flow be your sole or primary focus.
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good advice