Theology of Flow
Doing Good, Feeling Good, and Feeling Challenged
I’m thrilled to be leading a seminar on the Book of Genesis, over a new app, called Threadable, which is like if a university seminar, medieval monasteries and Twitter had a baby. It’s free and open to everyone. You can join by clicking on this link (it runs on iOS—iPhone and iPad—sorry to non Apple product users). Each week, for 12 weeks, I’ll be commenting interactively on a section of Genesis, following the weekly Torah reading cycle. Together, we will form a new gloss, a new commentary, on an evergreen text.
In the spirit of Genesis and beginnings, here’s a fun, hypothetical question. Is God in a state of “flow” when creating the world?
David Zvi Kalman jokes:
“MisfitTorah” suggests:
Yes, it’s funny to project onto God something so contemporary and trendy as “Flow”—but the question is an opportunity to think about creation theology in a fresh way. One of the hallmarks of flow is that you are doing some task perfectly calibrated to your skill such that it is not too easy and not too hard. The master craftsman at the edge of mastery exists in “Flow” because he has set himself a challenge that enables self-transcendence. Were the challenge simply he’d be a robot, not a master. Were it too hard, he’d be agitated or bored or resigned.
If you say that for God creation is a piece of cake, because God is omnipotent, then God can’t experience flow. On the other hand, if you say that God is omnipotent, perhaps God would seek to exercise that power to create a world that provides the necessary challenge to God so that God might experience “self-transcendence.” Humanity’s resistance to God, or the problem of evil and suffering more generally might exist, so to speak, so God can achieve “Flow.”
But is flow good and desirable? Is it a worthy end, or simply a perk? Let’s assume that people in flow are more optimized than people not in flow. Their potential is more fulfilled. Even so, that’s potential in one area. Let’s say the flow state is to be had in musical improv or rock climbing or in constructing financial derivatives—does the world actually care that much? Or perhaps the world would prefer that people choose projects on the basis of their merit rather than on the hedonistic basis of whether it brings the psychic bliss? Isn’t the single minded pursuit of “Flow” a kind of idolatry? Elevating to an ideal something that is morally neutral, or just one good among many? If so, God is indifferent to flow.
On the other hand, you could argue that God makes the world in such a way that each human is capable of a flow state, and that our purpose is to find work and activity that make this state available. If we do, our output will be better and our wellbeing will be better. Without flow, we can’t flourish. Even moral saints need to be in flow if they are to operate at the highest level.
One way of thinking about flow is that it’s a cypher for a philosophical problem of how we weight means vs. ends. Is effort virtuous? Or is it a curse? The garden of Eden story ends with God telling humanity that work is to become onerous. But that opens the path to imagining a utopia in which work still exists but is no longer something requiring “the sweat of your brow.” If the worship of flow is a kind of idolatry, on the one hand, the worship of hard work and “always be grinding” is an idolatry on the other.
Neither fruitless effort, nor effortless fruitfulness, nor the equilibrium between effort and output, offer us salvation, We have to serve the objective and the subjective both, and that means neither feeling good nor doing good enough are enough. Perhaps that problem in and of itself is the needed structure to empower and motivate us to a state of “flow.”