Perhaps the most powerful effect flow theory could have in the public sector is in providing a blueprint for how institutions may be reformed so as to make them more conducive to optimal experience.
A community should be judged good not because it is technologically advanced, or swimming in material riches; it is good if it offers people a chance to enjoy as many aspects of their lives as possible, while allowing them to develop their potential in the pursuit of ever greater challenges.
Work not only transforms the environment by building bridges across rivers and cultivating barren plains; it also transforms the worker from an animal guided by instincts into a conscious, goal-directed, skillful person.
We grow up believing that what counts most in our lives is that which will occur in the future.
After each episode of flow a person becomes more of a unique individual, less predictable, possessed of rarer skills.
Socialization, or the transformation of a human organism into a person who functions successfully within a particular social system, cannot be avoided.
We often call the manifestation of intentionality by other names, such as instinct, need, drive, or desire.
Teenagers, who swing from one threat to their fragile evolving personhood to another in quick succession throughout the day, especially depend on the soothing patterns of sound to restore order in their consciousness. But so do many adults. One.
The perfect society would be able to strike a healthy balance between the spiritual and material worlds, but short of aiming for perfection, we can look toward Eastern religions for guidance in how to achieve control over consciousness.
It stands to reason, however, that a child who has been abused, or who has been often threatened with the withdrawal of parental love – and unfortunately we are becoming increasingly aware of what a disturbing proportion of children in our culture are so mistreated – will be so worried about keeping his sense of self from coming apart as to have little energy left to pursue intrinsic rewards.
Early ethnographers have described North American Plains Indians so hypnotically involved in gambling with buffalo rib bones that losers would often leave the tepee without clothes in the dead of winter, having wagered away their weapons, horses, and wives as well.
We have come to accept that our morality simply no longer has currency outside our own culture.
Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies.
Another universally enjoyable activity is being with other people. Socializing might at first sight appear to be an exception to the statement that one needs to use skills to enjoy an activity, for it does not seem that gossiping or joking around with another person requires particular abilities. But of course, it does; as so many shy people know, if a person feels self-conscious, he or she will dread establishing informal contacts, and avoid company whenever possible.
Every relationship requires a reorienting of attention, a repositioning of goals.
This cultural hubris, or overweening presumption about what we are entitled to from a universe that is basically insensitive to human needs, generally leads to trouble.
Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions, and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out.
If one does not expect perfect safety, recognizes that risks are inevitable, and succeeds in enjoying a less than ideally predictable world, the threat of insecurity will not have as great a chance of marring happiness.
Unfortunately, too many adults feel that once they have hit twenty or thirty – or certainly forty – they are entitled to relax in whatever habitual grooves they have established.
If I set as my goal to remain alive while sitting on the living-room sofa, I also could spend days knowing that I was achieving it, just as the rock climber does. But this realization would not make me particularly happy, whereas the climber’s knowledge brings exhilaration to his dangerous ascent.