TL;DR
A life worth living on its own must be engineered, primarily in the following ways:
- Consciously shape work so its challenges yield engrossment and meaning.
- Treat free time with this same idea from 1.
- Invest attention in other people’s goals so relationships generate flow rather than mere comfort.
- Continuously take note, and notes, on 1-3.
Premise
Living is experiencing — doing, feeling, and thinking. The quality of this experiencing is what determines the quality of life. If I don’t take charge of this quality, it will be controlled unsatisfactorily, from the outside and from within. There is enough room for personal initiative and choice to make a real difference.
Emotions, goals, and the ordering of consciousness
Emotions are levers of attention and experience. Negative emotions consume attention to restore inner order. Positive emotions free attention to flow freely into whatever I choose.
The only way to take ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with my own intentions. In fact, my worst experiences are rooted in aimlessness. So I primarily need good, worthy goals. Clearly knowing they are good and worthy helps my heart and mind focus, which improves my attention and therefore my experience.
Good, worthy goals = good, worthy experience. This is what can bring satisfactory flow.
Flow
Flow is the state where what I feel, what I want, and what I am thinking are in harmony. I can reach it through:
- Specific, satisfying goals broken into substeps.
- Immediate feedback, so it is clear how well I am doing.
- A balance of challenge and skill — skills “fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable.”
In combination, flow emerges where high challenge meets high skill. It is satisfying in itself and is deterministic, because attention is fully invested, self-consciousness disappears, time distorts, and whatever I do is worth doing for its own sake — life is worth living for living’s sake.
The autotelic life
A good life is lived for its own sake. Pay attention partly free of personal agenda, so as to feel reality in its own terms.
To make this happen:
- Do whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention. Every task can be done beautifully. Even suffering can be handled beautifully — “acknowledge and respect its presence, and then get busy” focusing on a chosen object.
- Transfer attention each day from disliked or passive activities toward desired ones. This requires mental effort to prioritise, organise, and streamline interest and attention. For the most flow-blessed people, “it is that their enthusiasm for life makes most of what they do give them flow experiences.” I only need to refuse to ever waste time.
Life is spent on three functions — production, maintenance, and leisure — and they can all be aimed at autotelic living.
Production
The paradox of work
Work is dissatisfying when it feels pointless, boring, and stressful.
The fix for the first two is to invest extra attention and make it personal: understand the whole context and impact of my actions, then continually ask — “Is this step necessary? Can it be done better, faster, more efficiently? What additional steps could make my contribution more valuable?”
Stress, too, is workable: establish priorities, match skills to challenges (delegate, learn, get help, or break tasks into parts), and above all refuse the passive freeze — “only by exercising control can stress be avoided.”
Leisure
The risks and opportunities of leisure Lonely people with unsatisfying jobs turn to passive leisure, which then “cuts off further options for improving the quality of life.” The remedy is to treat free time seriously — “devote as much ingenuity and attention to it as one would to one’s job” — so that work becomes as enjoyable as leisure, and leisure becomes “true recreation instead of a scheme for dulling the mind.”
Maintenance
The texture of everyday life
The first step in improving the quality of life is engineering daily activities so that one gets the most rewarding experiences from them. Keep a diary of the past day — to learn which activities produce your high points, then increase them.
Beyond the self: Virtue and Fate
Act always as if your future depends on what you do, because it does. Virtue is the ability to creatively overcome inertia — a difficult but necessary skill.
Relationships: friends, family, and solitude
The quality of life improves immensely when there is at least one other person willing to listen to our troubles, because it is comforting and reassuring of the reality of our experience. A good conversation finds out the other person’s goals, then adds your own experience “without trying to take over… but developing it jointly.” A relationship should meet two conditions: adequate goal compatibility, and a willingness “to invest attention in the other person’s goals.”
- Friendships should provide ever-new emotional and intellectual stimulation throughout life.
- Family provides high expectations with unstinting love.
- Solitude provides safety for cognition and reflection.
When people pay attention to each other, or to the same activity together, the chances of flow binding them increases.
Reference