I've been thinking about all this meaning of life, how to have a good life stuff. I also recently read the rise of superman, by Steven Kotler, which is about Flow. This quote from Maslow struck a chord with me:
Maslow wrote:"During a peak experience, the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity, and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one's consiousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy.
"The peak experience is felt as a self-validation, self-justifying moment... It is felt to be a highly valuable - even uniquely valuable. experience, so great an experience sometimes that even to attempt to justify it takes away from its dignity and worth. As a matter of fact, so many people find this so great and high an experience that it justifies not only itself, but even living itself. Peak experiences can make life worthwhile by their occasional occurrence. They give meaning to life itself. They prove it to be worthwhile. To say this in a negative way, I would guess that peak experiences help to prevent suicide."
I think here Maslow is talking about macroflow, the real big deep flow experiences which maybe few people have actually experienced. There's also the more common microflow which basically everyone is familiar with.
Also this line from Csikszentmihaly:
I think that for me, being a very future oriented person (able to delay gratification and grind out unpleasant tasks for future hypothetical rewards), the next phase of living a better life is a focus on flow/peak experience/intrinsic motivation which implies immediate gratification. There's an optimum balance that I'm still too far to one side on.The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn't just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences...
In some sense I feel like Edison. The story goes that he tried 1000 different materials for lightbulb filament, and people asked him if he wasn't bummed out about about failing so much, and he said nah I didn't fail, I discovered 1000 materials that don't work for lightbulb filaments. I feel like I've tried a lot of strategies for having a good/fun/meaningful life, and most of them didn't really work out the way I wanted them to. The reality of the things I try never match up with the visions I had in my head beforehand. (which suggests that the issue isn't the things I was doing, but the method of pursuing a better life. i.e. explicitly pursuing happiness is one surefire way of not attaining happiness).
Sometimes people encourage me to stop trying so hard, or to just do whatever I feel like without a plan. The trouble is, when I do that, I downspiral into melancholy pretty quick and just don't do anything. The only way I crawl out of those holes is by building plans and strategies and then making myself execute them whether I feel like it or not.
So I feel like I have to somehow figure out how to trick myself into doing things for their own sake.... like I need to build a strategy/plan that I can execute that will deliver me to a place of intrinsically motivated activity/flow. Maybe if I do this enough times I'll be able to get there more naturally and without the predetermination, but to kickstart it I have to use methods I already know will work.
It also seems relevant to my renaissance skills project. When you work on skills from a space of intrinsic motivation/flow, skill development is super rapid. Grinding it out is way slower. Obviously some grinding is necessary (? typically in beginning stages I assume?), but if steps can be taken to drop into flow more often, why not.
Activities that I've experienced flow/intrinsic motivation for:
.writing (writing is mostly not flow, but I find the not-flow periods of writing enjoyable enough to put in the time required for flow to show up sometimes. Beats hauling rocks.)
.3d work (there's some caveats to this, related to challenge/skill ratio and clear goals prereqs for flow )
.climbing (duh)
.mtb, but not as much as you'd think. I also experienced a lot of frustration and toil, with the flow highs being very rare. Might be because I never got in good enough shape or a good enough gearhead to eliminate some major sources of friction.
.making something out of wood/metal in the shop.
.working on and restoring machines. I haven't done this much, but I suspect that if I can get through the noob stage and get a decent space set up for it, I'd really enjoy e.g. doing maintenence and work on motorcycles and things like that.
.Reading/studying, particularly taking notes on something and making connections between other things. I suspect if I can become fluid at the skill of zettelkastening I'll richly enjoy the experience for it's own sake (I've gotten small hits, but I'm still groping in the dark a bit too much).
.Designing (for builds like Serenity, my tiny studio, plans for ft dirtbag, etc)
--
Part of this work is learning to be more brutally honest with myself about my strengths and weaknesses, and the things I enjoy (or could enjoy) and the things that I'm only ever at best going to be a 'meh' on. I feel like I have some kind of conditioning that if something is enjoyable, I shouldn't do it, or it's a waste of time. That the only things worth doing kinda suck. If I want to spend more of my life actually enjoying it, I've got to get over this conditioning, because it causes me to stick with things that suck long after I should have abandoned ship.
For example, I'm not really enjoying the way I've been traveling. So far, the upsides of workawaying aren't outweighing the downsides, for me. In the past, I'd have just gritted my teeth and kept at it because I had extrinsic reasons for doing it. Now, with a bit more self honesty, I'm okay saying right, time to try something else.
I'm really glad you're here, been following your journal with interest.