How to control your life and find happiness

 "Passive forms of media aren’t supposed to make us happy and strong, they’re supposed to make money for someone." 

Things to know

• ·       Flow is a state of complete immersion in the activity being performed where everything outside of it becomes irrelevant- one forgets about the frustrations and worries of daily life. During flow, the sense of time is messed up- hours can feel like minutes, and minutes like hours. A professional violinist forgets about the outside world and becomes one with their instrument while performing, they are experiencing flow.
• ·       Attention is a major resource of our mind. How we choose to use it determines our quality of life. In this book, psychic energy refers to attention.

Pleasure and enjoyment are different

Many people might have the mentality that they shouldn’t put effort into anything unless it brings forth any extrinsic rewards, like money and fame. Although pleasure can be attained without investment of psychic energy, enjoyment is only attained through investment of attention. The happiest moments in life are ones that are accompanied by effort and engagement. Hence, one becomes a slave to pleasure through such mentality.

To experience flow, the activity must be challenging, requiring the individual to utilize their skills. The task also needs to have clear goals and immediate feedback. Some frequently mentioned flow activities are: reading, making music, rock climbing, dancing, sailing, and chess. Competitive situations are also enjoyable because they are challenging.

Why is passive consumption on the rise?

Entropy is the natural state of consciousness. When nothing requires attention and left to its own devices, the mind naturally gravitates towards something painful or disturbing. Worries about love life, health, investment, family, and job enter the consciousness. Therefore, people spend a large amount of time on their phones and TV although it doesn’t bring much enjoyment, because at least it serves to distract the mind from these thoughts. Not surprisingly, people report feeling low moods in their leisure, and find flow much common in their work. Passive forms of media aren’t supposed to make us happy and strong, they’re supposed to make money for someone.

When people hate their jobs/school and then use their leisure to engage in passive consumption, life becomes a constant cycle of boredom and anxiety. We must rethink how we spend our leisure by learning to use time instead of trying to escape it. Hobbies demanding skill, habits with goals and limits, and personal interests should be pursued to make leisure enjoyable again.

How to create order internally?

Currently, memorizing information has a bad reputation because of how it’s used in school. However, a way to control consciousness is learning complex pattern of information by heart. Original scientists and thinkers memorized music, poetry, and historical information. They could bring order in their consciousness simply by recalling a poem.

Another way to bring order is by structured thinking. Philosophy and science exist and are well developed because thinking is enjoyable. During the rise of philosophy, philosophers were completely immersed in thinking, tuning out of the outside world. Hence, many people described them as absent minded.

When one can relies on external agents like mobile, porn, drugs, political ideologies to create order in consciousness, they become their puppet.

Society against flow

In the past, it was acceptable to be a bad writer or a poet. Originally, “amateur” came from the Latin verb “amare”, which meant a person who loved what he was. In the present, success, achievement, and the quality of performance are valued more than the quality of experience. People disengage from these activities because they feel like they’re not good enough. In my personal experience, writing is the most flow inducing activity I perform. Most of the times, I get completely immersed in the emotion and idea conveyed by the writing and the outside world becomes a blur.

Things that can enslave you

For a society to maintain order, it must force individuals to undertake actions that the culture requires. This is why society requires the myth of a “good life” to function- motivating people to do what they don’t like in the present (sitting through a boring class) for the sake of becoming happier in the future. In essence, we are taught to live in the future. Another factor that controls individuals is genes. Our inability to resist unhealthy food, drugs, sex is driven by genes.

The author argues that if we don’t engage in introspection, stop what we’re doing and ask why we’re doing it and how it is making us feel, we might become a puppet to societal and genetic forces without realizing it. We should learn to find meaning and enjoyment in the present and stop taking comfort from an imagined position that won’t deliver its promise.

What kind of attitude finds flow?

Someone who doesn’t think their goals and intentions are more important than everything else, but tries to make the best of their current situation. The former would get frustrated that COVID-19 interfered with all their plans, the latter sees this as an opportunity to spend more time with their loved ones and develop new skills. One recognizes opportunities and possibilities for engagement when they pay attention to what is happening around them, not when they are busy thinking about themselves.

Religion was important

Religion was invented to bring order in consciousness. Flow inducing activities like art, drama, music, and dance were all created in religious settings to connect people with supernatural power and entities. When immersed in flow, a person reaches another dimension of reality which can be analogous to connecting with a supreme being.

In this increasingly rational world, we have discarded the value provided by religion and replaced it with nothing. It is no surprise that unimaginable material progress hasn’t translated to emotional fulfillment or improving the content of experience.

Main takeaway

The individual is defined by how they use their attention. Judge activities by how much they absorb your attention. Tasks requiring less attention are comforting, but they make you miserable in the long run while those demanding more will provide fulfillment and make you a more complex individual.

Note: This is NOT a summary of the book, just SOME ideas I found interesting.