"My favorite part of Dead Week is getting up early, drinking coffee, and looking ahead to the long stretch of nothingness that fills the day."

"The nothingness doesn’t have to be slothful; sometimes I leave the house and sometimes I don’t, but the point is that it doesn’t matter. If I don’t go outside, I don’t feel bad about it, and if I do, everybody else I encounter looks equally confused and at loose ends, frittering away these leftover days. It is the only time of year when the days feel slow to me, when the time outside of whatever tasks I have to do does not somehow vanish into further worry and busyness. It is the only time I don’t feel like I am perpetually late to my own life...."

Writes Helena Fitzgerald, in "All Hail Dead Week, the Best Week of the Year/The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is a time when nothing counts, and when nothing is quite real" (The Atlantic).

The author "is a writer based… in New York." I presume that means New York City, and not just because I know it is the convention in New York to say "New York" for New York City and to specify "New York State" if you mean to refer to the state. There's no other state where people add "State" to the state's name. Imagine if in Oklahoma, you said "Oklahoma State" to signal that you didn't mean Oklahoma City. Anyway, I know that means New York City because the people on the street have a distinct look of being off from work. If the author goes outside she's struck by everyone looking at loose ends. New York City is such a workplace.

Anyway, for me, out here in Madison, Wisconsin, every day is the equivalent of a day in Fitzgerald's "Dead Week."

"The anti-clutter nags conflate two distinct forms of materialism. In behavioral psychology terms, 'terminal materialism' refers to..."

"... acquiring and valuing an object purely for its intrinsic properties — like a fancy new iPhone (that will inevitably become obsolete). The worthless-looking junk we hang on to often exemplifies 'instrumental materialism,' valued for its connection to another person, a place, a time in our lives, a meaningful affiliation. These can take obvious forms — a wedding ring, a crucifix. But they can also be as eccentric and inscrutable as an abundance of paperweights or a ceramic leprechaun."

Writes Rob Walker in "Clutter Is Good for You" (NYT).

Walker quotes a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton that asserted: "We began to notice that people who denied meanings to objects also lacked any close network of human relationships."

A disturbing challenge to minimalists!

Goodbye to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

 

I found out via my son John's blog. John noticed the death announcement at the author's Facebook page. He quotes something I copied onto my blog a while back, Csikszentmihalyi's enumeration of the elements of "flow":

First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

ADDED: I'm still not seeing obituaries at mainstream news sites. It's possible that the author's Facebook page is wrong. In any event — alive or dead — Csikszentmihalyi is wonderful. I highly recommend his book "Flow," one of the most useful books I've read in my life.

AND: I've blogged about Csikszentmihalyi, many times over the years, as you can see if you click my tag (which I just discovered had been missing the final "i" all this time, corrected now).

"You aren’t enjoying reading? Then read longer! Read faster! The problem is you!"

"But the corollary to this way of reading — of taking books down in gulps rather than sips — is that you will discover much more quickly when a book isn’t for you, and you can then set it aside without the nagging suspicion that you might have sabotaged it by your method of ingestion.... Once I’m actually enjoying a book, it really does feel as if the pages are turning themselves; I find myself reading in all the little pockets of time that were once reserved for the serious business of checking to see if my dishwasher pods have shipped. And pleasure is, after all — once I scrape away the layers of self-image and pretentiousness — the reason that I read. When I’ve found the right book, and I’m reading it the right way, reading is fun — head-tingling, goosebump-raising fun. It’s a vivid and continuous dream that is somehow both directed from without and cast from within, and I get to be awake for it. Netflix can wait."

From "Why You Should Start Binge-Reading Right Now" by Ben Dolnick (NYT).

Have you lost the habit of reading books — either because you've become binge-watcher of TV (which I hate to tell you is all that Netflix is) or because you've been reading screens and have developed a style of reading (searching, wandering, jumping about, writing) that is so completely different from what a book seems to want you to do to it? If so, maybe the solution is to find a new way to read books that is more like what you've been doing staring into screens. That's where Dolnick (a novelist) wants to push you. It involves sitting with a book for a long time but reading it fast — binge-reading.

Will that work? Dolnick discovered the method he recommends one night when he had nothing to do all evening but read a book: "the power went out and, unable to watch Netflix or engage in my customary internet fugue, I lit a candle and picked up a thriller by Ruth Rendell." At some point he found he was reading very quickly and the reading material proved fascinating and compelling. If you'd just read fast and long, you could have the same experience. Even if the power is not off? Even if there's still some life in the battery of any iPad or laptop? Well, he's saying he made the discovery under these stark limitations. You can just take his advice and do it.

But how? You've restructured your mind. You've followed your own impulses and responses, and you've come to find reading nonlinearly, jumpily, on-line is your style. That's me. Maybe you're the person who binge-watches television. But whatever. You're doing it your way. Why should you change? Because you should be reading books? Dolnick isn't saying that. He's saying reading is fun. (Like the old library poster.)

I understand the concept: If you'd just get to the point where you see what Dolnick saw that time when the power went off, you'd keep going and you'd make book-reading your thing too. It would be just as good as the other things you've been doing with your attention — or better. Maybe, but are we not having fun with our on-screen reading? Are we not having fun watching television? I guess I could read a book on the psychology of fun. I have read in a book — long ago (this book) — that the things we fall into doing for fun can put us in a condition of entropy, which doesn't feel good at all. Anyway, I doubt if the enticement to reading books — come on, it's fun — will work on many adults, and when I think about spending more time sitting with an actual book, I don't think about racing through it, gulping. I think about looking at really great sentences and experiencing aesthetic pleasure.

But that's just me. And I've found a way to read a lot of books. I go for long walks and listen to audiobooks. That forces me to proceed through the whole thing linearly. My jumping-around style of reading on line can't take over. I'm on the book's time. And I'm getting out, moving around, and giving my eyes a break from looking at words. That works for me. I think my solution is better than Dolnick's, better for me anyway, perhaps because what I do reading (and writing) on line is better than what Dolnick says he does — the "internet fugue" of poking around doing things like "checking to see if my dishwasher pods have shipped." And I think the books I'm audiobook-reading are higher quality. A thriller by Ruth Rendell? I know. It's for fun. That makes me feel like poking around on the internet, getting ideas about the history, philosophy, and psychology of fun... and then write a blog post about it, have an in-person conversation about the blog post with Meade, and then go on a long walk and listen to "Kafka on the Shore."

You have your fun, I'll have mine.

"The bottom line of a good job is that it makes you feel..."

"... like you have unlimited energy for your work because it’s so fulfilling."

In discussing what makes a job the "least stressful"...

... consider that, in this context, the opposite of stress is control.

Is that true? For some, I would think, too much control would lead to stress. Let's say much was expected of you. You were supposed to be brilliant, high-achieving, and productive. But it was your responsibility to define your tasks, to figure out how to accomplish them, to set your own standards about what constitutes excellence, and to put time — any time, whenever you want, night or day, weekdays or weekends — into doing what you've decided is appropriate to do.

There is some reason to think that people feel best when they are in the psychological state called "flow," which is defined as having 8 components:

First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

Can you get there within the "least stressful" job, university professor? Of course. But you'd better be good at defining realistic tasks that will look accomplished when they are accomplished. You'd better be able to get into the zone where you feel a sense of effortless expertise.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book "Flow" identifies surgery and rock climbing as 2 activities that produce flow for the people who have the appropriate expertise. There, the tasks are specific, and the feedback about whether you are doing them right is clear. Compare a scholarly book project, which might take years, where you might wonder whether what you are writing is too dull or too controversial or unsupported by the data you're trying to use or who knows what your colleagues — your rivals? — will say about it at some unknown point in the future if you ever get this damned thing done?

Intelligent adults, contemplating why they play a mindless video game.

Lori Culwell sees the game "Angry Birds" as her "meditation tool" and thinks she's "picked up some sage wisdom from those self-sacrificing birds and their mortal pig enemies. Call it an Angry Birds satori, perhaps."

[T]he birds put my mind into a deeply Zen-like and hypnotic state, not unlike "flow" as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Maybe the people at Rovio have given us a game that is part meditation, part allegory for life. Maybe Freud would point out that my finding Zen in a game based on pig destruction signals latent anger issues.

("Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is one of my very favorite books, as I've noted before.)

And here's William Ian Miller in "Losing It"  — a book I first talked about here — talking about solitaire:

Everything distracts me... I interrupted the writing of this paragraph to play a game of solitaire, and then when I lost I allowed myself to play until I won, and then one more in case I won two in a row, and then I kept on until I won two in a row. Says the ancient rabbinical Pirkei Avot: The Ethics of the Fathers, written some eighteen hundred years ago: “If a man is walking by the way and is studying and then interrupts his study and exclaims: ‘How beautiful is this tree? How beautiful is this plowed furrow?’ Scripture considers that it is to be regarded as if he has forfeited his life (or as if he bears guilt for his soul).” If the beauties of nature cannot justify distraction, what of solitaire? My offense is (as if) capital; if only I could remember which circle of hell awaits me. My will—an element of my name, no less—never strong to begin with, has become weaker. The “I am” that remains in Will -iam is thus a ghost of its former self. If William James is right, and I find that he usually is, then I am in trouble: “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind" (italics in original).

Do you use video games in a way that makes you want to explain it — like Culwell — in terms of meditation and wisdom or — like Miller — to read it as a signpost that you are walking downhill toward the grave?

3 happiness paths.

Are you doing any or all of these?

• Feeling good. Seeking pleasurable emotions and sensations, from the hedonistic model of happiness put forth by Epicurus, which focused on reaching happiness by maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.

• Engaging fully. Pursuing activities that engage you fully, from the influential research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. For decades, Csikszentmihalyi explored people's satisfaction in their everyday activities, finding people report the greatest satisfaction when they are totally immersed in and concentrating on what they are doing — he dubbed this state of absorption “flow.”

• Doing good. Searching for meaning outside yourself, tracing back to Aristotle's notion of eudaemonia, which emphasized knowing your true self and acting in accordance with your virtues.

What college major leads to the lowest scores on the LSAT?

Oops. It's criminal justice. Second worst — the irony continues: pre-law. 

I think this has less to do with whether the major prepares you for the exam than with the raw talent of the people who choose various majors. That's why physics/math comes in first. My theory, anyway. The best advice for those who want to go on to law school is to study something you're very interested in and good at. It will help you get a good GPA, which counts about as much as the LSAT in admissions. It will make college intrinsically rewarding. (Try to make whatever you do intrinsically rewarding.*) And it will give you an opportunity to find out more about your own preferences which you will need to have when you get out of law school and find a path within law. It will also give you the ability to be drawn away from the idea going to law school, which is certainly not a bad thing. 

 _____________ 

*To think more deeply about what it means to do what is intrinsically rewarding, read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book, "Flow." At page 49 of the 1991 Harper Perennial edition, he describes the 8 components of flow:

First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

Flow/flOw.

A video game based on the theory in one of my favorite books, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow."

A deceptively simple video game called "flOw," in which players control the feeding and evolution of an aquatic organism, is making waves in the $30 billion market better known for fictional blood and bullets.

The game forsakes typical testosterone-fueled activities of killing, racing and blowing stuff up. Inspired by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory, which holds that people are happy and fulfilled when they are fully immersed in what they are doing, "flOw" is pure Zen.

Let's get a better description of flow than happy/fulfilled/immersed/Zen. In his book -- at page 49 of the 1991 Harper Perennial edition -- Csikszentmihalyi describes flow in terms of 8 components:

First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

(I originally typed that out to use in this article, which I wrote for the "Bloggership" conference. I say that that blogging is a flow experience for me. But this post isn't about that.)

Now, looking at that description of flow, I think you can see that all good video games produce flow, whether they are called "flow" or "flOw" or "fLoW" or whatever. The real question -- assuming you decide you want to live in flow -- is whether you should be finding your flow in games that have been manufactured to produce a flow experience. You can see that part of flow is becoming absorbed for long periods of time in something of a trancelike state. The book highlights individuals who find flow doing productive or healthy things like surgery and rock climbing. If you're finding your flow in something that is sedentary, uncreative, and nonlucrative, well, it might be okay. But maybe it's a problem. And I say that as someone who used to throw away a stupid amount of time playing games like Tetris.