Csikszentmihalyi

Some critical discussion about flow at Daniel Livingstone's blog: [|Flow! What is it good for?]

Critical review of Csikszentmihalyi's book at BlogCritics, [|here] //"The book is reasonably clear, but is not particularly well-written. It sounds naive and romantic, and it is full of the jargon of humanistic psychology (for instance concepts of psychic energy, psychic entropy, autotelic personality) and one-dimensional. His basic claim is that people are happy in activities that generate flow. He recognizes that people are also happy when basic needs are met in a pleasant way - good food, erotic sex, but he distinguishes between mere pleasure and the enjoyment of a complex experience.//

//His effort to distinguish between ordinary pleasure and enjoyable flow is largely semantic and largely unconvincing, and this false dichotomy is probably the key flaw in his philosophy. Flow is simply a feeling of pleasure. It rewarding, and like the other pleasures, it can be addictive. It is not an absolute good.//

//He tries to build a whole system of philosophy around flow. He holds that the complex pleasures of creating art, writing books, making music and climbing mountains are better than the simple pleasures of working people, and his project is the improvement of the lower classes by teaching them to find flow instead of watching TV. His biases are transparent. Like the other humanistic psychologists, he is working within a system of thought loosely based on// //[|Stoic philosophy]// //and neo-Platonism with some European Romanticism, some Indian and Oriental religiion and some neo-hippie consciousness-altering mysticism thrown in. He basically implies that humanity will be enlightened if more people can be led from the low pleasures of common culture to the higher enjoyment of living in a state of flow."//

Discussion and reproduction of a diagram illustrating flow at [|Explorations in Learning] blog: "Flow occurs when certain conditions are met, four of which are
 * 1) clear goals
 * 2) immediate feedback
 * 3) focused attention
 * 4) tasks that challenge (without frustrating) one's skills"