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THE REVISION OF THE CONCEPT OF HAPPINESS Introduction Twenty-three centuries ago, Aristotle arrived at the idea that what men and women look for, more than anything else, is happiness. While we want happiness for itself, we want other goals (health, beauty, money or power) only because we hope they will make us happy. Many things have changed since the time of Aristotle. Our understanding of the world of stars and atoms has become much wider than we could ever believe. The gods of the Greeks are like small, weak children if we compare them with people today and with the powers we have now. And still, about this very important topic, little has changed in the centuries that followed. Today we do not know more about happiness than Aristotle knew, and about how to get this very important state, we can almost say that we have made no progress. Even if today we are more healthy and live longer than in past centuries, even if the poorest person among us is surrounded by material luxuries that people could not imagine only a few decades ago (there were very few bathrooms in the palace of the Sun King, chairs were rare even in the most rich medieval houses, and no Roman emperor could turn on the television when he was bored), and even with the great scientific knowledge that we can repeat when we want, people often finish their lives feeling that they wasted their time and that their years passed between anxiety and boredom. Is it because the destiny of humans is to stay always unsatisfied? Or is it because each person wants more than he or she can get? Or is the deep discomfort that often makes even our most special moments bitter the result of looking for happiness in the wrong place? The purpose of this book is to use some tools of modern psychology to study this very old question: When do people feel happy? If we start to find answers, maybe one day we can organize our lives so that happiness is a bigger part of them. Twenty-five years before I began to write these lines, I made a discovery, and it took me all this time to understand that I made it. Maybe it is wrong to call it a “discovery”, because people have known it since the first days of human life. But the word is still good, because even if my finding was already known, it was not written or explained in theory in any academic field, in this case in psychology. So I spent the next quarter of a century studying this thing that is so difficult to see clearly. What I “discovered” is that happiness is not something that just happens. It is not the result of good luck or chance. It is not something that we can buy with money or power. It does not seem to depend on external events, but more on how we understand and read these events. In fact, happiness is a state of life that each person must prepare, grow, and protect by him or herself. People who know how to control their inner experience are able to decide the quality of their lives. This is the point that is closest to happiness. But we cannot reach happiness if we look for it directly and only think about it. “Ask yourself if you are happy – said J.S. Mill – and you will stop being so.” It is when we are totally involved in every detail of our lives, good or bad, that we find happiness, not when we try to look for happiness itself. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, said it in a beautiful way in the introduction to his book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Do not aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be reached; it must follow… as an effect that comes after your personal dedication to something that is bigger than yourself.” So, how can we arrive at this goal that we cannot reach by a direct road? My studies during the last twenty-five years have convinced me that there is a way. It is not a straight road. It begins when we get control over what is inside our mind. Our ideas about our lives come from many forces that form our experience, and each force has an effect that makes us feel good or bad. Many of these forces are outside our control. We cannot do much about our physical appearance, our natural character or our body’s basic form. We cannot decide, at least not very much, how tall or how beautiful we want to be. We also cannot choose our parents or the moment of our birth, and it is not in your power or in mine to decide when there will be a war or an economic depression. The instructions inside our genes, the force of gravity, the pollen in the air, the historical period when we are born… these and many other conditions decide what we see, how we feel and what we do. It is not surprising that we believe that our destiny is decided mainly by external forces. However, we have all lived moments when, instead of being hit by unknown forces, we felt that we had control of our actions, that we were the owners of our own destiny. In the rare times when this happens, we feel a kind of joy, a deep feeling of happiness that we wanted for a long time and that becomes a clear memory of how life should be. This is what we call an optimal experience. It is what a sailor feels when he holds a tight rope while the wind blows through his hair, when the boat jumps over the waves like a young horse: the sails, the boat, the wind and the sea “sing” together and this “song” moves inside the sailor’s body. It is what a painter feels when the colors on the painting begin to show a special tension between them and something new, something alive, appears in front of the surprised artist. Or it is what a father feels when his baby answers to his smile for the first time. But such events do not happen only when external conditions are good. People who survived concentration camps, or who lived very dangerous moments and almost died, often remember that, in the middle of the problems, they had very strong, rich moments when they felt something like a clear light inside, as an answer to very simple events: listening to the song of a bird in the forest, finishing a hard job, or sharing a piece of bread with a friend. Normally we believe that our best moments are passive, when we rest, when we receive something, or when we are relaxed (and these experiences can also be pleasant if we worked hard before to get them). But this is not true. The best moments usually come when the body or mind of a person is at its limit, when the person makes a voluntary, strong effort to reach something difficult and important. An optimal experience is something that we make happen. For a child it can be to put the last block on a tower with his shaking fingers, a tower higher than all the towers he has made before. For a swimmer it can be to try to break his own record. For a violinist, it can be to control a very difficult part of a musical piece. For each person there are thousands of chances, thousands of challenges to grow and to become bigger inside. These experiences do not always feel pleasant at the time when they happen. The swimmer’s muscles may hurt during the important race, his lungs may be close to exploding, and he may feel a bit dizzy and very tired; but these can still be the best moments of his life. To have control in life is never easy, and sometimes it can even be painful, but in the long run these optimal experiences give us a feeling of mastery, or better, a feeling that we take part in deciding the content of our own life. This feeling is very close to what we usually call happiness. During my studies I tried to understand as clearly as possible how people felt when they most enjoyed themselves, and why. My first research was with a few hundred “experts” (artists, athletes, musicians, chess masters and surgeons). In other words, people who seemed to spend their time doing exactly the activities they liked most. From their descriptions of how they felt while they were doing these things, I created a theory of optimal experience based on the idea of flow. Flow is a mental state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems important. The experience itself is so pleasant that people want to do it even if it has a high cost, just for the simple reason of doing it. With the help of this theory, my research group at the University of Chicago, and later my colleagues in many other countries, spoke with thousands of people of different ages and ways of life. These studies suggested that optimal experiences were described in the same way by men and women, by young and old people, without any importance of cultural differences. Flow was not only something for rich people in industrial countries. Old women in Korea, adults in Thailand and India, teenagers in Tokyo, Navajo shepherds, farmers in the Italian Alps, and workers in a factory line in Chicago described this state using almost the same words. At the beginning, our information came from interviews and questionnaires. To be more exact, with time we developed a new method to measure the quality of subjective experience. This technique, called the Experience Sampling Method, asks the people in the study to carry a small electronic device for a week and to write how they feel every time the device makes a sound. The device receives a signal about eight times a day, at random times. At the end of the week, each person gives us an almost continuous report, like a written film of his or her life, made from many small but typical moments. Until now, we have collected one hundred thousand of these small pieces of experience in different places in the world. The ideas in this book are based on this group of data. The study of flow that I began in the University of Chicago has now spread to many other places in the world. Researchers in Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan and Australia also study it. Today, the largest group of data, outside Chicago, is at the Institute of Psychology in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Milan, in Italy. The concept of flow has been useful for psychologists who study happiness, life satisfaction and inner motivation; for sociologists who see in flow the opposite of anomie and alienation (feelings of not having rules and of being alone and disconnected); and for anthropologists who are interested in group excitement and rituals. Some people use the idea of flow to try to understand human evolution, and others to explain religious experience. But flow is not only an academic topic. Only a few years after the first articles were published, the theory began to be used in many practical questions. When the goal is to improve the quality of life, the theory of flow can show a good direction. It has inspired new school programs, business training, the design of free-time activities and services. The idea of flow is also used to create ideas and practical methods in clinical psychotherapy, in planning activities in homes for old people, in the design of museum exhibitions, and in occupational therapy for people with disabilities. All this has happened in only twelve years since the first articles about flow appeared in academic journals, and it seems that the effect of the theory will be even bigger in the future. Review Many articles and books about flow exist, but they are written for specialists. This is the first time that the study of optimal experience is presented to the general public and that its meaning for the life of each person is discussed. But what you will read is not a “How to…” book. There are thousands of books in print or in bookshops that explain how to become rich, how to be powerful, how to find love or how to lose weight. Like cookbooks, they tell you how to reach a specific and limited goal, a goal that only a few people reach. But even if their advice works, what happens after the not very probable event that you become a thin, loved, strong millionaire? Normally, the person is again at the starting point, with a new list of wishes and as unsatisfied as before. What people really want is not simply to lose weight or to be rich, but to feel good with their life. In the search for happiness, small, partial solutions do not work. Even if they have good intentions, books cannot give us exact rules for how to be happy. Optimal experience depends on the capacity to control what happens in our consciousness from moment to moment. Each person must reach this with his or her own effort and creativity. What a book can do, and what this book will try to do, is to show examples of how we can enjoy life more, organized inside a theory, so that readers can think and arrive at their own ideas. Instead of a list of things to do and not to do, this book wants to be a trip through the world of the mind, with maps that come from scientific tools. Like all good adventures, this one will not be easy. Without some mental effort, without a promise to think and to look critically at your own experience, you will not receive much from the pages that follow. Flow will look at how we can reach happiness by controlling our inner life. We will begin with the question of how consciousness works and how we can control it (chapter 2), because only if we understand how our inner experience is formed, we can be the masters of it. Everything we live – joy or pain, interest or boredom – appears in the mind as information. If we can control this information, then we can decide how our life will be. The best inner state is when there is order in consciousness. This happens when we use our mental energy (our attention) to reach realistic goals, and when our skills are in balance with the chances we have to act. The search for a goal brings order to consciousness, because a person must put his or her attention on the present task and forget for a moment everything else.

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