He was 87.Īs a scholar, he is best known for creating flow theory-referring to a state of being in which people become so immersed in the joy of their work or activity “that nothing else seems to matter.” He outlined the theory in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, a seminal 1990 book that influenced leaders from politics to sports. Emeritus Mihaly “Mike” Csikszentmihalyi, a pioneering University of Chicago psychologist known as the “father of flow,” died Oct. Our genes impel us to seek basic pleasures, not the skills and challenges found in enjoyment.Prof. Yet these all fail to sustain our happiness. So in order to give our lives meaning, we try to change the environment around us, whether by displaying our wealth to impress others or chasing powerful positions. You don’t need to look far to see evidence of this: just think about the number of rich patients that psychiatrists treat regularly. As one study showed, satisfaction with life doesn’t correlate strongly with being wealthy. But having more money and acquiring more stuff doesn’t seem to make us happier. But these don’t satisfy us for very long either.Ĭertainly we live in luxurious times and people from the past wouldn’t believe the conveniences that modern life provides. Although this belief comforted people, it proved completely wrong as each of these civilizations collapsed.Īnd if we’re not hiding behind religion or political ideology to avoid the pointlessness of our lives, we’re struggling to acquire external rewards like power, wealth or fame. Still, many people continue to follow religious ideologies because they’re more comfortable thinking of life as meaningful.Īlso, many empires and cultures led their citizens to believe they’d mastered their fates – for instance, the Romans at the height of their power and the Chinese before the Mongol invasion.
While this approach seems to make sense, it can also lead to us abandoning our critical faculties.įor example, while organized religions like Christianity and Islam have provided us with rules to live by and given our lives meaning, our firsthand discovery of our predicament in the universe has shown the principles of religion to be wrong. To help us cope, most of us look for comfort in religion or we seek external rewards, like wealth or fame. And when we examine them closely, we notice that we’re unhappy and unfulfilled. When we view our lives from a distance, they seem insignificant.
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