Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (1934–2021)

The more I read about psychology, the more I wonder how people can't smell the snake oil. I'm in a management development program and Csikszentmihalyi's work was recommended. Perhaps I got the wrong one. This was certainly a load of rubbish.

Opinions as fact, conclusions tailored to support the thesis, odd references to ESP and spirituality, the only thing I can recommend is he has a really cool name.

I pulled the thread on a few of the topics and felt my skin crawl reading up on "psychic show more entropy." I studied thermodynamics and can only feel sadness if these guys have to borrow terms from real science to legitimize the flimsiness of theirs.

Habitual readers of self-help tripe might like this book. Nuff said. show less

Mình đã nghe về khái niệm Dòng chảy này trước đó qua các giới thiệu của bác Trần Xuân Hải và một số bài viết trên mạng. Đây là công trình nghiên cứu của tác giả, đi sâu vào tâm lý của con người để tìm kiếm cái mà ông gọi là Trải nghiệm tối ưu cho cuộc sống con người.

Để dẫn nhập vào cuốn sách, tác giả đặt ra câu hỏi về hạnh phúc và quá trình kiếm tìm nó của con người. show more Tác giả lập luận rằng hạnh phúc không ở đâu xa mà là ngay chính những trải nghiệm bị lãng quên, những trải nghiệm mà tổ tiên chúng ta đã có từ xa xưa nhưng qua thời gian đã bị mai một do quá trình quá trình tiến hoá của xã hội.

Minh chứng cho lập luận của mình, tác giả định nghĩa thế nào là Dòng chảy và cách mà con người hiện đại có thể trải nghiệm dòng chảy đấy. Từ quan sát "dòng chảy" trong chính bản thân mỗi người, đến "dòng chảy" trong đời sống xã hội tương tác không ngừng, các mối quan hệ từ gia đình đến công việc.

Tuy nhiên, dòng chảy chỉ là một khoảnh khắc có giới hạn thời gian và ngữ cảnh. Phần cuối, tác giả đưa ra hướng dẫn của mình để kéo dài khoảnh khắc dòng chảy ấy, làm thế nào mà cuộc sống của mỗi người trở thành một dòng chảy vô tận. Hạnh phúc cũng sẽ từ đó mà được duy trì.

Cuốn sách không nặng tính khoa học hay hàn lâm, ngược lại, nó như một câu chuyện được dẫn dắt có đầu - đuôi. Thấp thoáng đâu đó tính chặt chẽ của người làm khoa học. Nó nhắc nhở chúng ta về những trải nghiệm mà chúng ta cho rằng hiển nhiên nhưng đó lại là khoảnh khắc hạnh phúc mà không dễ có được. Đây là một cuốn sách rất đáng đọc. show less

I read this expecting a serious book of psychological research into human happiness. Silly me! What I got was a self help book which might be renamed the Book of Platitudes based on a rehashing of popular philosophy with case studies attached.

A lot of it was common sense and might be useful to someone troubled who has not had an extensive education in the humanities but the unremittingly conservative ideology, geared to keeping people functioning within a broken system was wearing to say the show more least.

This is the type of book that has grown into a torrent since its publication in 1990 - consultants to the corporate sector trying to find a way to keep the wheels of the economic system whirring when so many people within it are struggling to find meaning in what can have no meaning.

The whole ethos is exemplified in the praise for a poor sap who gets flow out of being a cog on an assembly line - no doubt, by now, automated out of that small pleasure because his flow was no longer profitable to the people who hire consultants to tell them how to encourage flow.

Much of the advice is not bad, albeit from the Institute of the Bleeding Obvious, but it is buttressed by claims from the humanities and social science that often prove to be no more than dubious received wisdom designed to prove the basic thesis.

And what does that thesis come down to - that hoary old chestnut that we construct our happiness from within and that we can find happiness through a cod merging of ancient wisdoms and recent psychological research. Yeah, right! Not impressed ... show less

"Flow," as the author of this book defines it, is what happens when we experience the right kind of challenge in the right frame of mind so that our whole being focuses on what we're doing, and worry, distraction, self-consciousness, even our perception of time all disappear. He believes that it is this flow state that constitutes real and substantial happiness, the "optimal experience" of the subtitle.

This "flow" experience is a familiar one to me, but also mysterious and fascinating and show more very much worth investigating. But while most of what the author has to say about it here seems sensible enough, I think this is a rather flawed exploration of the subject. For one thing, he sometimes seems to define the concept of "flow" so broadly that its meaning becomes blurred. For another, I'm highly dubious about the idea of anything, however broadly defined, being presented as the one and only key to happiness. But the biggest problem, I think, is that the book doesn't really seem to know whether it wants to be a scientifically-based explanation of a particular aspect of psychology, or a philosophical consideration of what it is to live a meaningful life, or a sort of self-help volume meant to encourage readers to live more satisfying lives of their own. As a result, it's not terribly successful at being any of them, and far too much of it is taken up by somewhat repetitious examples of various areas in which people can find fulfilling challenges. I have a few other quibbles with it, as well, including a dislike for some of the terminology he uses, but those are comparatively minor.

So, kind of a disappointing read. And yet, it was still a fairly thought-provoking one, as I frequently found myself, especially in the earlier parts of the book, wanting to argue certain points, or coming up with my own examples of things, or pondering how our relationship to "flow" has changed in the 22 years since this book was published. (For instance, what does it mean that we're increasingly living in a world where not only are interruptions and intrusions increasingly unavoidable, but where failing to concentrate completely on any one thing (aka "multitasking") is regarded as a sort of virtue?) That's a good thing, at least, but it just makes me think that this could have been a lot better than it was. show less