Flow Psychology

Wherever you look, it seems as if every person — regardless of economic or social class — is constantly striving to acquire more of one thing: money. Whether it’s a wealthy billionaire business mogul or the average worker, there remains the same drive towards amassing larger and larger sums of wealth. Additionally, those with tremendous amounts of money tend to have a stronger, greedier desire for it than their less wealthy counterparts. Why is it that the overarching goal of most humans leaves even those who have reached far beyond it perpetually unsatisfied and wanting more? This idea that fulfillment can be achieved through materiality has been disproved over and over again — happiness, rather, is collateral. Happiness is not a proper end goal — the more it is aimed at it and made into a target, the more it is eluded. Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than one’s self.

The life goals of the vast majority of people are relatively simple: to survive, bear children who will in turn survive, and do those two with a certain degree of dignity and comfort. Once these problems of survival are solved, however, mere comfort and food fail to provide sufficient contentment. Rather, new needs are felt and new desires arise. With affluence and power come escalating expectations, and as our level of wealth and comfort keeps increasing, the sense of wellbeing we hoped to achieve recedes into the distance. It’s quite ironic that the waiting rooms of psychiatrists have increasingly become filled with rich and successful patients who, in their forties or fifties, suddenly wake up to the fact that a plush suburban home, expensive cars, and even an Ivy League education are not enough to bring peace of mind. Yet people keep hoping that changing the external conditions of their lives will provide a solution. If only they could earn more money, be in better physical shape, or have a more understanding partner, they would really have it made. Even though we recognize that material success may not bring happiness, we engage in an endless struggle to reach external goals, expecting that accomplishing them will improve our quality of life. Wealth, status, and power have become in our culture all too powerful symbols of happiness. When we see people who are rich, famous, or good-looking, we tend to assume that their lives are rewarding, even though all the evidence might point to their being miserable. And we assume that if only we could acquire some of those same symbols, we would be much happier. This paradox of goal setting and expectations suggests that satisfaction and contentment are insurmountable tasks; however, goal setting itself isn’t an inherently bad behavior. Rather, peoples’ fixation on what they want to achieve prevents them from deriving pleasure from the present, and they forfeit their chance at contentment.

This idea is discussed further in psychoanalytic theory — mainly by Jacques Lacan — through the concept of the “objet petit a’’ which stands for “unattainable object of desire”. It is predicated on the idea that desire lacks in perpetuity and is therefore the cause of endless longing. Lacan asserts that to be human is to encounter the fact that we are necessarily incomplete, and that we are subjects separated from ourselves. Humans do nothing more in life but attempt to make themselves complete, but are often greeted at every turn with inadequacy. Therefore, the best one can do is accept the fact they will never truly be “a self”. There is no identity one can claim, ideology one can ascribe to, sport they can play, friends they can have that will ever make a subject a whole. This is in part due to the birth of desire out of a feeling of devoidness. We desire what we lack in our own image, but upon obtaining the object of desire, we realize that our desire has merely shifted to something else. This is why we act at all — it is out of the endless desire to complete ourselves. Humans are in conflict with our own image and identity, and the goals one sets for themselves are not in actuality self-fulfilling (with the exception of the happiness one might feel for completing a task in which they aspired to), but only to be greeted with another task or goal they desire to achieve. The pain of desire always outweighs the pleasure of obtaining the desired entity. In this form, we represent our objet petit a, an unattainable object of desire. We have a vague abstraction of what we need, but have no way of expressing it unless we are shown. And when given the tools to express this desire, there remains the inarticulable void of forever ungraspable desire, which is the objet petit a.

However, this seemingly perpetual inability to feel contentment isn’t entirely the fault of the individual. We grow up believing that the important parts of our lives are those which occur in the future. Parents tell their children that learning habits now will pay off when they are older, teachers assure their students that the boring material they’re learning will prove beneficial in the real world when looking for jobs, and the overworked intern is told to have patience and work hard because they’ll receive a promotion to the executive ranks sometime later. This mentality trains our brain to remain in a state in which we are constantly straining for the dangling prize that is just out of our reach. Consequently, we internalize that mindset over our lifetime and fail to recognize potentially fulfilling opportunities because they fail to satisfy our immediate desires.

The common mindset that many may have is: “If I enjoy doing pleasurable things, why should I stop?” It is important to recognize that pleasure seeking is a natural reflex encoded into our genes evolutionarily for the preservation of the species — not necessarily for the purpose of our own enjoyment. The pleasure we take in the act of eating ensures that our body is receiving sufficient nutrients for survival. The pleasure taken in intercourse is a practical way of ensuring the continuation of the species. There is nothing innately wrong with following this genetic programming to indulge in pleasurable activities as long as we recognize them for what they are and as long as we retain some control over them when it is necessary to pursue other goals. Submission to genetic programming can become quite dangerous because it leaves us helpless. A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. Instead of deciding how to act in terms of extrinsic personal goals, they have to surrender to the things that their body has been programmed — or misprogrammed — to do. One must particularly achieve control over instinctual drives to achieve a healthy independence of society, for as long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

This exploitation of our pleasure-seeking instinct is brought about by institutionalization and socialization. A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around them have agreed they should long for. They may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but they fail to notice them because they are not the things they desire. What matters is not what he has now, but what he might obtain if he does as others want him to do. Caught in the treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands. In a complex, capitalistic society, many powerful groups are involved in socializing. Official institutions like schools, churches, and banks try to turn us into responsible citizens willing to work hard and save. All the while, we are constantly cajoled by merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers to spend our earnings on products that will produce the most profits for them. For example, the sporting and fitness industry exploits one’s desires to be a healthier person by presenting their product as if only it can make the target who they want to be. The anxiety of the entire system is that it sells images and dreams we have as if only that one service can make you achieve it. This extends into the average work day as well, with constant paycheck, clothing, spouse comparisons dominating the social spheres. This is the face of anxiety: when your perception of self is based on things you do not have rather than all what you have potential to achieve, and this is what our system thrives off of.

We are made dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes. There is no question that to survive, it is necessary to work for external goals and to postpone immediate gratifications. However, a person does not have to be turned into a puppet tugged around by social controls. The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and to learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society. Rather, it means that in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.

The most important step in emancipating one’s self from social controls is gaining the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience — in the process of living itself — the burden of social controls automatically falls from one’s shoulders. The power returns to the person when rewards are no longer controlled by outside forces. It is not necessary to struggle for goals that always seem to recede into the future and end each boring day with the hope that tomorrow, maybe, something good will happen. Instead of forever straining for the tantalizing prize dangled just out of reach, one can begin to realize the genuine rewards of living. Concurrently, it is not by completely submitting ourselves to instinctual desires that we become free of social controls — we must also become independent from the dictates of the body, and learn to take charge of what happens in the mind. Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there, and as long as we obey the socially conditioned knee-jerk responses that exploit our biological inclinations, we are controlled from the outside. To the extent that a glamorous food advertisement makes us salivate for the product or how getting left on “read” spoils our day, it is obvious that we are not free to determine the content of our experiences. Since what we experience is reality, we have the ability to control how we react to it, and thus can free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world. “Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them,” said Epictetus. And the great emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.”

Gilles Deleuze — a prominent key figure in post-modern French philosophy — encapsulates this idea in his concept of a rhizome. Contrary to an arborescent structure, which is characterized by linearity, orderedness, and hierarchy, a rhizome is a twisty, non-linear, decentralized network with many beginnings and endings. He asserts that it is customary to abide by a rigid arborescent line of thinking with everything planned out as opposed to a fluid rhizomatic way of thinking and living. He asserts that standards of value are internal or immanent, and to live well is to fully express one’s power and to test the limits of one’s potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society still suppresses free-flowing rhizomatic and unique thought and alienates persons from what they can do. To affirm reality, which is a flux of change and growth, we must overturn established identities and become all that we have the potential to be, though we cannot know what that is in advance. A perfect example of this phenomenon in action is the mystique of rock climbing. You get to the top of a peak, elated that the grueling journey is finally over, but you also really wish it would go on forever. The justification of climbing is climbing — you don’t conquer anything except yourself. The purpose of the rhizome is not to look for a peak or utopia, but to stay in the flow. It is not an explicit act of moving up, but rather a continuous flowing; you move up to keep the flow going. There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself; it is a self-communication.

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. How we feel about ourselves and the joy we derive from living ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe. Certainly, we should keep on learning how to master the external environment, since our physical survival may depend on it. But such mastery is not going to increase the good we as individuals feel or reduce the chaos of the world as we experience it. To do that we must learn to achieve mastery over consciousness itself.