9. Quotes on Foresight (Understanding the Future)
http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/10/18/quotes-on-foresight-understanding-the-future/
Written by Sean Murphy. Posted in Quotes
“For each human being there is an optimum ratio
between change and stasis. Too little change,
he grows bored. Too little stability, he panics
and loses his ability to adapt.
One who marries six times in ten years won’t
change jobs. One who moves often to serve his
company will maintain a stable marriage. A
woman chained to one home and family may
redecorate frantically or take a lover or go
to many costume parties.”;
── Larry Niven, “Flash Crowd“
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, edited by, ‘Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness’, 1988
Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., Sociological implication of the flow experience
p.45
When everyday activity is constraining, routinized, invariant, overly structured, when experience of the world is one of excessive regulation and oppressive discipline, then people seek variety and personal challenge in their recreation. They search out occasions for creative self-expression, more puzzling problems, and difficult tests. They yearn for freedom of choice, for situations where outcomes hinge on the volitional control of players. Resources are purposely limited to decrease the probability of success and ensure that the uncertainty of these outcomes is maximized.
In short, whose who experience a surplus of certainty in their daily lives, that is, those who are alienated, will seek uncertainty in play. On the other hand, those who view the world as mainly uncertain, that is, anomic persons, will seek certainty in recreation.
This chapter is adapted from Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., Mountain Experience: The Psychology and Sociology of Adventure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 170-91, 207-25.
(‘Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness’, edited by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, Cambridge university press, library call# 153 Optimal, 1988, )
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Tony Schwartz with Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy., The way we're working isn't working: the four forgotten needs that energize great performance, 2010
pp.140-141
p.140
The need to feel cared for and secure has its origins at the earliest stages of our development, which makes biological sense.
p.140
The more nurtured rats also grow up to be more alert, confident, and bold in their behaviors and more likely to nurture their own offspring.
The same pattern is true, Meaney believes, of all species.
p.140
More than any species, however, human beings carry this need for nurturing forward throughout their lives, at home and at work, the intensity depending on the degree to which it was met early in their lives.
p.140
physician and psychoanalyst John Bowlby
an emotionally chilly upper-class British family in the early 1900s.
he rarely saw his parents and was sent off to boarding school at the age of seven, an experience he found frightening and painful.
p.140
The key to healthy emotional development, Bowlby came to believe, is what he termed “a secure base from which a child or an adolescent can make sorties into the outside world and to which he can return knowing for sure that he will be welcomed when he gets there, nourished physically and emotionally, comforted if distressed, reassured if frightened.”
p.141
his American disciple Mary Ainsworth,
a secure base and a safe haven provide a reliable source of emotional renewal that makes it possible for a child to risk exploring the unknown.
p.141
The more secure the child's base, the more confident she becomes and more willing she is to venture into the world, for longer and longer periods of time.
Margaret Mahler, a psychoanalyst and contemporary of Sigmund Freud,
“return to base” as an opportunity to “refuel”.
In short, feeling valued and secure is a basic form of stress innoculation.
p.141
Our early childhood experienced leave an imprint that powerfully and predictably influences our security ── and our vulnerability to triggers ── throughout our lives.
Even as adults, Baumeister concludes, the fear of aloneness and the absence of caring relationships are “worse than the pain of emotional or physical abuse.”
p.141
Over time, the source of a secure base typically evolves from a parent to a spouse or a partner. The extent to which this need is met profoundly influences not just the quality of our relationships, but also our effectiveness in the world.
“A great deal of neurotic, mal adaptive and destructive behavior”, writes Baumeister, “seems to reflect either desperate attempts to establish or maintain relationships with other people or sheer frustration and purposelessness when one's own need to belong goes unmet.”
p.141
Philliop Shaver, an attachment researchers and psychologist
“secure attachment”, marked by the capacity for trusting relationships, good self-esteem, and comfort in sharing feelings with friends and partners.
p.141
Ainsworth
“anxious”, meaning we often worry that we're not getting enough love and are clingy and overly dependent as a consequence.
p.141
“avoidant”, meaning we're distrusting of others, struggle with closeness, and tend to be more emotionally remote, withholding, and detached.
p.141
Threatening events exacerbate our need for a secure base, even as adults.
p.141
Bowlby wrote,
“To remain within easy access of a familiar individual known to be ready and willing to come to our aid in an emergency is clearly a good insurance policy ── whatever our age.”
(Schwartz, Tony, 1952-, HF5549.5.P37S39 2010, 658.3'128—dc22, copyright © 2010)
(The way we're working isn't working : the four forgotten needs that energize great performance / Tony Schwartz, with Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy. — 1st Free Press hardcover ed., 1. performance., 2. work — psychological aspects., 3. organizational effectiveness., 4. personnel management., )
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, edited by, ‘Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness’, 1988
pp.183-192
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
and
Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi
p.183
The relative rarity of flow experiences is due, by definition, to the fact that in everyday life the opportunities for action are seldom evenly matched with our abilities to act. Consequently occasions of intense concentration in which we are not distracted from purposeful involvement, in which we get responsive feedback to our actions, are not easy to come by. Everyday experience is characterized more by listless, lower-level involvement interrupted by constant distractions, by boredom, and by periods of worry.
p.183
One might blame the social system for such a state of affairs, or the culture, or the individual's lack of enterprise and self-discipline. Any or all of these causes may be responsible for not optimizing experience to its fullest. But in the last analysis the culprit is that quasi-metaphysical entity known as
“the human condition”.
p.183
The fact is that the universe does not run in order to make life easier for man. Thus whatever advantage we can manage to snatch from the environment we do in spite of impersonal forces and in the face of random chance. And as soon as we get comfortable in one niche, boredom begin to nudge us on toward new goals.
p.183
There are obvious reasons why effortless living keeps getting interrupted. Because the environment is not built to our specifications, external contingencies constantly break into our concentration. It is either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. Then our body requires attention: It is either tired or hungry, sleepy, or thirsty.
pp.183-184
Physical pain forces us to turn attention away from what we are doing, and center it inward.
p.184
Psychological pain - unfulfilled desires, wishes, disappointments, fears - do the same. Awareness of eventual death, and the consequent shortness of time, force us to choose alternatives that are not the ones we would prefer.
p.184
To these universal features of the human condition must then be added the social and cultural factors that might hinder flow. A social institution such as slavery may restrict the opportunity of action of a segment of the population. A given religion system my either reduce or increase the frequency of flow in the culture.
p.184
It is reasonable to suppose that in a primitive culture that happened to be well adapted to its environment, people would be in flow most of the time, provided that they were unaware of alternative lifestyles and possibilities. In such ideal-typical communities, according to Redfield (1953), life choices are self-evident, doubts and unfulfilled desires are few and transitory.
p.184
An excellent example of how a particular culture was able to build flow into their lifestyle was brought to our attention by Richard Kool of the British Columbia Museum. To quote from a recent letter:
The Shushwap region was and is considered by the Indian people
to be a rich place: rich in salmon and roots - a plentiful land. In this
region, the people would live in permanent village sites and exploit
the environs for needed resources. They had elaborate technologies
for very effectively using the resources in the environment, and
perceived their lives as being good and rich. Yet, the elders said,
at times the world became too predictable and the challenge began
to go out of life. Without challenge, life had no meaning.
So the elders, in their wisdom, would decide that the entire
village should move, those moves occurring every 25 to 30 years.
The entire population would move to a different part of the Shushwap
land and there, they found challenge. There were new
streams to figure out, new game trails to learn, new areas where
the balsamroot would be plentiful. Now life would regain its meaning
and be worth living. Everyone would feel rejuvenated and
healthy. Incidentally, it also allowed exploited resources in one
area to recover after years of harvesting.
pp.184-185
What the Shushwap had discovered is an arrangement that many statesmen have only dreamed about: Both Thomas Jefferson and Chairman Mao thought that each generation needed its own revolution for the people to have an active stake in the political system ruling their lives.
p.185
But presumably few cultures have ever attained such a perfect fit. Most human efforts at adaptation fall short in some respect or other, either by making survival too strenuous a task to accomplish, or by closing themselves off in a rigid cultural pattern that stifles the possibilities for action of each new generation. Some anthropologists, such as Marshall Sahlins (1972), contend that, even in the harshest environments of the Kalahari or the Australian desert, preliterate men have found ways to lead lives that are more leisurely, free, and enjoyable than anything contemporary urban settings offer.
p.185
On our side, we tend to agree more with the views of the historian Arnold Toynbee, who held that most cultures have suffered either from a lack of survival challenges, as in the case of the Pacific Islanders, or from too frequent and intense challenges, as in the case of Eskimo cultures.
p.185
In Toynbee's view a cilivization emerges only when environmental challenges are strong enough to prompt a consistent adaptive response, but not so strong as to absorb all the people's energies just in survival tasks.
p.185
Toynbee's thesis might be overly simple, yet it undoubtedly contains more than a grain of truth. But the “challenge-and-response” model should not be taken to apply to objective conditions.
p.185
What differentiates cultures from each other is in part their differential responses to the same objective factors.
p.185
Often what prompts the development of a civilization is not a change in objective conditions, but a conceptual reorganization that allows a group of people to recognize challenges where they did not see any before.
p.185
For instance, the great awakening of Islam in the seventh century (7th century) or the transformation of Japan in the last two centuries (200-years) are more easily explained in terms of reconceptualization of what was possible, rather than in terms of changes in the external possibilities.
p.185
Such reconceptualizations, according to [Arnold] Toynbee, were the task of “creative minorities” within each culture.
p.185
All cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, attempts to reduce the impact of randomness on the course of human life. They are adaptive response to the environment just as feathers are for birds or fur for mammals. Cultures prescribe norms, evolve goals, discover beliefs that helps to make human action more fit to tackle the challenges of existence. In so doing they must rule out many alternatives, and so limit possibilities; but this channeling of attention to a limited set of goals and means is what allows effortless action within the self-created boundaries of the culture.
p.186
This is why the analogy between games and cultures is
so compelling. But consist of an arbitrary set of goals and of rules that allow action to proceed in a concentrated fashion. The difference is mainly one of scale. Cultures are all-embracing, they specify how a person should be born, how he or she should grow up, marry, have children, and die. Games fill out the interludes of the cultural script. They enhance action and concentration during “leisure time”, when the cultural instructions are otherwise silent, and the person's attention threatens to wander into the uncharted realms of chaos.
p.186
Occasionally a culture succeeds in evolving a set of goals and rules so compelling and so well matched to the skills of the population that its members are able to experience flow with unusual frequency and intensity.
p.186
In such cases the analogy beween games and cultures is even closer. We can say that the culture as a whole becomes a “great games”.
p.186
Some of the classical civilizations may have succeeded in doing this. Athenians citizens, Romans who shaped their actions by virtus, Chinese intellectuals, or Indian brahmins moved through life with the intricate grace of ballet dancers, and derived perhaps the same enjoyment from the challenging harmony of their actions as they would have from an extended dance.
p.186
The Athenian polis, Roman law, the divinely grounded bureaucracy of China, and the all-encompassing spiritual order of India were successful and lasting examples of how cultures can enhance flow - at least for those who were lucky enough to be among the principal players.
p.186
A culture that enhances flow is not necessarily “good” in any moral sense.
p.186
The rules of Sparta seem needlessly cruel to us, even though they were by all accounts successful in motivating those who abided by them.
p.186
The joy of battle and the butchery that exhilarated the Tartar hordes, or the Turkish Janissaries, were legendary.
p.186
It is certainly true that for great segments of the European population, confused by the dislocating cultural shocks of the 1970s, the Nazi fascist regime and ideology provided a simplified game plan.
p.186
It set simple goals, clarified feedback, and allowed a renewed involvement with life that many found to be a relief from prior anxieties and frustrations.
p.186
Flow is a powerful motivator, but it does not guarantee virtue. Other things being equal, a culture that provides flow might be seen as “better” than one that does not. But when a group of people embraces goals and norms that will enhance its enjoyment of life, there is always the possibility that this will happen at the expense of some other group.
pp.186-187
The flow of the Athenian citizen was made possible by the slaves who ran his property, just as the elegant lifestyle of the Southern plantations in America rested on the work of imported slaves.
p.187
The same argument that holds for cultures as a whole holds for subcultures, or groups of people who attempt to differentiate themselves from others in the same society by adopting distinctive goals, norms, and eventually separate lifestyles.
p.187
In a society as complex as ours, we have subcultures of Amish and Mennonite farmers in black garb riding their home-drawn buggies, and surfing subcultures that represent an opposite set of norms and values; in between these two one finds almost every other possible combination.
p.187
In evolutionary terms, a subculture is a mutation of the cultural form that tries to establish itself in competition with others. Generally most will disappear, because they do not give any advantage over existing lifestyles. A few, however, will survive in a symbiotic or parasitic relation to the main culture; and occasionally one of them might even supplant mainline goals and norms, and become the dominant cultural form.
p.187
Subcultures constitute a network running through society, overlapping and enfolding its spaces. Each person might belong to more than one, in differing combinations.
p.187
There are subcultures of Masons and of gourmet cooks, academics, and science fiction fans. In each case, the subculture specifies goals and rules for its participants, and thus provides an organized set of challenges, a specialized arena in which to experience flow.
p.187
In Chapter 12, Delle Fave and Massimini describe two isolated mountain communities in the Italian Alps. Once part of the mainline farming culture of Europe, the Occitan villagers, cut off from the rest of the world by winter snows, have been left behind as a quaint reminder of a way of life that has long since disappeared elsewhere.
p.187
Yet, as the interviews with the older generation of the village show, the way of life that developed in this particular niche of the environment is still unusually conducive to flow. When asked if they ever felt the intense concentration, clarity of goals, effortless action characteristic of the flow experience, all the older villagers recognized in it the feeling typical of their everyday working lives. That is how they felt, they reported, when they took the cows to the high pastures, when they pruned their orchard, when they sat down to carve a piece of furniture out of wood. To the question, “If you had the time and money, what would you rather be doing?” the older villagers answered that they would keep on doing the same things - take the animals to the high meadows, prune the orchard, carve the wood.
p.188
The Occitan culture is thus an example of that rare adaptation, a way of life that absorbs all the energies of its members in an enjoyable, fulfilling interaction. Work is just as enjoyable as leisure, and leisure is as meaningfully related to the rest of life as work is. Great regrets, unfulfilled desires, or chronic discontent might be present in each person's individual life, but they are not built into the fabric of goals and means that the community provides.
p.188
Yet this fine-tuned adaptation to a harsh environment is about to disappear. The fragility of the Occitan culture is shown by the answers of the younger generation of villagers. They no longer enjoy the traditional forms of life. Their concentration is disrupted by goals and desires that come from the culture of the plains. When they herd cattles on the mountains their minds dwell on opportunities suggested by television commercials. For them work is drudgery to be endured only for the money it brings, which then can be spent to experience flow in expensive leisure settings; and since work brings more money in factories, most younger Occitans are settling down to industrial jobs far away from their native valley.
p.188
The oldest generation still lives year-round in a mountain village, while many members of the middle and the youngest generation work part of the year outside the country or in industrial centers. For the oldest generation, as for the elderly Occitans, work was the most frequently mentioned flow activity.
p.188
The fact that optimal experience is less tied to jobs means that people experience flow much less frequently on a day-to-day basis: In the younger generations only half of the flow-producing activities mentioned are reported as taking place every day, whereas the oldest generation reports doing practically all the things that produce flow daily. Needless to say, positive descriptions of work decrease by each generation, with the youngest members finding their work boring, full of effort, distracting, anxiety producing, and uninvolving.
pp.188-189
The fact that those who find flow in their work stress personal involvement as a key element suggests this may help them to structure autotelic experiences within their jobs. Since work takes up such a major part of a person's psychic energy, this necessarily affects the rest of daily life. As one young member of the third generation expresses it, when the job goes well, the good feeling stays even after work.
p.189
Because workers who report flow more frequently tend to actually spend more time working while on the job (Csikszentmihalyi 1982), the dichotomy between work and leisure as sources of flow is not a healthy one for the future of society.
p.189
It is an example of the uncontrolled process of urbanization eroding traditions that took thousands of years to evolve, and that are now being forgotten in the course of a few generations. Another name for it is “progress”.
Unfortunately progress is only a hypothesis.
p.189
Whether it is true or not only time will tell, for if the technological, value-free lifestyle we call progress turns out to be an evolutionary mistake, it might be too late to retrace our steps.
p.189
Nevertheless, such cultures suggest the type of psychic integration and identification with productive activities that should be the ideal for structuring the jobs of the future.
(‘Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness’, edited by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, Cambridge university press, library call# 153 Optimal, 1988, )
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“In the philosophy of the Book of Changes nothing is regarded as being absolutely at rest; rest is merely an intermediate state of movement, or latent movement. However, there are points at which the movement becomes visible.”, p.282, The I Ching, or, BOOK OF CHANGES; The Richard Wilhelm translation from Chinese into German, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, foreword by C. G. Jung; preface to the 3rd edition by Hellmut Wilhelm, 1950, 1967, 1977, 1950, 1961, 1967, 1987, 1990.
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Gary Gach, The complete idiot's guide to Buddhism, 3rd edition, 2009
p.94
A passing stranger encountered some Buddhist monks in a forest. He asked what they were doing.
A monk stopped to explain that they were Buddhists and that he and his fellow monks were cutting wood.
“Wait. I cut wood, too, for my fire”, said the man. “I don't see anything extraordinary about that.”
“Well, sir”, the monk replied, “when we cut wood, we know we're cutting wood. We don't cut wood to build a fire. We cut wood to cut wood.” The monk smiled, and added, “If we can't cut wood, how then can we build a fire?” Then he resumed his work, and the man went on his way.
Gary Gach, The complete idiot's guide to Buddhism, 3rd edition, 2009
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, edited by, ‘Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness’, 1988
Mihaly and Isabella Csikszentmihalyi, Introduction to part II
p.87
The entire Marxist perspective hinges on the theses developed in the early Economic and Political Manuscripts and in The German Ideology , according to which unequal control of property is inhuman because it deprives people who do not own the means of their subsistence from exercising control over their actions. As a result, men without property end up exploited not only in material terms, but, most important, in terms of their essential human nature: They are no longer masters over the psychic energy that goes into work; and work being the most complex activity in their lives, they lose control of their own experiences.
Given the fundamental importance of this thesis, it is remarkable how little we still know about the experiential concomitants [accompanying; attendant, accompanying circumstance, or thing] of social class. To what extent is it true that class differences correspond to differences in the quality of experience?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The future of flow
p.375
The perspective is probably most useful in explaining the kinds of changes that are relatively free, that are not constrained by immediate survival pressures. For instance, Kuhn's (1970) description of what motivates paradigm shifts in science is very compatible with our model. He argues that the best way to understand why young scientists begin to reject the ideas of their elders and to seek new ways to represent their field is that the challenges of “normal” science become too tame.
p.375
Within a well-understood theoretical paradigm the play of ideas becomes stagnant; the excitement of discovery is replaced by routine application. Boredom, the inability to experience flow within the existing set of rules, is perhaps the most powerful impetus for the revision of old theories, a revision that involves the recognition of new challenges, which in turn requires the refinement of new skills.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The future of flow
p.376
Even Karl Marx initially became interested in the power differential built into property because he realized that those who lacked economic freedom were less able to control their experiences, and thus their consciousness could be exploited by the owners of the means of production. Paradoxically, historical materialism is based on concern for the quality of experience. But despite these noble precedents, we still known very little about what inequalities in the quality of experience may be lurking in the structures of our society.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The future of flow
p.379
No matter how rich and comfortable we get, no matter how much time we are able to free from obligation, the quality of experience is not going to improve one bit unless we learn to invest our psychic energy in ways that will bring intrinsic rewards. From this perspective a good society is one that succeeds in providing a meaningful plan for the investment of psychic energy, an investment that brings enjoyment to every act of daily life, and that allows for the growth of complexity in consciousness for as many of its people as possible. “Equality of opportunity” does not apply only to access to material resources and to power, but also to those opportunities for action that, in conjunction with a person's abilities, make it possible for a person to develop his or her potentialities and to enjoy interaction with the world.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The future of flow
p.380
One of the most interesting of these criticisms is William Sun's (1987) comparison of the concept of flow and the concept of Yu developed in the fourth (4th) century B.C. writing in the Taoist thinker Chuang-tzu. Yu refers to the right way of following the path, or Tao. Watson (1964) translates it as “wandering”; Crandall (1983) as “walking without touching the ground”; Sun (1987) as “to swim”, “to fly”, or “to flow”. In any case, Yu is the way Chuang-tzu believes people should live - without concern for external rewards, spontaneously, with full commitment - in short, as a total autotelic experience.
But there is an important difference between Yu and flow, in Sun's estimation. He sees the first as a typical Eastern concept, in that it is to be attained entirely by a private effort of consciousness leading to a final liberation of the will, and a transcendence of individuality merging into a superhuman field of energy. In contrast, flow is a typically Western concept in that it hinges on the balancing of external challenges and objective skills. Flow can be only attained, Sun writes, if the external conditions are optimal. And thus, paradoxically, the ancient and mystical Yu is a more realistic option than the allegedly pragmatic flow, because it is impossible to reform the world whereas it is possible to reshape consciousness.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The future of flow
p.382
It is important, however, that Sun has introduced us to Cook Ting: He is certainly an excellent example of how one can find flow in the most unlikely places, in the most humble activities of daily life. And it is also humbling to realize that over 22 centuries (2200-years) ago the dynamics of this experience were so well known.
(‘Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness’, edited by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, Cambridge university press, library call# 153 Optimal, 1988, )
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