Flow Rhythms & Psycho-Moral Development
Art lessons from the ouroboros
There are flow states, and then there are flow rhythms that emerge from the way no-flow states and flow states fit together. Flow states come in various durations, intensities, and historical trajectories. A useful way to think about yourself is as a flow rhythm, or a melody that emerges from the way silences (no-flow states) and noises (flow states) relate to one another across your lifetime.
The concept of “flow” in psychology is famous. You flow when you perform a challenging yet stimulating activity without self-awareness and with skill.1 You enter a flow state when you become engrossed — “zoned out,” “lost” — in a practice that you have practiced before. People describe flow as one of the most pleasurable and rewarding experiential states. Importantly, a zoned-out state only properly qualifies as a flow state if it requires and tests a skill. To fully understand the implications of flow, you must grasp how culture contextualizes the meaning of “skill.”
“Skill” is a general name for specific methodological competencies. If you are skilled at a skill, you are methodical in your practice of a method, competent in your performance of a competency. We use “skilled” as an adjective to indicate a personal competency2 and “skill” as a noun to refer to an activity capable of being performed more or less competently.3
Crucially, “success” and “failure,” and therefore “competence” and “incompetence,” are cultural-moral judgments based on culturally contingent standards of moral value. For instance, whether the governor is competent in your perspective depends on your culturally derived goals for someone in his position. This doesn’t remotely mean that all judgements work equally well for specific people in specific contexts, just that we must remain sensitive to context when speaking in a general way about “skills.”4
Integrating the sociology, you flow when you perform a challenging yet stimulating activity without self-awareness in a manner deemed right according to internalized, culturally-transmissible standards of moral value. In the moment, you have to believe that the activity content of the state is morally good for that state to qualify as a flow state in your lifetime. For example, flowing through a basketball game indicates that the un-self-conscious you existing right now thinks playing basketball here is morally good, worth doing, right, true for life.
Think about what that implies.
It means that flowing is morally developmental, that every flow state is a subjective moral trial, and that every flow rhythm is a practical moral philosophy about what is worth valuing through attention.
It means that a culture is a flow rhythm genre, a template with collective forms of life that organize individuals’ attention over time in consistent ways. How fit a mammal that can constrain its actual future by acting out its ideas about potential futures will turn out to have been will partially depend on the idiosyncrasies of its flow rhythm(s). Culture as an attention structuring tool is inextricably bound up in the processes of cultured humans’ evolution.
It suggests that psychopathology can be a function of the way in which the ratio of flow states to no-flow states in a flow rhythm changes over time. If your flow rate dramatically declined over the course of the last several months, your life rhythm has been disrupted and you have likely been growing anxious and depressed about your increasingly disengaged existence.
It follows from this that psychotherapists heal problems in attention through an art of rhythm. They wield perspectival powers that they don’t fully understand, but that they know tend to make chaotic flow rhythms flow more rhythmically over time. They prescribe ways of re-structuring attention to their patients that they believe will re-stabilize flow rhythms by creating sustainably useful patterns of flow and no-flow.
An ouroboros is not a serpent, but a pattern created through variation in the rate at which the serpent’s attentive face eats its ends over time. You, reader, are an ouroboros. Flowing is your un-self-conscious self “consuming” your self-conscious self. You are a variable cycle of awareness, a melodic attentional trajectory, a flow rhythm making living art through the flux of lifetime.
Author’s note: The above is indebted to Dr. John Vervaeke’s cognitive science of relevance realization, William James’ pragmatic psycho-philosophy of habituation, Émile Durkheim’s functionalist sociology of collective effervescence, and Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist social philosophy.
More technically, flow states are characterized by the inhibition of meta-cognition (thinking about thoughts, self-consciousness) as well as the dynamic focusing of the historically calibrated perceptual-attentional system that is “you” on the sub-processes constitutive of an activity. Critically, perceptual-attentional focus is a holistic brain-body-context state, an environmentally contextualized full-body experience.
Although too wordy for the purposes of this post, a more precise way to state “a personal competency” would be “a personal property that is the average way a specific person performs an activity, as derived from a particular set of their historical performances of that activity.” It is better to watch someone try their hand at something at least a few times before gauging their skill level because individual performances are data points and skill as a concept is more useful for predicting when it is conceptualized as a trend across data points. Personal skill is a trans-temporal construct usefully characterizable with respect to its historical trajectory, connectivity with other skills, and force (degree of environmental reinforcement) — skills are habits with different degrees of automaticity that progress goals subjectively identified as morally good.
Judgments about skillfulness are exactly that: judgments. Judgments are derived from observations of contrasts between imagined possibilities and the important systems that are known to exist today. People occasionally defy our judgments, our expectations for the future, and thereby change our perspective by updating our knowledge of what exists today. It is crucial that social scientists not essentialize skillfulness for you, reader, whose beautifully individual “ways of moving through existence” can only be “yours.” Note that “yours” in this context only makes sense to you if “you” represents “this specific existence here” or “the particular being that is me.” Note that “you” can only represent a “you” that is totally individual, an organism that exists holistically, because it can only be all of it: “this you,” “(Your Name).” You aren’t “your body” — whose body? — you aren’t “your brain” — whose brain? — you are all of that which is you, you are an embodied brain-body system. “You” can only represent you, reader, and make sense when “you” is a specific individual living in the world with an unknowably unique autobiography and therefore an unknowably unique trajectory in existence.
It is cultural supremacism, or bigotry, to assume that cultural strangers use “skills” to refer to the same things we do.