The Good Life

Reading about evolutionary psychology is interesting in and of itself. But I realize that another reason I read up on this stuff is that I am curious about the best way to live--the way to have a meaningful life. Probably every human being is interested in finding out the best way to live, but a lot of people just get stuck in the materialism phase, acting out what their Pleistocene brain tells them to do (such as accumulating things, because resources were always limited up until the present). But, like the Ecclesiastes story tells us, there can be more to life than this.

You may be aware that there are many books out there along the lines of "positive psychology," "happiness," and "flow." In many cases evolutionary psychology is a part of figuring out what the good life is, because if we don't understand what our basic instincts are, we can't work to move beyond them. These books also address how it can be that we live lifestyles of comfort that would be unimaginable to earlier peoples, but we still don't seem to be that happy.

Right now I am reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is "the creative moment when a person is completely involved in an activity for its own sake." --TED talk by Csikszentmihalyi.

I think it is something like "being in the moment" or "in the zone." It's always seemed to me that my mind just buzzes away without being in the moment, which is why I wanted to read this book.

He talks about how mostly we are either doing what our instincts tell us to do or whatever society has conditioned us to do. He points out something the kids and I have joked about forever: at school, kids are told to work hard in kindergarten so you can go to first grade, to work hard in 5th grade to get ready for middle school, work hard in high school so you can go to a great college, and work hard in college to get a good-paying job, etc. etc. until pretty soon you're looking at retirement. (What about doing it all for the joy of finding out about the universe you live in?)

He calls that state when we're not in flow "psychic entropy," meaning that consciousness is unstructured if we don't work at it by engaging in creative activities (including all kinds of work and other things) that challenge us just at the right level.

He points out that "enjoyment," which is what we get from flow, is different from pleasure, which we could get from eating or sex--pleasure is fine, but it doesn't help us grow and reach new levels of organization of our consciousness.

I think I experience flow when gardening. It's one time I don't feel as though I really ought to be doing something else. And one interesting thing leads to another.

Another life-changing book for me was The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at UVA. Haidt talks about flow and all sorts of other things--basically how to find happiness, given the human nature we're born with and drawing on "ancient wisdom" as well. More about that later.

Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness website