Why Happiness is “Flow” for the Stoics

And How You Can Sustain It

Perhaps it was the morning before a battle. Or perhaps it was the evening after a stressful day arguing with politicians. We do not know, really. What we do know is that at some point, Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome, sat down to write out the following lines just for himself:

From Diognetus [I learned] not to busy myself about vain things, and not easily to believe those things, which are commonly spoken … nor to be mad after such things. Not to be offended with other men’s liberty of speech, and to apply myself unto philosophy (Meditations I.3, translation modified).

Aurelius’ practice appears to have been part of what the scholar Pierre Hadot has called a “spiritual exercise,” a daily activity to monitor and facilitate one’s way to happiness. By journaling, just for himself, Aurelius was able to detect any disturbances in his life, what the Stoics called “agitations,” and if he could not fix them immediately, then at least he could label them to know that they were there.

The reason the Stoics, and Aurelius only happens to be one of the more prominent of their practitioners, cared about “agitations” is because they signalled the presence of a vice. Vices were conceived as the opposite of virtue, and virtue was thought to be a quality of your character without which happiness would prove impossible.

Interestingly, then, the Stoics held that impediments to happiness were more easily detectable than happiness itself because they didn’t think that “happiness” (eudaimonia in Greek) was equivalent to felt positive emotions, such as elation and joy. Rather, Zeno, the man who founded Stoicism, argued that it is better understood as “a good flow of life” and as “living in alignment” (LS 63A, 63B).

To put their view memorably: happiness isn’t something that you feel; it’s something that you don’t feel: the aligned flow of your life.

That’s a little bit of an exaggeration, but the rhetoric highlights something important. The Stoic idea that happiness is flow is a different conception of “flow” than the account contemporary positive psychology offers, the one that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced: Cheek-sent-me-hi) has popularized. Martin Seligman is broadly recognized as the “father” of the contemporary field of positive psychology. He adapts Csikszentmihalyi’s flow as “engagement” in his account of happiness. Stoic flow is different from that too.

Given this context, I’m going to forward two closely related theses: first, that happiness as flow in the Stoic sense, is an intuitively plausible idea, and second that this idea is not like the sense of “flow” that contemporary psychologists articulate.

If I’m right, then the Stoics offer us some ancient wisdom that contemporary social science has missed. It’s worth, then, pausing to figure out what is at stake, especially if it’s something that we can fix by simply journaling.

Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow

To be clear, I think that Csikszentmihalyi is right about the phenomenon he describes. In his own words:

“Flow” is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake” (Flow p. 6).

The feeling of flow that he has in mind is most often experienced in activities like sports. It is the feeling of being “in the zone,” where your efforts match up with the challenges that come your way.

There is a reason why sports and similar activities are paradigmatic flow activities. In Csikszentmihalyi’s own words:

When describing optimal experience in this book, we have given as examples such activities as making music, rock climbing, dancing, sailing, chess, and so forth. What makes these activities conducive to flow is that they were designed to make optimal experience easier to achieve (Flow p. 72).

The harmony that characterizes “flow” for Csikszentmihalyi, then, is harmony among one’s intentions, one’s abilities and the difficulty of the activity one is performing. If the activity proves too hard, we drop out of flow and feel frustration. If it proves too easy, we get bored.

We enjoy this feeling, and Csikszentmihalyi’s evidence suggests that humans are driven to pursue flow states as much as, or even more than, sex. It is, then, a positive feeling, even if it’s not the focus of your awareness. What I mean is that when you’re winning at your favorite sport, you’re focused on the ball, but you’re also aware that you’re winning.

The general message of Flow is that, because this feeling is both so powerful and so positive, if you can learn how to turn your more ordinary activities into flow experiences, then your life will be far more enjoyable — it’ll be a happier life. That’s why key chapters in the book turn on the questions such as: How do I turn my job into a flow-like environment? How can I turn my family relationships into flow?

Ultimately, I think this sense of “flow” is compatible with the Stoic concept, but they are importantly different ideas.

Stoic Flow

If the paradigm case of flow for contemporary psychology is found in activities that are like sports, then the paradigm case of Stoic flow is found in a calm household.

Ryan Holiday, a marketing specialist and prominent contemporary practitioner of Stoicism, characterizes his ideal day as follows:

For me, the perfect Saturday involves getting up early. Not disgustingly early, just early enough that the morning is still fresh and young. I get my son dressed and we go for a long walk with the stroller while my wife gets much-deserved sleep.

Taking our time, we cover a few miles as the sun comes up, and then we come back home. I do a few pushups on the porch before coming back inside. (My son tries his best to do the same.) By now my wife is up, and we have a nice breakfast together as a family. Eggs from the chickens that graze on the grasses and grubs that grow around the coop behind the house, maybe some leftovers from the week thrown into something on the stove.

There’s nothing on the schedule or the calendar for the day. It’s Saturday, after all, and nobody else is working. The house is quiet. The phone hasn’t rung once. I head upstairs to my office and sit for a few minutes with my journal. And then, inspired by the stillness and the peace of the day, I usually do a little writing (“You Could Have Today”).

In this passage, Holiday is depicting the kind of “flow of life” that Zeno had in mind. It’s not a matter of having positive emotions, so much as having all the important elements of one’s life in order.

The Greek term for this alignment is homologoumenos, which might also be translated as agreement, and it might sound similar to the “harmony” that characterizes flow states for Csikszentmihalyi. The difference emerges when you consider what is being harmonized or aligned.

For Csikszentmihalyi, the harmony of “flow” is among your abilities, your intentions, and the difficulty of the activity you are working on.

For the Stoics, the alignment of “flow” is among all the dimensions of your life: your thoughts, your reasons, your understanding of the world, your actions following from those reasons, your relationships, and your responses to what is and is not under your control.

To put the difference another way, when Holiday sits down to write, because he is an author, he probably goes into flow. But that activity is just one part of his life’s larger alignment.

Learning How to Flow

If Csikszentmihalyi can teach you how to flow by reframing your daily activities, then Marcus Aurelius teaches us how to make our lives flow … by journaling.

If you’re going to do this right, then you need to write down something specific, not just your thoughts, not just your worries or anxieties.

You need to learn how to pay attention to the “agitations” of your life. These aren’t simply matters that irritate you; they are matters that disturb the alignment of your life.

To go back to Holiday’s ideal day, you might notice that he has quite a bit of flexibility in structuring it— that’s, of course, one of the great draws of the life of a writer. If he didn’t have that flexibility, he would be stuck travelling into work as he used to do when he was the director of marketing at American Apparel. Then he would have a decision to make: do I want to write, or do I want to be a marketer? The direction of his life tells you the choice that he made.

Another kind of agitation is the sort where you are upset, and you need to consider whether the matter is worth being upset about. People talking about you at the office in a derogatory manner may not matter — it could just be idle gossip. But it might also affect the prospects for your promotion. Will it get back to your immediate supervisor? Will it affect your performance report? If so, is there anything you can do about it? Is there anything you should do about it?

The first kind of meditation on agitations is about alignment among the greater goals of your life. The second kind is about your response to events in it. In both cases you are practicing what the Stoics called perception.

The goal is to eliminate these agitations, either by taking appropriate action, if the matter is under your control, or releasing your concern about it, if it isn’t. And if you learn to do that well, then you will have mastered the Stoic virtue of learning to flow.

Resources

What follows are just some of the main sources I used for the present article. I’ve linked to Amazon, but I deleted the referral id. So I’m not selling you anything with these, I’m just giving you access to what I honestly think is useful.

The work that scholars in the field, like myself, use is Long, A.A. and Sedley, D. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. The first volume is a translation into English, the second in the original Greek.

If you want Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations on its own, you can look at that piece.

Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life has been transformative for the contemporary revival of Stoicism. So has Ryan Holiday’s work, and you can buy his trilogy of short works in a complete set now.

Obviously, I also used Holiday’s blog from Medium: “You Could Have Today, Instead You Chose Tomorrow.”

Finally, you can look at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’ Flow for what is a really good book on this single conscious state.