Flow, Episode 10 – Free Will

You'll never find the enjoyment of a complex and meaningful life without listening to this climactic epi-Flow-de. Quitting at last week's penultimate one will take you plummeting right back into the anxiety zone. It's Mihaly's bombshell at the 11th hour; enjoying isolated Flow activities in your everyday life amounts to nothing without an overall purpose, which you're definitely not given and won't just find if you hang around for long enough waiting! This week we start with cave people who didn't need much Flow, and whizz through time to aliens of the future who finally have free will in their planet-sized brains, and miss out most things in between because there were only 90 minutes of recording. So if you've enjoyed the Flow season and you don't require every tiny detail to be concluded, you will love the bumpy climax to our magnum Flow-pus.We take one final look at fascist Flow and compare this with Greta Thunberg Flowing across the Atlantic. We deliver the promised argument about free will, ending it long before it's finished (you're welcome); while Dan holds onto the comfort of choice reassurance, James uses the subconscious and limitations of consciousness to claim free will is impossible. We look at infinite choice in contemporary life, regardless of our free will or lack thereof to make our decisions, because either way the decisions cause Flow-obstructing anxiety and a likely life of perpetually augmenting psychic entropy. And finally we look at the four life stages of self-development proposed in the book. Can you guess where you're at? And where does James think he is..?It's the final chapter of our season reading the book of Flow. Find all previous episodes of Private Practice Podcast and send us your concluding-but-not-conclusive thoughts on the Contact Us page of www.privatepracticepodcast.net – not that you will, for which we are probably grateful.'Flow' by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi claims to be 'The classic work on how to achieve happiness', although we think it's more like 'how to create states of purposeful complexity', which make for enjoyment, which can be interpreted as happiness. But obviously no one is going to write that on the cover of a book. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent over two decades looking scientifically at situations in which people from a variety of social and biological backgrounds report feelings of deep enjoyment. His studies revealed that what makes experience genuinely satisfying is a state of ordered concentration and complexity, which eliminates the psychic entropy that causes anxiety, and he called this 'Flow'. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.