I’m rethinking the whole “flow” bandwagon and construct.
I think it’s been appropriated by the performants.
That weird cult of meritocracy based entre-(pre)neural self-creators. Kind of like what they’ve done for mindfulness as a lubricant for better functioning business minds. Bleh.
Their “enablers” of flow state are: immersion in a task that’s challenging but not too challenging. This is a cargo cult byproduct of something deeper. That is: you wouldn’t need the artificial gravitas of a situational task to fix attention if your attention was not so fractured to begin with.
And to do mundane tasks, with full attention ala zen, has always been the gold standard of flow states. This immersion of the modern day flow junkies is not a being in the moment but a loss of a sense of time and self-awareness that sounds very similar to deep attachment. A zombie working state. Kind of the opposite of true mindfulness. And the “zone”, in high performance parlance, has been conflated with all of this in a sticky threesome.