Anxiety Isn't Just About Scales, It's About the Experience

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Anxiety can be either just worrying, because you're just thinking about it, whether you're doing it right. Or at the extreme end, if the challenges are so hard, but your skills are not anywhere close to being able to meet them, then that's anxiety producing. If i have a criticism of this model, and also a slight resistance to to we, you know, when you keep emphasizing that everything is about developing the scales and the times that it takes to develop the skilli,. well, i think that’s true of a lot, probably most flow activities, it feels like. It doesn't seem to me to map much on skills,you know, hat.

David and Tamler lose themselves in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (pr. ‘chick sent me high’) classic paper on the concept of flow. We talk about the features of flow activities – loss of ego, the merging of your awareness with the activity, and autotelic (not what you think) enjoyment. What makes flow activities so rewarding? Do you need to develop skills over many years to experience them? Do easy and natural social interactions count as flow?

Plus as men of pure virtue, we call an audible and choose not to make fun of a recent paper (with a student as lead author). Instead we pilot a not fully formed idea: “Substack Starters." Now that the economy is tanking, do we have any heterodox beliefs that might lead to profitable Substacks?