Flow and Peak Experience

Flow and Peak Experience

Flow

On Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's discovery of optimal experience, the challenge-skill balance that produces absorption, and what it means to find an activity worth doing for its own sake

Flow and Peak Experience

Peak Experience

On Abraham Maslow's discovery that ordinary people have extraordinary moments, the B-values that characterize transcendence, and what the hierarchy of needs looks like when you take the top seriously

Flow and Peak Experience

The Edge State

On how extreme conditions — combat, high-altitude mountaineering, endurance sport, crisis surgery — produce the same absorption and clarity described in flow, and what the convergence reveals about ordinary life

Flow and Peak Experience

Positive Psychology and Its Limits

On Martin Seligman's turn from learned helplessness to human flourishing, the PERMA framework, and where the science of wellbeing runs up against the questions it was not built to answer

Flow and Peak Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience

On William James's founding account of mystical states as the center of religious life, the four marks that define them, and why his secular psychology of the unseen remains the most honest framework available