How We Lost the Flow
The flow state was our pathway to liberation—before it got taken over by profiteers
I’ve spent much of my life in pursuit of flow.
I didn’t know anything about flow states when I was younger—I didn’t even know they had a name. But that didn’t stop me from chasing after them.
I felt them. That’s all that mattered
You’re in the flow when everything happens effortlessly. You don’t even think about it. You get caught up in an activity, and it seems so easy and natural.
This typically happens when you’re playing. That was how I first discovered the flow state. I felt it when I played in a game or sport, especially basketball in a fast-paced playground game.
When I was in the flow state, I could do things with ease that in other situations would seem impossible.
But I felt it even more intensely when I played the piano.
Once I discovered jazz, I was hooked on it. Something about musical improvisation seemed to amplify the flow state to rapturous levels. I got caught up in the music like I was a surfer riding a big wave.
When I was a teenager, one of the surf magazines published a short story about a wave that kept circling an island—it never broke on the shore. It just kept going round and round.
If a surfer got on that wave they could ride it forever. That’s what playing jazz felt like to me.
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Some people are blessed to experience flow states at work. For them, work is literally play.
That’s how the work song developed. It could transform the drudgery of labor into something trance-like. And not only did the hours of work pass by more rapidly, but you also worked more efficiently when in a flow state.
The work song was the first attempt in history to monetize the flow state.
But, as mentioned above, I really didn’t know anything about flow back then. I just felt it, and kept chasing after it.
One day, however, I attended a talk on creativity by jazz pianist Denny Zeitlin, one of the smartest people I’ve met in my life. He not only plays the keyboard at the absolute top level, but is an intellectual and psychiatrist—and has taught others as professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.
“The flow state is our most powerful weapon against the intense rationalization of our lives.”
Denny introduced me to the flow concept that day. I learned about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is still the key text on the subject.
Csikszentmihalyi helped me understand my music vocation more clearly than I’d ever done previously. In fact, when he described what flow really is, he immediately compared it to jazz.
Flow, he told an interviewer, happens when you are
completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.
Some years later, while researching my book Healing Songs, I dug much deeper into this subject. And the more I probed into the neuroscience and physiology of music, the more I realized how essential flow is for everybody—not just the performer, but also the audience.
A skilled musician guides an audience into the flow state. That’s the main purpose of a musical performance.
Every musician is like a conductor, and the double meaning of that term is important here. A conductor is someone who guides a musical performance, but the word also describes a person who takes others on a trip—for example, the conductor on a bus or train.
But no bus trip can match the journey provided by an intense musical performance.
It feels liberating. It can be soul-shaking. That’s why we listen to music in the first place.
We are all travelers. We’re all seeking flow.
The flow state is important because it’s our most powerful weapon against the intense tech-driven rationalization of our lives.
The dominance of STEM-thinking has left so many of us hollow inside. In a world of intense rationality and digitization, people’s inner lives are gradually destroyed. They are hungry for something deeper, holistic, and more vital than data manipulation can deliver.
Just look at all the metrics on self-harm, suicide, addiction, depression, psychic disorders of every sort. People will tell you that you can’t measure a crisis in the inner life, but that’s not true—there are plenty of numbers and charts that spell it out.
The deepest thinkers of the last century have grasped this—and laid the foundation for flow psychology. I need to give credit to philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1942), seldom read nowadays—but it's no coincidence that his work influenced Proust (the deepest psychological novelist of them all), or that Bergson wrote one of the great philosophical studies of comedy.
These insights are developed further in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and others—all the way up to the leading thinkers of our own time, such as Charles Taylor and Iain McGilchrist.
These rank among the wisest individuals of modern times. But their wisdom is shut out in the cold by a data-driven, profit-driven, device-driven culture.
Even worse, we are now robbed of our flow state—which is now getting hijacked for corporate enrichment.
That’s why the intense monetization of flow is so disturbing to me.
Flow shouldn’t be subjugated by profiteers. It is meant for play, not profits. But that’s changed in recent years.
Consider the rapid growth in legal gambling.
Gambling puts us into a flow state, just like playing music—but in a way that can be easily manipulated by profiteers.
Until recently, gambling was constrained by legal restrictions—which were based on a clear and obvious understanding of the huge social harm it causes.
But there was too much profit potential for both governments (who now run the largest gambling operations in the world) and businesses. The more people got addicted to the flow state achieved through gambling, the richer they got. So vices previously controlled by the Mafia now are exploited by politicians and Wall Street.
Even more widespread is the hijacking of the flow state to sell advertising—promoted by social media platforms. TikTok started this-but it is now everywhere online.
Scroll-and-swipe apps are now the dictators of the flow state for a billion or so people.
Their role model is narcotics, by the way. That, too, was once a destructive blight only criminals took advantage of. But it has now gone legit with support from the wealthy and powerful.
Scroll-and-swipe only got invented a few years ago, but it is already far bigger than the drug business. By the way, it is also run by a cartel—I call it the dopamine cartel.
Substacker Ken Klippenstein has an even better name. He calls it the Appistocracy. I like that term, and will start using it myself. It aptly describes the forces arrayed against us.
In our age of Appistocracy, everything online is getting turned into a kind of casino. Web interfaces deliberately emulate slot machines. The pacing, the colors, the hypnotic repetitions, and the like.
Philosopher Charles Taylor writes about this in his new book Cosmic Connections—published at age 92! ( and maybe the deepest work ever completed by a nonagenarian writer):
Casinos know how to organize the environment so that gamblers on slot machines get into the flow, where catastrophic losses can’t dislodge, but on the contrary intensify the feeling of ‘just one more time.’ And Apple designs its machines to hook people, especially children, into the ‘one more time’ flow. The lack of meaning can be felt here, often very strongly, when you stop and sense: What have I been doing? And we overwhelmed by the sense of emptiness—which is one more reason to go on ‘just one more time.’
Those are profound words—and a harsh indictment.
Taylor goes on to say that the same feeling of flow could come from watching a sunset or gardening or music. But those don’t enrich profiteers.
But how strange to hear Apple listed alongside casinos and cartels.
Just a few years ago, that linkage would have made no sense. But tech companies have changed—and now the subjugation of flow in the service of corporate profits is their central mission.
Mark Zuckerberg can’t get richer unless he manipulates people through the flow experience. Over at Apple, Tim Cook can’t maximize his stock options unless he increases the addictive flow of his devices. Google is doing the same. As is TikTok, Twitter, and many other platforms.
And there are hundreds of smaller platforms that hope to do the same—but they aren’t big enough (yet) to join the cartel.
This is where I remind you that there are pathways to the flow state that don’t go through Silicon Valley.
Dancing and singing can deliver it just as surely as swiping and scrolling. A walk in nature or playing with a dog create flow just as surely as an online casino.
By choosing the former, instead of the latter, you will end up richer in multiple ways. That’s far better than letting the Appistocracy enrich itself at our expense.
It's implicit in what you write, but to make another meaning of "conductor" explicit: it's the ability to carry/sustain an electrical current.
The flow is another word for grace or chi or prana. Many cultures use a different word for the same thing: that flow of energy that sustains our being. Without that energy flow, nothing would exist. We are always in that flow and at the unconscious (spiritual) level we always know it. The times you write about are when you become aware of it and can sense it physically and emotionally. From my perspective, that flow is God's unconditional love. But others have different names and that's fine by me. Peeling away all the self-imposed junk that keeps me from consciously reveling in the flow every minute of my life has been my life's focus. Go with the flow, or vaya con Dios. Same thing.