"To live life as a work of art..."

Flow is the experience of enjoyment and it is probably the closest thing to a meaning of life we've found so far. Google it if you don't know about it already but maybe read through this first, it might be easy enough. I might be reinventing the wheel here, but I think we could all use a refresher.

In this lecture, Mihaly Csikeszentmihalyi says there is a difference between enjoyment and pleasure. Pleasure is a massage or a back rub (or ice cream). Enjoyment has a sense of achievement and active contribution, while pleasure doesn't. A google search for "Mihaly Csikeszentmihalyi" and "pleasure" brings an exact quote:

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the people who are most happy in life have a much higher percentage of enjoyment than pleasure. In fact, I think knowing this difference is the key ingredient to a happy life.

Whoah, big statement there, I know, but think about it. If you don't know the difference then there's no reason to get out of the warm bed in front of the Scrubs marathon on tv to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You're feeling good from pleasurable things right now, why go through the pain of travelling through the cold city to see another pleasureable thing? All the arguements about high-brow vs. low-brow aren't gonna work. And so you'll sit home, and have pleasure...but no enjoyment while all the busy bees ask you "when are you going to do something with your life?"

Lets do a couple of thought experiments together, after all what are blogs for if not for thinking aloud?

Enjoyment is the light at the end of the tunnel.
This article states that when we should praise children for working hard, not for being smart. When we praise them for being smart it sets up the following spiral in the child:

If I'm not good at this new task then that means I'm not smart, therefore I won't do it unless I'm good at it already and that will save me from realizing/having others realize that I'm not that smart.
You really should read the article, I'm paraphrasing from memory.

But, what if by praising a child for being smart, we are emphasizing the pleasurable aspects of things and maybe even devalueing - or worse, short-circuting - the enjoyment? Since enjoyment can be a rare thing (15% say they've never experienced it) and pleasure is only as far away as the fridge or the bath, isn't it possible we're reducing children's experiences with enjoyment to the point that they don't know it's even out there?

Think about children who are robbed of (i) the best feeling the brain can produce and (ii) the awareness that the brain can produce that feeling at all. Why bother going to school or work or doing chores or doing anything when the pinnacle of human experience can be found in watching a movie? What would they seek? Anything that would give them enjoyment. And what do we picture the sterotypical slacker doing most with his time that's notorious for being vehicles of flow?

Video games.

"It's a pillar! "It's a rope!" "It's a branch!"
What I become aware of at times like these is that these answers have been found before...but like the parable of the blind men in the room with the elephant, its we're realizing that they're all the same thing.

A large part of cognitive behavioral psychology teaches ways to deal with the anxiety that develops when we forsake pleasure for potential enjoyment, but people report being happier and more fullfilled when they do this. Religion teaches us to not seek pleasures in the flesh but do good works - and many people would testify that that has brought them bliss.

Look around. Some people seem to know about the pleasure vs. enjoyment dichotomy subconsciously and you can pick them out easily. They're the ones who write fan fiction or debate canon on forums for their favorite tv show. The pleasure they got from watching it wasn't enough, they wanted enjoyment. They're the ones who have blogs about what they've read, because the pleasure of reading it wasn't enough, they're the ones who go home and toss a ball around after a baseball game, who started hacking scripts together which then turned into full fledged applications, who created startups in their garage because they knew there was more out there.

Maybe the pleasure of the idea of recognition got them started, but the one thing about pleasure is that it's pretty common, and when the pleasure runs out (when the going gets tough), the ones who hadn't achieved enjoyment would lose interest, the ones that remained, the ones that we talk about, the tough that get going, they created whatever they created for it's own sake, for nothing but the joy of creating. Everything else was gravy.