Beyond boredom and anxiety

What Hacker News says

1. eesmithMay 2023
   Google Scholar found some uses, like Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games. by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Review by: Murray S. Davis Source: Contemporary Sociology , Mar., 1977, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Mar., 1977), pp. 197-199 at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2065805.pdf

   > Sociologists will find most provocative the author's alternative to Erving Goffman's analysis of self-consciousness. Both are mystics in the sense that they investigate the conditions causing someone to lose self-consciousness. But Goffman is what I would call a pessimystic, for in Frame Analysis (1974:378ff) he examines how the self disappears in the "negative experience" that results when situational contradictions increase its stress; Csikszentmihalyi is an optimystic, for he ex- amines how the self disappears in the "flow experience" that results when situational consonances decrease its stress

   and "Anglophonia and Optimysticism: Sebastian Knight’s Bookshelves"

   > The Anglophone universe becomes a linguistic afterlife in which Nabokov optimistically hopes to resurrect his Russian art, just as he “optimystically” (the pun belongs to Sebastian Knight’s “Dean Park”) expects that the otherworld preserves the spirits of his dead.

   Further, https://archive.org/details/libraryjournal122sep/page/n489/m...

   > Coauthors Taylor and Crain discuss the concept of "optimysticism," first intro- duced in Taylor's Messengers of Light. The phrase refers to the ability to see beyond the worst of situations to the mystery of goodness at the core of life.

   and from 'The optimystic's handbook' at https://archive.org/details/optimysticshandb00tayl/page/n15/...

   > Optimysticism is the choice we make not only to experience the best of this world but also to see beyond this world into eternity, and in doing so, to live the mystery of the fullest here on earth.

   No well established meaning.

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2. philip1209Apr 2022
   “Alienated children in the suburbs and bored housewives in the homes need to experience flow. If they cannot get it, they will find substitutes in the form of escape.”

   Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in the book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play

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3. andrewlApr 2014
   I don't know if the term flow came before in the zone, but it has been in use for decades. Csikszentmihalyi published a book called Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play in 1975.
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4. jacobolusNov 2010
   2000? Csíkszentmihályi’s book (Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play) which introduced the term flow was published in 1975.

   Here’s a TED talk by Csíkszentmihályi (2004): http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.htm...

   Also worth reading: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig, 1974), The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche, 1872)

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