In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book ‘Flow – the classic work on how to achieve happiness‘ he describes the results of a extensive study in which people reported more happier moments at work than during leisure time, although wished they had more leisure time. He puts it down to a number of things such as work providing the enviornment for being happier such as goals, challenges and feedback and often our leisure time does not. How much of our leisure time is watching TV/films where we are watching actors pretending to live another life instead of living our own to the full? Or watching sport instead of being active ourselves? Or listening to others make music instead of making it ourselves? He suggests our culture has lost the ability to make the most out of our leisure time and the consumption of mass media is not designed to make us happier, it is designed to make someone else money.
He also suggests that although people have more enjoyable moments at work where they feel challenged and achieving there is a cultural stereotype of work being something you are not supposed to enjoy, it is an imposition, a constraint and infringement of freedom and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible and as a result it is easy to disregard the positive times where you can find happiness in what you are doing.
Certainly makes you think about how you spend your leisure time and what your attitude to work is. Are you happy with work? Do you want help to find a way of making it enjoyable or understand what you really want to be doing? I used to be in a very ‘good’ job, well paid, I was good at it – but it was not ‘me’. I was not fulfilled. I am happy to say I have now found something that most of the time does not feel like work. I can help you too.
