The weakness of age is the penalty paid by the folly of youth. The attitudes set in the early years continue to color how we experience work during the rest of our lives. On the job, people tend to use their mind and body to its fullest, and consequently feel that what they do is important, and feel good about themselves while doing it. Yet their motivation is worse than when they are at home, and so is the quality of their moods. Despite huge differences in salary, prestige, and freedom, managers tend to feel only somewhat more creative and active on the job, while clerical and assembly-line workers are no unhappier and dissatisfied. Everyone tends to experience work in the same way. A purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Traditionally, identity and self-respect have been based on the ability to obtain energy from the environment for ourselves and our families’ use. Whether the satisfaction an individual gets from doing a necessary job is partly genetically programmed, or is entirely learned from the culture, the fact is that more or less everywhere both men and women are now providers for their household. Civil rights have made it perfectly normal for both genders to be police officers, firefighters, lawyers, doctors, and engineers. 

And it is also becoming more common for men to share in the responsibility of taking care of the child, and we are actually seeing more fathers choose to become househusbands. In fact, 21 percent of men now stay at home to manage the house and child(ren), which is up from just 5 percent in 1989. Both men and women’s self-esteem is strongly attached to what happens to their families. Having a destitute parent or a child who has trouble in school is much greater load on their minds than whatever can happen at work. The double jeopardy that a family and a career impose can be a heavy burden on the self-esteem of people. However, most people still enjoy working for pay than they do staying at home because when a person is earning money, they feel like they are accomplishing more and expect more from themselves, and have the ability to support the house and money to buy what they want without depending on anyone else. When you have to stay at home and have a budget to live on, and are not paid for the work you do in the house, no matter how many hours you put in, you still have to complete your job and still have the same budget to maintain. These issues bring into focus why cleaning the house, cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry, fixing things around the house and balancing the checkbook might sometimes produce negative experiences in a person’s day. However, work can also be challenging. Although you are working for pay, you have to spend a certain number of hours in the office, take breaks at certain times, and are made to interact with people you may not like and hear things you may not want to hear, and you also get performance reviews. 

So, no matter how you feel about your job or how tired you are, one must always produce excellent work and be in a relatively good mood. You cannot ditch the guy at the water cooler, who is always waiting around to gossip, instead you have to find a friendly way of telling him that you are busy and hope he catches on. You may not like the overly enthusiastic guy, who works on the same floor as you, seems to take breaks at the same time of you and goes to the bathroom when you do, but you have to still be pleasant. And if you are tired, you cannot just fall asleep at your desk and recklessly complete a project. There are many high expectations to earning a paycheck. In a recent survey, 83 percent of executives, 77 percent of middle level employees, and 61 percent of the unemployed reported that they were satisfied with their lives. So it seems that people who are employed and tend to earn more money are more satisfied with their lives. Perhaps that is because they more than likely are doing jobs they were highly trained for. Nonetheless, without the goal and the challenges usually provided by a job, only a rare self-discipline can keep the mind focused intensely enough to insure a meaningful life. 

When we look at flow in the lives of adults, one finds more occasions of it on the job than in free time. Now, remember, flow does not mean you are happy in the moment, it just means you are doing something you find important and that adds to your self-esteem. Them moments when a person is in a high-challenge, high-skill situation, accompanied by feelings of concentration, creativity, and satisfaction, were reported more often at work than at home. Work is like a game that we do during the day, it usually has clean goals and rules of performance. It provides feedback either in the form of knowing that one has finished a job well done, in terms of measurable sales, or through evaluation by one’s supervisor. A job usually encourages concentration and prevents distractions; it also allows a variable amount of control, and—at least ideally—its difficulties match the worker’s skills. Thus work tends to have the structure of other intrinsically rewarding activities that provide flow, such as games, sports, music, and art. In comparison, much of the rest of life lacks these elements. When spending time at home with the family or alone, people often lack clear purpose, do not know how well they are doing, are distracted, feel that their skills are underutilized, and as a result feel bored, worthless, sad, or anxious. So it is no wonder that the quality of experience at work is generally better than one would expect.

While I was fearing it, it came, but came with less fear, because that fearing it so long has almost made it dear. There is a fitting dismay, a fitting despair. This is harder knowing it is due, than knowing it is here. The trying on the utmost, the morning it is new, is terribler than wearing it a whole existence.  I was waiting so long for a miracle to come and everyone told me to be strong, to hold on and do not shed a tear. Superiority to fate is difficult to learn. This is not conferred by any, but possible to earn. A pittance at a time, until, to one’s surprise, the heart with strict economy subsists till Paradise.  So through darkness and good times I knew we would make it through. I stepped from plank to plan so slowly and cautiously; the stars about my head I felt, about my feet the sea. And the World thought I had it all, but I was waiting for you. I knew not but the next would be my final inch, –this gave me that precarious gait some call experience. I see a light in the sky and oh it is almost blinding me. One day is there of the series termed Christmas day, celebrated part at table, part in memory. I cannot believe that I have been touched by an Angel with love. We have been pursued by learned Angels in scholastic skies!  

Neither patriarch nor purulent, I dissect the play; seems it to y hooded thinking, reflex holiday. Let the rain come down, say you will never let me down, and wash away my tears. Let it fill my heart and drown my fears. Let it shatter the walls for a new Sun. A new day has come. Had there been no sharp subtraction from the early Sun, not an acre or a caption where was once a room. Where it was dark now there is light. Where there was pain, now there is joy. Where there was weakness, I found my strength, all in the eyes of a boy. Not a mention, whose small pebble wrinkled any bay, unto such, were such assembly, this were Christmas day. I taste a liquor never brewed, from tankards scooped in pearl; not all the vats upon the Rhine yield such an alcohol. Inebriate of air am I, and debauchee (a person given to excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures) of dew reeling, through endless Winter days, from inns of molten blue. When landlords turn the drunken bee out of the foxglove’s door, when butterflies renounce their drams, I shall but drink the more! Till seraphs swing their snowy hats, and saints to windows run, to see the little tippler leaning against the sun!  

It dropped so low in my regard I heard it hit the ground, and go to pieces on the stones at the ground, and go to pieces on the stones at the bottom of my mind. I am in the dark, I am underwater. Searching for a teardrop in the water. I can feel your shadow over me, I can hear your whisper in my ear. The ocean is bleeding; it is taking me down. I am falling, you are watching me fall. I am watching as your body’s falling deeper and you are looking for a teardrop, here it is. Stars, amid profound Galaxies, at that grand Right hand!  Yet blamed the fate that fractures, less than I reviled myself for entertaining plated wares upon my silver shelf. I remember the way you used to dance, then I remember you that you will never dance again. Now you are fallen, I am falling with you, and with us, our blood, our love. If the foolish call them flowers, need the wiser tell? If the savants classify them, it is just as well. Our heartbeats used to move in time, but they have slowed down, left us behind. This is the story of a fallen love. Those who read the Revelations must not criticize those who read the same edition with beclouded eyes!  I like quiet times alone—they make me realize how very special you are to me. Happy Mother’s Day With All My Love. Momz—I love you. Bye (P.S. Daddy Wrote This for Me).  

Heaven promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage effect of what is called miraculous interposition. Although much has been written about how the environment in which one lives affects one’s mind, there is actually very little systematic knowledge on this topic. Since time immemorial, artist, scholars, actors, and religions mystics have chosen carefully the surroundings that best allowed serenity and inspiration. It is fortunate all will come right in Heaven, for it is certain too much goes wrong on Earth. In contemporary America, research institutes and corporate Research and Development laboratories are generally sited among rolling green hills, and meadows spanning as far as the eye can see, with rocky cliffs bordering along raging seas. Near quaint stone churches, tiny pubs, and stone cottages with flowerboxes overflowing with color, even on rain-filled days. There are fields filled with sheep, tiny roads, and Irish music filling the air with song. Heaven often plans more mercifully for us than we plan for ourselves. If we are to trust the reports of creative thinkers and artists, actors, congenial surroundings are often the source of inspiration and creativity. They often echo Ryan Phillippe’s words, which he wrote on a romantic lake: I feel that the various features of Nature around me provoke an emotional reaction in the depth of my heart, which inspires my career. If once we pushed on to the coast and separated, we should never be able to see that place again with our eyes, or do any more than sinners did with Heaven,–wish themselves there, but know they can never come at it. 

Ryan says some of his most important insights came from his own backyard, where he invited colleagues from all over the World to hangout and talk about life and computer science. After talking to Ryan, one gets the impression without his lush green backyard and gorgeous planets, his career would have not been worthwhile.  To make a creative change in the quality of experience, it might be useful to experiment with one’s surroundings as well as with activities and companions. Outings and vacations help to clear the mind, to change perspectives, to look at one’s situation with fresh eyes. Taking charge of one’s home or office environment—throwing out the excess, redecorating to one’s taste, making it personal and psychologically comfortable, could be the first step in reordering one’s life. No heretic can learn the language of Heaven. To be just is to deserve celestial assistance.  We often hear of how important biorhythms are, and how differently we feel on Blue Mondays as compared to weekends. In fact, the way each day is experienced changes considerably from morning to night. Early morning and late nights ten to be low on many of the beneficial emotions for some, whereas mealtimes and afternoons are high. The largest changes occur when children leave school and adults come home from work. Peradventure at this instant, there are beings gazing up to this very World as their future Heaven. However, the Universe is all over a Heaven: nothing but stars on stars, throughout infinities of expansion. 

Not all the contents of consciousness travel in the same direction: when out with friends in the evening teenagers report increasing excitement hour after hour, but at the same time they also feel that they are gradually losing control. In addition to these general trends, there are a number of individual differences: morning individuals and night individuals relate to time of day in opposite ways. Despite the bad reputation of certain days of the week, on the whole people seem to experience each day more or less like the next. True, as one would expect, Friday afternoons and Saturdays are marginally better than Sunday evenings and Monday mornings, but the differences are less than one would expect. Much depends on how we plan our time. If man were wholly made in Heaven, why catch we hell-glimpses? Sunday mornings can be quite depressing if one has nothing to do, but if we look forward to a scheduled activity or a familiar ritual such as going to church services, or the park with our dad, then it can be a high point of the week. Heaven often plans more mercifully for us than we plan for ourselves. The man who is a hero can withstand unjust opinion. Is it not time to begin to take more counsel of humanity, and less of your courage?  

 One interesting finding is that people report significantly more physical symptoms, such as headaches and backaches, on weekends and at times when they are not studying or working. Even the pain of gastrolienal intestinal is tolerable when individuals with the condition are with friends, or involved in an activity; it flares up when they are under extreme stress or are alone with nothing to do. Heaven will not always come to witness when they are called. Apparently when psychic energy is not committed to a definite task it is easier to notice what goes what with our bodies. This fits with what we know about the flow experience: when playing a close tournament, players can go for hours without noticing hunger or headache; when filming for twenty-four hours, actors can ignore pain and fatigue until the event is over. When attention is focused, minor aches and pains have no chance to register in consciousness. Again, with time of day as with the other parameters of life, it is important to find out what rhythms are most congenial to you personally. There is no day nor hour that is best for everyone. Reflection helps to identify one’s preferences, and experimentation with different alternatives—getting up earlier, taking naps in the afternoon, eating at different times—helps to find the best set of options. To live at all is a high vocation: to live forever may truly appeal us. Toil we not here? And shall we be forever slothful elsewhere?  

In all of these examples, we proceeded as if person were passive objects whose internal states are affected by what they do, who they are with, where they are, and so forth. While this is true in part, in the last analysis it is not the external conditions that count, but what we make of them. It is perfectly possible to be happy doing housework with nobody around, to be motivated when working, to concentrate when talking to a child. Basically, to have excellence of daily life finally depends not on what we do, but how we do it. Nevertheless, before looking at how one can control the quality of experience directly by transforming information in consciousness, it is important to reflect on the effects that the daily environment—the places, people, activities, and times of day—has on us. Even the most accomplished actor, detached from all influences, will prefer to sit under one particular tree, eat a certain food, and be with one companion rather than another. Most of us are much more responsive to the situations in which we find ourselves.  Thus the first step in improving the quality of life is to pay close attention to what we do every day, and to notice how we feel in different activities, places, times of day and with different companions. Although the general trends will probably apply also in your case—you will find yourself happier when in nature and most often in flow when in active leisure—there might be also surprising revelations. Honest folk get to Heaven by different roads.   It may turn out that you really like being alone. Or that you like working more than you through. Or that reading makes you feel better afterwards than watching television. Or vice versa on all these counts. There is no law that reports we have to experience life in the same way as others. What is vital is to find out what works best in your case.  Celestial sounds have sometimes been heard on Earth.  

No civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man every knows what a pleasure is. So the first step in improving the quality of life consists in engineering daily activities so that one gets the most rewarding experiences from them. This sounds simple, but the inertia of habit and social pressure are so strong that many people have no idea which components of their lives they actually enjoy, and which contribute to stress and depression. Have always the idea of pleasing before you, and you cannot fail to please.  Sweet pliability of a man’s spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which eat expectation and sorrow of their weary moments! Keeping a journal or reflecting on the past day in the evening are ways to take stock systematically of the various influences on one’s mood. After it is clear which activities produce the high points in one’s day, it becomes possible to start experimenting—by increasing the frequency of the good experiences, and decreasing that of the others.  

When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. A somewhat extreme example of how this might work was reported by Dr. M.R Harris, when he studied mental health in the Netherlands. In his hospital, patients were routinely given the electrical stimulation mapping (ESM) to find out what they do all day, what they think about, and how they feel. Every pleasure worth a wish is in the power of almost all mankind.  One of the patients, a chronic schizophrenic woman, whose name I cannot release for privacy concerns, had been hospitalized for over ten years, showed the usual confused thought patterns and low effect of severe mental pathology, which means she had distortions of perception, delusions, hallucinations, and usual behaviors, such as thought disorders. Basically, she reflected a loss of contact with perceived reality, which is sometimes known as a psychotic disorder. 

However, during the two weeks of the ESM study, the female patients reported quite happy moods twice. In both cases, she had been taking care of her fingernails. Thinking that it was worth a try, the staff had a professional manicurist teach her the skills of the trade. The patient took eagerly to the instruction, and she was soon caring for the nails of the rest of the patients. The disposition of the young lady changed so drastically that she was released into the community under supervision; she hung a shingle on her door, and within the year she was self-sufficient. No one knows why paring nails was the challenge this woman needed, and if one interpreted this story psychoanalytically, perhaps one would realize that when people are trusted, and allowed to care for themselves, and are taught with care, they can recover.  

The moral of the story is for that one lady, at that particular stage in life, being a manicurist allowed at least a pale semblance of flow to enter her life. It is painful to be frustrated in what we propose as our pleasure. I have known a good man wish to have bad news true, merely because he had related them: and we may conceive a saint vexed at not finding a man dead, when he had digested a funeral sermon in his mind, and was ready to bury him. Every pleasure worth a wish is in the power of almost all mankind. To make life pleasant, we must have our trifling amusements as well as our sublime transports. Pleasure given in society, like money lent in usury, returns with interest to those who dispense it. Anybody’s life may be just as romantic and strange and interesting if one fails as if one succeeds. All the difference is that the last chapter is wanting in the story.   

In no case, perhaps, is the decision of a human being impartial, or totally uninfluenced by sinister and selfish motives. Maintenance activities are quite varied in terms of their experiential profile. Few people enjoy housework, which tends to be generally negative or neutral along all dimensions. If one were to look in finer detail, however, it would turn out that cooking is often a good experience, especially compared to cleaning the house. Our motives are always pretty mixed. Personal care—washing, dressing, and so forth—is usually neither can be a good experience, but might be a negative experience for others. Eating, as mentioned earlier, is one of the most beneficial parts of the day, for many people, in terms of affect and motivation, whereas it is low in cognitive activity and seldom on occasion of flow. All the Earth, though it were full of kind hearts, is but a desolation and a desert place to a father when his children are absent. Nonetheless, I enjoy a nice hot shower because the soap has a great scent (white Dial), and the hot water feels so good on my body, it motivates me to feel fresh and clean, and have a nicely pressed outfit to wear, and fresh breath. And coming home to a clean house, with a good scent, is the best thing in the World. Exercising is also highly motivation and a great way to create flow, as well as reading a book, or learning a new skill.  

The hope of fame, desire of honor and preferment, envy, emulation, and the dread of disgrace, are motives which co-operate in suppressing that aversion to death or mutilation, which nature hath implanted in the human mind. Driving a car, which is the last major component of the maintenance category, is surprisingly a beneficial part of life. While neutral in terms of happiness and motivation, it requires skill and concentration, and some people experience flow more often while driving than in any other part of their lives.  As one would expect, leisure tends to include the more beneficial experiences of the day. Leisure is when people feel most motivated, when they say that they want to do whatever they are doing. Yet here too, we find some surprises. Passive leisure, which includes media consumption and resting, while it is a motivating and reasonably happy activity, involves little mental focus, and rarely produces flow. Socializing—conversing with my son in the morning without much ulterior purpose except the interaction itself—is generally highly beneficial even though it seldom involves high mental concentration. The motives even of our best action will not always bear examination. People are so prejudiced and so used to humbug that for the most part they do not in the least know their own motives for what they do.

Romance and Netflix and Chill function may provide some of the best moments of the day. But for the most people these activities are rather rare, so they fail to make much of a difference in the overall quality of life unless they are embedded in the context of an enduring relationship that provides emotional and intellectual rewards as well. Active leisure is another source of extremely beneficial experiences. When individuals participate in a hobby (something fun that they love to do), get involved in exercise, play a musical instrument, or go out to a movie, play video game, or go to a restaurant, they tend to be more happy, motivated, concentrated, and more often in flow than in any other part of the day. It is in these contexts that all the various dimensions of experience are most intensely focused and in harmony with each other. It is important to remember, however, that active leisure usually takes up only between a fourth and a fifth of person’s free time and for many it is vastly overshadowed by the amount of time spent in passive leisure activities such as watching television.  However, never give more than a second place to the World’s opinion. 

Another way to look at the patterns in your life is to ask which activities are the happiest? Which are most motivated? If we do that, we see that happiness is highest when taking care of our hygiene, exercising, reading a good book, or for most people eating, when in active leisure, and when conversing with people; it is lowest when we are dealing with business meetings or stuck in traffic. Motivation follows a similar pattern, with the addition that passive leisure, which does not make one happy, is something we usually want to do anyway. Concentration is highest on the job, when driving, and in active leisure—these are the activities that during the day require the most mental effort. The same activities also provide the highest rates of flow, and so does socializing with others.  When we look at the pattern this way, it again shows that active leisure provides the best experience overall, and some would say so does housework, personal care, but idling provides the worst experience. Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often. 

Men have stronger arms, and heads for harder work, but they have no such hearts as women. And the World has been led by the heart in all ages. The quality of life depends on what we do in the eighty or so years we are allotted, and what passes in consciousness during that time. Different activities typically affect the quality of experience in rather predictable ways. If all through life we only do depressing things, it is unlikely that we will end up having lived a very happy life. Usually each activity has both beneficial and negative qualities. When we eat, for instance, we tend to feel more of a beneficial affect than usual; a graph of a person’s level of happiness during the day resembles the profile of the Golden Gate Bridge across San Francisco Bay, with the high points corresponding to mealtimes. At the same time, mental concentrations tend to be rather low when a person eats, and one rarely experiences flow. There are those who like not to be detected in the possession of a heart. The psychological effects of activities are not linear, but depend on their systemic relation to everything else we do. For instance, even though food is a good mood, we cannot achieve happiness by eating around the clock. Meals rise the level of happiness, but only when we spend around five percent of our waking time eating; if we spent one hundred percent of the day eating, food would quickly cease to be rewarding. 

The same is true of most of the other good things in life: Netflix and Chill, relaxation, television watching, in small doses tend to improve the quality of daily life considerably, but the effects are not additive; a point of diminishing returns is quickly reached. We are all good and bad. Give me the heart that is huge as all Neptune; and unless a man be a villain outright, account him as one of the best tempered blades in the Universe. Unauthorized and abhorrent thoughts will sometimes invade the best human heart. The traditional view of the production process is that capital is subject to diminishing returns: As the stock of capital rises, the extra output produced from an additional unit of capital falls. In other words, when workers already have a large quantity of capitol to use in producing goods and services, giving them an additional unit of capital increases their productivity only slightly.  As we see, when adults work (or when children do schoolwork) they tend to be less happy than average and their motivation is considerably below normal. At the same time their level of concentration is relatively quite high, so their mental process seems to be engaged more than they are the rest of the day. Surprisingly, work also often produces flow, presumably because challenges and skills tend to be high when working, and goals and feedback are often clear and immediate. 

Many of us are but sorry hosts to ourselves. Some hearts are hermits. Of course work is such a broad category that seems impossible to make an accurate generalization about it. In the first place, it makes sense to think that the quality of experience when working would depend on the kind of job one has. A traffic controller must concentrate much more on his job than a night watchman. A self-employed entrepreneur presumably is much more motivated to work than a clerk in a government office. While this is true, the characteristic signature of work persists despite the very real difference. For example, the experiences of managers when they are on the job resembles their own experience when they are at home. Nothing like a cold heart; warm ones are ever chafing, and getting into trouble. Another problem of generalizing about work is that the same job will have many aspects that are experienced differently. A manager might love to work on a project but strongly dislike to sit in conferences, while an assembler might love to set up a machine but strongly dislike taking inventory. Nevertheless, it is still possible to talk about the distinctive quality of the work experience in comparison with other general activity categories. The more it resembles a flow activity, the more involved we become, and the more beneficial the experience. When the job presents clear goals, unambiguous feedback, a sense of control, challenges that match the worker’s skills, and few distractions, the feelings it provides are not that different from what one experiences in a sport or an artistic performance. 

Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man. The diminishing returns to capital has another important implication: Other things equal, it is easier for a country to grow fast if it starts out relatively poor. This effect of initial conditions on subsequent growth is sometimes called the catch-up effect. In poor countries, workers lack even the most rudimentary tools and, as a result, have low productivity. Small amounts of capital (cash) investments would substantially raise the workers’ productivity. By contrast, workers in rich countries have large amounts of capital with which to work, and this partly explains their high productivity. Yet with the amount of capital per worker already so high, additional capital investment has a relatively small effect on productivity. Studies of international data on economic growth confirm this catch-up effect: Controlling for other variables, such as the percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) devoted to investment, poor countries do tend to grow at a faster rate than rich countries. For myself, it would be no great indulgence to be kept shut up in those mansions of which they preach, having a natural longing for motion and the chase. The way to Heaven is as up a ladder, and the way to hell is as down a hill. And Earth was a Heaven a little the worse for wear. And Heaven was Earth, done up again to look like new. Compassion the heart decides for itself. It is a poor heart that never rejoices. To this mind of the heart, some bright ray of the truth shot straight.