Self-Complexity and Flow

The most ambitious claim in four decades of flow research was not about happiness, engagement, or the quality of experience. It was about the self. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s argument: flow’s most important consequence is the growth of complexity in the self—a progressive development in which each genuine flow experience leaves the practitioner slightly more capable of experiencing the world in its richness than she was before. Complexity has a specific technical meaning here. It is not complication—having many parts—but differentiation and integration simultaneously present: the practitioner perceives finer distinctions than before, and she holds those distinctions in coherent relation to one another. The sommelier who distinguishes two hundred grape varietals and can connect those distinctions to soil, climate, tradition, and regional history is both more differentiated and more integrated in the domain of wine than the casual drinker who perceives only red and white. The complex self is not merely more skilled; it is more alive, because it perceives the