I suspect psychologists focus on the experiential quality of flow due to the lingering influence of late-eighteenth-century utilitarianism. As first proposed by Jeremy Bentham, the English jurist, philosopher, and social reformer, happiness is a matter of having pleasure and avoiding pain, and nothing more. Any pleasure will do. The “lower” pleasures (of warmth, play, food, sex, and so on) count as much as any other. “Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin [a game of darts] is as good as poetry,” Bentham famously said. This flatters the surfer who is not fond of books. Yet the higher/lower dichotomy also just doesn’t fit the pleasures of surfing. They aren’t the “higher,” intellectualized pleasures of reading a novel or a poem or a philosophical treatise. They also aren’t akin to the “low” pleasures of scarfing a cheeseburger, either. The pleasures of surfing are somewhere in the middle, like the pleasures of jazz improvisation or fine cooking.

  After a strict upbringing under Bentham’s teachings, John Stuart Mill hoped to show that a hedonic utilitarianism is not so beneath human dignity as to be “worthy only of swine” as it can seem. To Mill, Bentham’s mistake was to discount the “higher” pleasures: “There is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.”*11 So Mill placed the pleasures of poetry and intellectual contemplation categorically above such mere “lower” pleasures as warmth, play, food, and sex. Better, as he put it, to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied, and, I presume, to be an angst-ridden existentialist philosopher than a contented non-reflective surfer.

  Is this just elitism? Mill thinks not. Any “competent judge,” he says, would have a “decided preference” for the higher over the lower. The people who “addict themselves to inferior pleasures,” such as the pleasures of surfing, simply don’t know what they are missing. They aren’t “susceptible to both classes of pleasure,” so, you see, they don’t “ever knowingly and calmly” prefer the lower. It’s simply a matter of surfers not learning the pleasures of reading books, that is, the unwashed’s lack of exposure to the finer things.

  To which the surfer will respond, yeah, actually no; that’s definitely wrong. To take myself as a counterexample, I enjoy both surfing and philosophy immensely, and I wouldn’t necessarily give up surfing if I were forced to choose between them. I firmly prefer a lot of both, intermingled, with a flexible schedule. The thought of giving up either one for the other feels less like a “deliberate preference” expressive of happiness than an existential crisis. I’m glad to have philosophy in case I become injured or aged and incapable of surfing. I’m also banking on surfing if a head injury leaves me unable to do philosophy. I have no plan if or when I become unable to do either. (I hope fate will spare me that terrible situation.)

  It’s odd that Mill defended hedonism at all. If a “decided preference” has authority in the matter, why not just say that happiness is a matter of getting what one prefers? This became the standard view in economics (on which Mill had great influence). Happiness, called “utility,” is just a matter of getting what you want, of having your preferences satisfied. Even today this view is often confused with hedonism (see a lot of social science), but the two are very different.*12 Although having a desire fulfilled might be the cause of pleasure, this view implies that happiness is not generally a matter of good experience. Suppose you have a nice conversation with a stranger on a train, and as she exits for her stop, you find yourself wanting her to do well in her life. Even if you never heard from her again, if she does in fact prosper, you will have got what you wanted. Your preference would be logically “satisfied” (the preferred state of affairs obtains), but without knowing “satisfaction” in experience.

  But this means that a bare “preference” can be for anything, much of which may have little to do with the person whose happiness is in question. Say I prefer that the number of stars in the galaxy be even. If it turned out without my knowledge that the number is even, it doesn’t seem that my life goes better for the world’s being as I preferred. Or had the stranger from the train instead suffered a horrible accident, your desire for her prosperity would not have been met, but your life wouldn’t have gone any worse had you never received the news.

  Even when a preference concerns a person’s own life, it may not seem entirely relevant. If a previously dedicated surfer only wanted to stay home and count blades of carpet nap in his bedroom, the satisfaction of that desire wouldn’t necessarily count as good for him. If he refused to leave the house, the poor guy’s surfer brethren would be more apt to worry about sudden mental illness than view him as flourishingly happy for doing exactly what he wanted. A surfer, of all people, should know what he’s missing.

  So one can see why Plato and Aristotle took happiness to be an objective condition. The good life is made up of goods, things like a person’s character, health, longevity, success in her projects, quality of relationships, and quality of experience. These elements are objectively valuable for the person who has them, quite aside from his or her beliefs or desires. Even felt pleasure is not of unqualified value. If I take secret satisfaction in the news that a hated colleague has fallen into a terrible illness, the “improper” pleasure of schadenfreude wouldn’t make my life go better (even if I seem “way too happy”).

  The ancients never asked why one should strive to be happy in the first place. It is a question worth asking: Why not forget about yourself and your “happiness”? Just seek the goods that bring happiness, and so do what’s most worth doing, with happiness coming along as a by-product. Aristotle did say that human flourishing “supervenes” upon, or “comes along top” of, the pursuit of something else. As Joseph Butler, the eighteenth-century bishop, theologian, and philosopher, developed the point, if I start the day trying to be happy in general, I won’t know what to do. I’ll have to find more particular things to do, like checking the waves and maybe trying a new surfboard. Yet those particular activities may have little to do with myself, and instead concern ways I’m related to others or what lies beyond. Thus surfers say they surf not for fun, not for their own sakes, but for surfing’s sake. They find their happiness without seeking it, convinced that this independently wonderful activity is ever so worthy of one’s limited time in life. If they even know or care what the elusive “happiness” is, it is surfing.

  All of this is a natural consequence of the idea that doing well as a person is an exercise of skill, a matter of “virtue.” Skillful activity is a way of being related to what lies beyond one’s subjective experience. But then doing well as a person, eudaimonia, will also be a matter of how one is related to the world beyond one’s head. And that is finally why “surfing” on a convincing experience machine, though fun for the moment, won’t ground a flourishing life, while actually being wet, in the water, surfing, might. As much or more than almost anything else, surfing expresses, clearly and purely, the value in being objectively related in an attuned harmonious dependence to what lies beyond oneself.

  Chasing Flow

  Because flow can’t be induced, not at will and by popping a pill, it is the sort of thing one can wait for or one can chase. For those who give chase, there is something of a discipline to bringing it on often and forcefully. In a recent book that celebrates flow seeking, Steven Kotler praises big-wave surfers for having “mastered” flow, by organizing life around triggers for optimal experiences.*13 Certain external conditions or “flow triggers”—such as risk, creativity, and altruism—bring the flow state along, at least eventually. And if one can optimize for flow, shouldn’t one capitalize, striving to get as much as possible?

  Of my adrenaline junkie big-wave surfer brethren, I would like to submit that it is possible to spoil surfing for oneself, sowing the seeds of one’s own discontentment. Even in surfing, but especially in big-wave surfing, the blessed “flow state” of peak performance is difficult to attain and mostly short-lived. For each month of the year, there’s a different surf break in a different part of the world that’s likely to produce huge but readable waves. Despite all the advantages of advanced surf forecasting and global transportation, scoring optimal conditions requires elaborate planning, last-minute travel, and expenses that preclude ordinary living. It’s easy to miss out on the best days, just by a day, having flown from the other side of the planet. And even when one is scoring often, this brings only a cycle of highs and recoveries, which may leave one ruined for readjustment to normality. Chris Malloy, a world-traveling surfer turned filmmaker and cattle rancher, describes his comedown to a more ordinary existence this way: “Not all of us experience a happy life after doing this shit for a couple of decades. I bet there are some PTSD similarities….[I]t can be hard to get excited again. Ever. And that feeling sucks.”*14

  In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates compares two jars, one sound and full, one leaky. The man with a full jar can rest content that his costly milk, honey, and sugar are secure and that he won’t have to work just to keep them. “He can relax over them.” The leaky jar, a metaphor for the pleasure-chasing hedonist, must be refilled constantly, bringing anxiety to its owner, who can never rest in happy contentment, for fear of seepage and insufficiency. “He’s forced to keep on filling [the jar], day and night, or else he suffers extreme pain.”

  Socrates’s interlocutor, the wily Callicles, argues to the contrary that a leaky jar is the way of happiness, for pleasure comes instead from “having as much as possible flow in.” The admirable, worthy person will “allow his appetites to get as large as possible and not restrain them. And when they are as large as possible, he ought to be competent to devote himself to them by virtue of his bravery and intelligence, and to fill them with whatever he may have an appetite for at the time.”*15 Happiness comes in the chase.

  The fortunate surfer is akin to the man with a full jar. Being able to transcend the mundane on a regular basis by hitting the waves, the surfer can make peace with the ordinary, finding joy in abundance in ordinary being. As for losing oneself completely in ecstatic self-transcendence, it’s super when it happens, when the waves get epic. On most days, though, in life’s normal course of events, it is good enough to be harmoniously related to what lies beyond in average waves, while one is waiting for the next set, with a swell passing beneath, pulled by the slight current, under a vast sky, in reflections that quicksilver around the dark of the deep. There is still the gentler joy in connection, in flowing attunement, that allows one to slide through the more mundane tasks of life with no worries, being efficacious without control, even in unexcited tedium.

  Ecstatic bliss—whether in big-wave riding, getting a glimpse of nirvana, or being flush with the Holy Spirit in church—is presumably worth chasing, if you’ve got some time away from work. Even for those who manage to behold the beatific vision, the peaks will come only occasionally and then quickly pass. The chase is exciting, but not a durable basis for daily peace. If one’s happiness must be peak happiness, or even a steady averaged increase—because ordinary life, in ordinary waves, could only be mundane, dull, and drab, never quite sweet enough—well, one could often be left discontented despite all the mountaintop or big-wave experiences. And that is, frankly, rather unappreciative of the colossal fortune in having wound up a surfer. It is in flow as it is in love: you just have to wait. You faithfully persist, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, accepting the ebb and flow of ordinary life.

  The flow “triggers” make experiential flow more likely, but only more likely. They work to any real degree only for the person who remains faithful in practice. There’s no “hack” whereby flow can be engineered, not in the way one can indeed juice the brain chemicals by taking drugs or improving one’s diet and getting more sunshine. One must persist, faithfully, in disengagement and rest, through the ebbs and troughs of normal human existence. We can be nudged along by mood management. The architects, of buildings and of societies, can help flow experience come a bit more readily at work, at the museum, and on the street, steadily reducing the average level of the lows, while steadily raising the average quality of experience overall, over enough time. And we could work less, with more time and flexibility for leisure and creative endeavor of the sort that might bring flow more regularly. A few people can afford to pay a good architect to build a dream home, so maybe they have the luxury of maxing out on flow states. Even so, as Plato or Aristotle might say, the home in question is a person’s “soul,” the overall organization of his or her personality, virtues of character, and place in the world, all of which are subject to fortune’s caprice. The happiness of a person can only be a steady, ongoing achievement. As Aristotle says, “As it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”

  The artist and the surfer both know something about waiting. Success in creative endeavor does not necessarily come to the hardworking or to those greatest in natural ability, spatial-conceptual intelligence, sense of music, or fine wit. It comes to those who weather the ebbs and the angst, the anxieties and insecurities of the creative process, those who know how to stay open and attuned long enough for a roughly imagined vision to be gradually brought into being, in a material, public realization, as artwork on the wall, the film, the novel, the ballet. The faithful in creative practice learn to wait for the flash of insight, the moments of spontaneity, the spells of effortless productivity. They wait trusting, hoping, the blessed creative flow will return to them, at some point, before too long, so as to be ready when the fever strikes. When the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins was asked why he practices all the time, despite being so accomplished, he said he wanted to be there when the spirit comes.*16 No rituals or routines suffice. What once worked goes stale; an inspired social movement becomes wooden or cultish; new wine is not put in old wineskins. And while one can improve one’s odds, trying different things that help, trusting that flow will return in fortune’s due course, one can only place one’s bets in a faithful practice. The expectation that flow can be controlled, that it’s a mere matter of mastering oneself or one’s circumstances, is a recipe for boring unoriginality, not to mention frustration and discontentment.

  Whether new or old, the Stoic pretense of self-mastery pays too little heed to fortune, to what is beyond our grasp and control even in our very selves. Happiness is not within one’s control, if only one could virtuously discipline one’s attitudes. The blessed “flow state” is too occasional and fleeting to by itself offer a sturdy contentment in one’s being. True joy, true happiness, come with favorable circumstances beyond our control, which, in faithful practice, must themselves be surfed.

  The Importance of the Ordinary

  Aristotle noted that we are what we repeatedly do. Skilled excellence is not an act but a habit of action. Centuries later, William James, the philosopher who founded modern psychology, explained how we acquire excellence through habit:

  The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.*17

  Practice conserves attention. A resource in limited supply, our ability to attend to something is thus freed for other uses. I had to think about sinking my weight into a long carve in my early years of surfing. The habit formed, after a thousand acts of carving; I now do it automatically. This frees my mind for whipping the turn into a tighter rotation, or for noting the next wave moment coming, so as to speed my transition. With each new habit that I “hand over to the effortless custody of automatism” by practicing often, my thoughts are further freed for the next level of attainment. I can now pay ever more exquisite attention. The more I practice, the freer I am to take in new facets of my wave situation, and I become ever more attuned.

  This is the ordinary basis of self-transcendence. The loss of myself in my consciousness can be fluid and a matter of degree.*18 My trained reflexes are open adaptive patterns, a whole repertoire of skills that stand ready for action. I know how to use them when I can engage them at different times in different directions, without having to pay much attention to them. Having been practiced, they now run automatically, which allows my thoughts to range over changing situations, noticing myself or my movement, and then not, depending on what I’m doing. Occasionally, I’m utterly absorbed in the wave’s moment. I see only the wave wall that I’m rushing along. I’ve practiced enough to let myself fade into the background of my awareness, and I may not know what exactly my body is doing, or have time to check where exactly my leg is. Other times I do know, because I’m mindfully present to where my weight is held and where I’m headed over an extended wave section, with only passing moments of complete self-effacement.

  Though especially important in sports, the fluidity of attention’s focus also enables the most ordinary of doings. We are nearly always more or less absorbed in one task or another. I know how to walk through a doorway, opening the door as I see who might be in the room. I turn the doorknob, and, as Heidegger noted, I won’t usually be thinking of my hand on the knob. The knob turning is still something I actively did, even without thinking, because I’ve got that much mastery of doorways and the world around me. I’ve done it plenty. But that action of mine can simply fade out of my consciousness as I enter the room and think only of whether I’ll see a certain friend at the party, who said she might attend.