TV vs. Hobbies: Who wins the “Flow” Challenge?

I hear it all the time on campus. “Work smarter, not harder.” This may be an admirable trait, but its justification usually goes like this: “If you work smarter, you do not have to work as much. This means we can have more time for enjoyable things, like TV and stuff.” Those friends who tend to advocate for this mentality rarely do so in order to more fully experience life, or increase their time for productive leisure (click here for more information on background of “leisure”).

Often times, people see work as a way to survive, not as a way to grow. We think that those who are clever or lucky will figure out how to get out of work. But this doesn’t mean that the alternative is pleasurable. In the late 1990s a researcher named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted a ground-breaking study in which people wore a device that alerted them, at random intervals, to complete a notebook of their activities. In their notebooks, one thing they noted was how much “flow”— a state in which a person works intently on something fascinating and is able to work in a smooth rhythm, be creative, and recognize afterward that it was a pleasurable experience — they were experiencing at the moment.

Csikszentmihalyi stumbled on an odd finding: people spend most of their leisure time doing things they do not find enjoyable. For example, one of the most common activities of his study participants was watching television. Other studies show that even among teenagers, who watch television less than adults, the average number of hours watched per week is around 20. And yet, as Csikszentmihalyi reports,

“…hobbies are about two and a half times more likely to produce a state of heightened enjoyment than TV does, and active games and sports about three times more. Yet these same teenagers spend at least four times more of their free hours watching TV than doing hobbies or sports. Similar ratios are also true for adults. Why would we spend four times more time doing something that has less than half the chance of making us feel good?”

Csikszentmihalyi concludes that “each of the flow-producing activities requires an initial investment of attention before it begins to be enjoyable.” This is one of the saddest implications of her study: people too apathetic to even get the energy to do something they find enjoyable.

While this can be convicting, it can also be provocative, hopefully provoking us to unplug from our devices and invest our time in something truly worthwhile and, perhaps surprisingly, more enjoyable.