Flow redux

Socially mediated distraction via iPhone isn't the form of attentive flow we need.

"When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote more than twenty years ago about “flow”—that state of being in which someone is so involved in an activity “that nothing else seems to matter”—he argued, “Attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.” We might believe that our attempts to fill our interstitial time with mediated distractions qualify as an effort to optimize our experiences under less than optimal conditions. But the concept of flow needs to be revisited in an era of smart machines."

"The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World" by Christine Rosen: https://a.co/bNObLyT

Russell’s happy merger

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life." — BertrandRussell, The Conquest of Happiness

I agree with Russell in spirit, but "personal transcendence" requires at least enough ego to generate those wider interests. I'd say you should make your interests personal and expansive. Inclusive. Connective. "Larger than yourself." Pretty sure that's what he meant anyway. Impersonal means more than merely  personal. Interpersonal. We don't need zero ego, we need a social ego that bonds us with our species and with the future of life. That's how you transcend time and mortality. Or try.

Note: he says not that the ego recedes but that its walls do.  They become permeable. The self doesn't disappear, it grows and becomes part of "universal life." The trick is to feel and embody that before shedding mortal form. It's Peter Ackroyd's "trans-end-dance, a.k.a. the dance of death" (Plato Papers).

Maria Popova: Bertrand Russell died on this day in 1970, having lived nearly a century and won the Nobel Prize, leaving us his immortal wisdom on how to grow old.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/07/03/how-to-grow-old-bertrand-russell/