Almost everything we’ve just covered, however dangerous, falls under the category of that which can go wrong when almost everything goes right. This is what happens when we begin finding flow with regularity. But the state is unpredictable and there are no guarantees. A great many discover flow accidentally—having no idea how they got there or how to return. Still others, even those who once had easy access to the zone, may suddenly find themselves cut off from the source, trapped in a struggle phase without end. In either case,
once flow becomes a lock without a key, the ramifications are soul-sucking to say the least.
“No question about it,” says Flow Genome Project executive director Jamie Wheal, “there’s a dark night of the flow. In Christian mystical traditions, once you’ve experienced the grace of God, the ‘dark night of the soul’ describes the incredible pain of its absence. The same is true for flow. An enormous gap sits between the ecstasy of the zone and the all-too-familiar daily toil waiting for us on the other end. If you’ve glimpsed this state, but can’t get back there—
that lack can become unbearable.”
Even those familiar with flow can go through long stretches where the state becomes inaccessible. The struggle can last weeks, months, occasionally years. As climber Dean Potter explains, these periods are true trial by fire:
“When I feel that really draining side of not being able to enter into the flow, it’s horrible. I feel helpless, lethargic, restless, disturbed. The positive here is I hate that feeling so much it makes me more focused. I take all the necessary steps to get out of it as soon as I can. Sometimes, though, I end up sunk in a really bad place. True depression, trapped for quite some time. But even here there’s an upside. At those times, doing anything hurts so much, I can only do what truly inspires me. Otherwise, I have no power. This allows me to lock onto ideas that are authentically mine—so the dark side of flow, for all its torment, keeps me being exactly who I am.”
Potter, at least, has the ability to find his way to the other side. What about the college lacrosse star who graduates into a job as an accountant, much needed to feed her family, but not a territory nearly as rich in flow triggers as competitive, high-contact sports? The one-time drummer now working as a stockbroker? The mother of three who used to do some sculpture when she was younger but now has no time for herself? As professional big-wave surfer turned filmmaker, cattle rancher, and Patagonia Ocean Ambassador Chris Malloy pointed out in an e-mail to me, sometimes being cut off from the source simply means growing older:
I hope you talk a little about how utterly fucked we can become when we get too old or broken or smart to keep it up. Not all of us
experience a happy life after doing this shit for a couple of decades. I bet there are some PTSD similarities. It’s funny, I read Sebastian Jungers’s War and I learned something: The guys coming home are all screwed up, not because they saw people die as much as they missed the rush. I would never put myself in the same category as those fighting men, but it can be hard to get excited again. Ever. And that feeling
sucks.
And the dark night of flow is an issue that society has not made particularly easy to handle. How many people have stopped playing guitar,
writing poetry, or painting watercolors—activities packed with flow triggers—
because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like “career” or “children”? How many, now grown up and done with childish things, have put away the surfboard, the skateboard, the whatever? How many have made the mistake of conflating the value of the vehicle that leads us to an experience (the surfboard, etc.) with the value of the experience itself (the flow state)?
What’s painfully ironic here is that flow is a radical and alternative path to mastery only because we have decided that play—an activity fundamental to survival, tied to the greatest neurochemical rewards the brain can produce, and flat out necessary for achieving peak performance, creative brilliance, and overall life satisfaction—is a waste of time for adults. If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round. Unless we invert this equation, much of our capacity for intrinsic motivation starts to shut down. We lose touch with our passion and become less than what we could be and that feeling never really goes away.
The dark night of the flow happens when people glimpse the state and can’t get back there, but another issue arises when people are getting into flow, yet misinterpreting its meaning. The automatic nature of the state—how every decision, every action, leads seamlessly to the next—lays a different kind of trap: it can turn flow junkies into bliss junkies. “Bliss junkies are people who think the magical ease of the flow state is the goal,” says Wheal. “When they confront the difficulty of the day to day, they’d rather reach for a pill or a new lover or another meditation retreat than get down to hard work. The idea being, if it was all so easy, clear, and effortless in flow, then why not wait for the next wave to hit? Not being in flow becomes an excuse to stay listless and undermotivated.”
We don’t have to look far for examples. Think of rave culture or the new age movement or just about any holdover hippie community or—for that matter
—almost every ski or surf town in the world. And when listless and undermotivated, bliss junkies often turn to drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, and other high-risk behaviors to mask the pain of flow’s loss or to hasten its return.
And these issues are only part of this picture. In this accounting of flow’s dark side, the categories we’ve so far examined—the escalating ladder of risk, the dark night of the flow, and the meaning miscalculations of the bliss junky—
are all personal and psychological, but there are also cultural issues to consider, namely, the questions of whether flow can be corrupted or controlled.
Neither question is easy to answer. Corruption is problematic because flow increases empathy and social bonding, but that doesn’t mean pickup artists or pickpockets can’t co-opt the state to further their craft. Along similar lines, no one knows if flow can be used to train super soldiers, but the US Defense Department seems committed to finding out. Most of the high-performance scientists in this book work with both athletes and the military. Red Bull, for
example, has teamed up with the Navy SEALs. DARPA funds flow research (the aforementioned sniper study). Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on one’s trust in government and feelings for nation-states, but it doesn’t take much to imagine how this experiment could go wrong.
On a slightly different scale, society likes to pay for performance and flow definitely improves performance. In action and adventure sports, for example, flow’s escalating ladder of risk—once cause for marginalization—now supports an entire industry. And these supporters want footage. Thus athletes on a heli-ski film shoot (who used their ability to get into flow to get that job) can’t back away from a run just because they’re not feeling the flow—not if they want to continue to have a career.
These economic pressures are pushing people past their challenge/skill sweet spot and with the expected results. Squaw Valley psychiatrist Dr. Robb Gaffney (Scott’s brother, who McConkey once called the best “nonpro” skier in the world) recently told NBC Sports, “All my friends who have been lost were the best at what they did. Worldwide. And yet we still lost them.… I do see corporate sponsorship as a big player here. They’re making a lot of money.
They’ve tapped into a reward center in the brain, the thrill-seekers are going for it, the culture’s enthralled with it. It’s a money-making machine.”
Now, certainly, not all of us face such dire consequences in our chosen professions, but this doesn’t solve the problem. Even in less extreme work lives, once we start accessing flow with regularity, performance will dramatically improve and new expectations will follow. Those added expectations will push the difficulty level up a few notches, and this extra psychological burden can easily send us past the challenge/skill sweet spot, rendering us unable to access the very state we need to meet those new expectations.
The second issue here is whether flow can be controlled. Doubtful. In technological terms, a “disruptive technology” is any innovation that creates a new market and new values and eventually displaces an old market and older values. Cars replacing horse-drawn carriages is the classic example. Flow is also a very disruptive technology. Unlike the automobile, it’s not a disruptive
“external” technology, but a disruptive “internal” technology, operating in the psychological rather than the physical world. This does not make it any less potent. The athletes in this book harnessed the state to displace traditional markets (today, top jocks are just as likely to skateboard as play football), alter our value system (our societal tolerance for and reward of high-risk behavior has seriously increased), and reshape culture (a $750 billion lifestyle industry).
Thus the rub: Flow, like all technologies, remains morally neutral. It can be used for good or ill or both at the same time.
In esoteric terms, flow’s tendency toward disruption is the reason it could be considered a “left-hand path.” A “right-hand path” is a path of orthodoxy. It’s cut, dry, and filled with “thou shalt nots.” On a right-hand path, we follow the
rules and do what we’re told and no questions asked. This may sound dull, but right-hand paths have a very long history of keeping us safe. A “left-hand path,”
meanwhile, is an ecstatic path and mostly gray. It’s little guidance and less security. Lao Tzu, founder of Taoism, warned that a left-hand path is best never begun, and once begun, must absolutely be finished.
But how to finish such a path? We have a vast gap in our knowledge. Our society has spent centuries waging war against torment. When we are depressed, we know how to fight for happiness. When we are ill, we have guidebooks toward health. When we are loveless, jobless, hopeless, not smart enough, not skilled enough, not good enough, we now have colossal industries and institutions designed to teach us to strive and seek. We have become really good at negotiating with darkness, for certain, but how much do we really know about the light?
How much do we really know about true happiness? Burning creativity?
Unbridled ecstasy? As children we are taught not to play with fire, not how to play with fire. On the flow path, we are drawn forward by fire; by powerful hedonic instincts; by our deep need for autonomy, mastery, and purpose deeply fulfilled; by dizzyingly feel-good neurochemistry; by a spectrum of joy beyond common ken; by the undeniable presence of our most authentic selves; by a cognitive imperative to make meaning from experience; by the search engine that is evolution and its need for innovation; and by the simplest of truths: life is long and we’re all scared and, in flow, at least for a little while, we’re not.