Faith Venture

I have written about happiness guru Arthur Brooks before. He wrote a bestseller with Oprah.

From his recent newsletter:

In his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that enjoyment gives you a sense of effort, forward movement, and accomplishment. Or, as two psychologists wrote in 2021, during enjoyment, one “commits oneself to savoring the situation and engaging in the task to have positive feelings of joy and fun.”

Enjoyment is better than pleasure because it is more conscious and permanent. As Csikszentmihalyi points out, everyone gets pleasure from eating when they’re hungry, but it takes some knowledge and cultivation to enjoy food. After you finish lunch, the pleasure is gone, and in fact, the idea of eating is no longer appealing because your physical need has been satisfied. Meanwhile, the memory of a meal enjoyed with friends transcends the immediate experience and can bring good feelings long after it is over.

Or consider—did you just gulp a beer or savor a glass of fine wine?

Advertisements for 60 years and then social media influencers on steroids have pushed the idea of momentary pleasure at us. Have we the strength to push back?

Consider spiritual discipline. Do we partake of a burst of pleasure at putting down someone of a different faith practice on social media? Or do we obtain the pleasure of perhaps a half-hour reading a spiritual text with contemplation?

This entry was posted on January 6, 2025 at 6:18 am and is filed under Attitude, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.