On Flow States, Peak Performance, and The Pursuit of Fulfilling Work

How the technology era has set the stage for helping us hack our flow

What makes life worth living? What makes us happy?

The ancient Greeks, starting with Aristotle, pondered endlessly over such questions. They concocted the Greek term “eudaimonia”, commonly translated to “happiness” or “welfare”. Eudaimonia has since been used by philosophers and psychologists alike to explore and define happiness.

Eudaimonia is about individual happiness; according to Deci and Ryan (2006: 2), it maintains that:

“…well-being is not so much an outcome or end state as it is a process of fulfilling or realizing one’s daimon or true nature — that is, of fulfilling one’s virtuous potentials and living as one was inherently intended to live.”

Despite our attempts over the past few centuries to solve the mystery behind what makes us happy, we are now in the middle of a mental health epidemic.

According to the World Health Organization, a reported 264 million people suffer from depression. Meanwhile, Gallup polls report that only 15% of the world’s one-billion full-time workers are engaged at work. If we consider this with the fact that the average person spends 35–44 hours per…