Much as I love storms, I doubt I’ll ever get to a point where sitting in my basement waiting out a tornado warning gets to be fun, or even remotely enjoyable. But as I hung out below ground this week, watching chaos popping up all over the area on radar and the local weather team staying on top of it, I couldn’t help but take a simple pleasure in what I was seeing—not the unstable skies, but the pair of weather guys combining competence and a professionally controlled joy at getting to use all their skills and knowledge.
The metaphors! The allegories! The excited expressions about what they were seeing, together with warnings about what the average human should be expecting and doing—including not, please, hanging around to take pictures and videos of the looming whirlwind. The knowledge that they had a captive audience, and need not rein themselves in to keep family members from rolling their eyes at each other in passing and exchanging sotto voce commentary about how Uncle Pete’s going off about weather again. It was, in short, the great gift of witnessing the enthusiasm of two dudes who’d obviously found their thing and were living into it with everything they had that made my round of basement sheltering something other than a terror-filled prayer that nothing fell on or was forced into or through my home.
And so for a few hours, I reveled in fuzzy feelings about that sort of enthusiasm in general, contrasting it with the ways in which even the most interesting things—documentaries, museum displays, sporting events, vacation photos, and yes, even the local news and its weather team—seem to have become tools in some greater monetization scheme, and hence, victims of the standardization that comes with the formatting, tone, style, and etcetera needed to grab the attention of an algorithm or formula that’ll bring you an audience. Been to a baseball game in the last decade or so where the actual game, and not amusement-park amenities, is the highlight? Have you tried searching online these days for a recipe? You have to scroll through a whole dissertation before getting anywhere close to the ingredients list—and that treatise is not a passionate “I love baking!” preamble, but a way of loading the page up with at least 1,200 words and requisite headings containing certain keywords that make not for good reading, writing, instruction, or even the expression of enthusiasm—but for good search engine optimization. And of course, if you’ve been to any writing workshop anywhere, the inevitable question arises, usually before the round of introductions is done: How do I publish? How do I shape this to be attractive to the biggest audience, or do what I need to do to get a contract—the purpose in being at said workshop not to share a love of what you’re doing, and discuss it and even maybe learn something new or gain a better understanding of your craft—but to beat out everyone else’s stuff in an editor’s slush pile. The love of doing things for the simple love of doing them—not in order to post your doing them to a feed, or to earn ad revenue or gain followers—feels like a foreign concept.
It's not that what I guess I want to see as activity undertaken out of a romantically pure motive has ever been unsullied; even before everyone was taking idiotic risks to post selfies for strangers, there were, say, ad placements in movies and tons of get-rich-quick schemes. And at the beginning of this century, at one school where I spent a lot of time, there were also at least a couple of departments drooling over the possibilities of positive psychology and flow, wondering how they could essentially design the workplace, work life, the working world, and so forth, to “optimize”1 that feeling you get when you’re fully in the zone and enjoying what you’re doing to such a degree that among other things, the fear of looking like a dork falls away, and you just go for it. In trying to figure out what he called flow, researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s basic curiosity about why this fantastic absorption happens wasn’t in itself a lamentable thing—but as Braxton Soderman and others have pointed out about flow and about positive psychology in general,2 all this focus on individual happiness pretty much ditches any consideration of structural issues or social responsibilities or questions about how an organization’s run, and in the flow-in-the-workplace hoo-hah in particular, gives evidence that, as Christian Haines explains,
Playfulness and flow have become valuable feelings not just in our free time but also at work, especially in the so-called creative industries. At the extreme, the creative destruction of entrepreneurs as they seek out new markets is itself a playful activity: “Entrepreneurs disrupt the status quo, appropriate situations in inventive ways, and salivate over new, untapped markets as playgrounds for potential profit” (p. 179). In this “situation of total play,” the value of play seems to unravel. Play is just another kind of labor—unpaid labor.3
In other words, and among other things, falling into that state of enjoyment, which I doubt can be entered with a snap of the fingers or the flip of a managerial switch, seems not to be good enough on its own; just like everything else in US life, we want it when we want it; we want it to multitask; and we think we can design situations in order to get our instant flow on, and make big productive bucks for the boss, or maybe some extra income from a side hustle, by doing so. And if you don’t succeed—whether by not achieving the flowing state or by being poor and unhappy about that fact, or by not becoming a YouTube star, or by failing to beat cancer even while taking a cheery, never-surrender attitude to it4—as positive psychology seems to say, well then it’s your own fault for not accepting and flying the flag for how approved happiness works.
What the hell does this have to do with the weather, though, especially on a commercial station where the local news isn’t much more than lots of stealth ads, traffic reports, and simplistic soundbites delivered by dolled-up anchors? The brilliant thing about weather is that it’s going to do its thing—it’s going to flow, I guess you could say—whatever your plans are and whatever the optimizers think about it—and when a situation develops like the one a few days ago, in which multiple counties were under sometimes multiple tornado warnings, breaking to commercial and quick tips to hack your morning routine aren’t going to happen. The unbrilliant thing, of course, is also that the weather’s going to do its thing—and even people who are fascinated by storms and how they develop have to feel at least a bit of discomfort at loving the phenomena they study and knowing those phenomena are destroying lives and habitats—and that the increased severity of storms and fires and floods and droughts has almost everything to do with the way we’ve bought into attending to our own product-heavy happiness.
Look, I know the weather guys probably have to go on station team-building retreats, and have to tout the station’s weather app and make their appearances at sponsored events, and that the better the station’s ratings, the more its owners will spend on luxury items. But maybe what I was seeing in that weather coverage, with its combination of enthusiasm and stay-safe entreaties and provision of information and lack of advertising or feel-good admonitions in general, was just a small bit of evidence that even on-screen personalities can break through it all once in a while. I want to believe that what I was seeing, constrained as it was, was a reminder of how even in an increasingly threatened world, in a prolonged global situation that makes it ever harder for a conscientious being to let go and drop into their zone, it might still be possible—and maybe even, maybe, maybe, possible to drop in and go for it and not do too much harm in the process.
I’m not exaggerating by cynically using this term. One of Csikszentmihalyi’s books on flow is called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).
Braxton Soderman, Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021). See also and especially Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (New York: Picador, 2010).
Christian Haines, “Christian Haines Reviews Against Flow,” Critical Inquiry 16 March 2022, https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/christian_haines_reviews_against_flow/. See the review (and the book!) for an alternative notion of “critical flow.”
See especially Ehrenreich here.