Equation for Flow 🌊

July 26, 2024 | Categories: Philosophy

Welcome to my first-ever blog post! Of course, this has always been on the top of my to-do list, with the only restriction being, "What the hell should my first public blog post be?" After all, if someone is either a big fan of my work or a journalist looking for material to cancel me 20 years from now (foreshadow), this would be the first place they look. This significance is comparable to that of Beethoven's first symphony, Thomas Jefferson's writing the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, or my thinking about how I should name my variables (that last one might be true). So much anxiety! If only I could just enter a flow in which all of these thoughts can go away, and it would just be me writing whatever is on my mind. But how can one enter flow? Note that this is simply my interpretation of flow, which might or might not work at all for you.

For outside contexts, I am an average student. By always attending lectures, writing down notes, and reading ahead of time, I am about one standard deviation away from my class average. As a second-year student taking many capstone and graduate classes, I can't really complain about my intellect. However, the more I interact with the top "academic weapons" of my school, the more time it would take for me to keep up with them, to the point that my overall mental and physical performance starts to drop across the board due to aimless burnout. So clearly, the "just work harder" motto is a scam because not only are you losing in the long run, but you are also losing out on the time that you could have spent on yourself! Through observation of the geniuses that I have somehow managed to surround myself with over the last year, my answer to this problem is simply Flow.

Easier said than done, of course. You often hear stories of great geniuses like Newton, who regularly forgot to eat and sleep for days while writing Principia Mathematica, but not stories of how much time professional athletes train to regularly achieve this state in the field. I certainly have yet to reach this level, but being someone whose record is 27 hours of non-stop coding in a Hackathon, I think I have a small glimpse of how to get better at it.

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the graph below that describes how flow can only be achieved when there is a direct correlation between challenge and skill.

Although I agree that this is a very accurate depiction of the flow state, I would also like to point out that if you are in the boredom zone, why the hell would you even care about being in the flow state in the first place? Like I don't get bored washing the dishes and immediately think, "damn, if only I can be in the zone right now." If boredom is your problem, I would recommend either meditation or multitasking with another low-priority task. So, realistically speaking, the only other variable you have left here is anxiety. As a CS and Math student, my immediate intuition is Complement (this is a set theory term representing the opposite).

Instead of focusing on "how can I enter flow," try asking yourself, "How can I not be anxious?" This way, you are not actually entering flow but minimizing the obstacles that are stopping you from doing so! Wow, how obvious! The floor is not made from the ceiling (assuming it is a one-story house).

Okay, stopping being anxious is a lot easier to understand than entering the flow, but if stopping being anxious is that easy, therapists would be out of a job by now. This is the dead end where I say that all I can provide you is a formal definition of the flow state and that the rest depends on how much you invest in your emotional intelligence. My recommendation is to lay out all of your inner issues either by talking to a professional or someone close, writing them down in a journal, or spiritually removing them through meditation.

 If you have either read this far or skipped all the yapping above, here is the final equation: (! means not in CS terminology):

Flow = ! (Anxious) = Relative EQ

I hope you enjoy my first blog post. This is definitely just a random midnight thought post, but it has been a while since I have been able to sit down and write continuously without any interruption or break (I was definitely in the flow while writing this). For future content, I would also like to add quick technical summaries of random topics related to CS, Math, Physics, Business, and random Philosophical thoughts such as this.