Concept
Psychic entropy
Psychic entropy is Csikszentmihalyi's term for the disorder of a mind whose attention is pulled by conflicting demands: anxiety about the meeting while reading, resentment intruding on dinner, the phone's pull mid-conversation. Nothing gets full attention and nothing completes.
Attention is limited, and everything a person experiences passes through it, so what happens to attention is what happens to the person. When it is fragmented by competing pulls, the result is the exhausting, unproductive state most people call a normal day: half-reading, half-worrying, half-present. Csikszentmihalyi's point is that this is not a mood but a structural condition, entropy, the ordinary state of a mind that has not chosen where to look, and that it has an opposite, ordered consciousness, in which attention is directed at a chosen goal. Goleman supplies the mechanism of the pull: the amygdala grabs attention for anything that resembles a threat, and modern life supplies such things hourly. The remedy is not to empty the mind, which cannot be done, but to give attention somewhere to go, a goal, a task, a person, so that when the pull comes there is an order to return to. An audit of one day, hour by hour, chosen or unchosen, shows how much of a life is spent in entropy.
A real-life example
A designer in Kadıköy audits a Wednesday and finds nine of fourteen waking hours went to things she did not choose: a client's late message replayed at breakfast, feeds in the gaps, an argument rehearsed on the metro. The five chosen hours were the only ones she remembered liking.
How to use it
- 1Audit one day: each hour, what was attention mostly on, and did you choose it?
- 2When the mind is in entropy, give attention somewhere to go rather than trying to empty it.
- 3Design the unchosen hours: the phone's place, the commute's book, the first thing seen in the morning.