Derek Thompson goes into the history of the “flow” concept, and how tech and entertainment companies learned to simulate it without any of the substance psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi originally had in mind:
Algorithmic flow is flow without achievement, flow without challenge, flow without even volition… To be lost in the lazy river of algorithmic media is to be lost the current of life without a mind. Zombie flow.
Ten years ago the question was how to get into flow more often. Now it might be how to get out of the fake version fast enough to remember what the real one felt like.