Happiness as order in the mind

Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist, wanted to know when people feel truly happy. He gave people pagers that beeped at random moments and asked them to note what they were doing and how they felt. Happiness, he found, does not simply happen to us. It depends on how we direct our attention.

Left alone, the mind tends toward disorder, which he calls psychic entropy: worries, distractions and drifting thoughts. Flow is the opposite, an ordered state in which attention is freely focused on a goal.