The connection between deep work and flow should be clear: Deep work is an activity well suited to generate a flow state (the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity—all of which also describe deep work). And as we just learned, flow generates happiness. Combining these two ideas we get a powerful argument from psychology in favor of depth. Decades of research stemming from Csikszentmihalyi’s original ESM experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile. Csikszentmihalyi even goes so far as to argue that modern companies should embrace this reality, suggesting that “jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities.” Noting, however, that such a redesign would be difficult and disruptive (see, for example, my arguments from the previous chapter), Csikszentmihalyi then explains that it’s even more important that the individual learn how to seek out opportunities for flow. This, ultimately, is the lesson to come away with from our brief foray into the world of experimental psychology: To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.
A Philosophical Argument for Depth
Our final argument for the connection between depth and meaning requires us to step back from the more concrete worlds of neuroscience and psychology and instead adopt a philosophical perspective. I’ll turn for help in this discussion to a pair of scholars who know this topic well: Hubert Dreyfus, who taught philosophy at Berkeley for more than four decades, and Sean Dorrance Kelly, who at the time of this writing is the chair of Harvard’s philosophy department. In 2011, Dreyfus and Kelly published a book, All Things Shining, which explores how notions of sacredness and meaning have evolved throughout the history of human culture. They set out to reconstruct this history because they’re worried about its endpoint in our current era. “The world used to be, in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things,” Dreyfus and Kelly explain early in the book. “The shining things now seem far away.”
What happened between then and now? The short answer, the authors argue, is Descartes. From Descartes’s skepticism came the radical belief that the individual seeking certainty trumped a God or king bestowing truth. The resulting Enlightenment, of course, led to the concept of human rights and freed many from oppression. But as Dreyfus and Kelly emphasize, for all its good in the political arena, in the domain of the metaphysical this thinking stripped the world of the order and sacredness essential to creating meaning. In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. “The Enlightenment’s metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life,” Dreyfus and Kelly worry; “it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.”
This problem might at first seem far removed from our quest to understand the satisfaction of depth, but when we proceed to Dreyfus and Kelly’s solution, we will discover rich new insights into the sources of meaning in professional pursuits. This connection should seem less surprising when it’s revealed that Dreyfus and Kelly’s response to modern nihilism builds on the very subject that opened this chapter: the craftsman.
Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book’s conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner. To illustrate this claim, they use as an organizing example an account of a master wheelwright—the now lost profession of shaping wooden wagon wheels. “Because each piece of wood is distinct, it has its own personality,” they write after a passage describing the details of the wheelwright’s craft. “The woodworker has an intimate relationship with the wood he works. Its subtle virtues call out to be cultivated and cared for.” In this appreciation for the “subtle virtues” of his medium, they note, the craftsman has stumbled onto something crucial in a post-Enlightenment world: a source of meaning sited outside the individual. The wheelwright doesn’t decide arbitrarily which virtues of the wood he works are valuable and which are not; this value is inherent in the wood and the task it’s meant to perform.
As Dreyfus and Kelly explain, such sacredness is common to craftsmanship. The task of a craftsman, they conclude, “is not to generate meaning, but rather to cultivate in himself the skill of discerning the meanings that are already there.” This frees the craftsman of the nihilism of autonomous individualism, providing an ordered world of meaning. At the same time, this meaning seems safer than the sources cited in previous eras. The wheelwright, the authors imply, cannot easily use the inherent quality of a piece of pine to justify a despotic monarchy.
Returning to the question of professional satisfaction, Dreyfus and Kelly’s interpretation of craftsmanship as a path to meaning provides a nuanced understanding of why the work of those like Ric Furrer resonates with so many of us. The look of satisfaction on Furrer’s face as he works to extract artistry from crude metals, these philosophers would argue, is a look expressing appreciation for something elusive and valuable in modernity: a glimpse of the sacred.
Once understood, we can connect this sacredness inherent in traditional craftsmanship to the world of knowledge work. To do so, there are two key observations we must first make. The first might be obvious but requires emphasis: There’s nothing intrinsic about the manual trades when it comes to generating this particular source of meaning. Any pursuit—be it physical or cognitive—that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.
To elaborate this point, let’s jump from the old-fashioned examples of carving wood or smithing metal to the modern example of computer programming. Consider this quote from the coding prodigy Santiago Gonzalez describing his work to an interviewer:
Beautiful code is short and concise, so if you were to give that code to another programmer they would say, “oh, that’s well written code.” It’s much like as if you were writing a poem.
Gonzalez discusses computer programming similarly to the way woodworkers discuss their craft in the passages quoted by Dreyfus and Kelly.
The Pragmatic Programmer, a well-regarded book in the computer programming field, makes this connection between code and old-style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval quarry worker’s creed in its preface: “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” The book then elaborates that computer programmers must see their work in the same way:
Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship… One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today’s civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored.