Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: A galvanizing force for the study of experience in the context of leisure

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who died this past year, was arguably the foremost progenitor of the study of experience in the interdisciplinary field of leisure studies. “Mike C,” as he was happy to be called by all, readily introduced his work on intense enjoyment, or what he represented as flow experience, into the field’s lexicon. As the psychology of leisure was also emerging at the time, with the work of John Neulinger, Seppo IsoAhola and others, Csikszentmihalyi’s Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (1975) gave this subfield a ‘phenomenology’ to accompany the rather vague terms of intrinsic motivation and perceived freedom that were seen as definitional for leisure to be leisure. This phenomenology—ultimately to be informed as it was by groundbreaking applications of “beeper” (pager) technology in his Experience Sampling Method (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1987)—anticipated the study of involvement, engagement, absorption and immersion that have become the primary foci of those such as Mat Duerden (2022) who are identifying and cultivating the best of leisure experience, i.e., “optimal” leisure experience, in seeking ways to promote and design for it. Csikszentmihalyi’s earliest work, though, was based on interview studies by people in both work and leisure contexts who could talk about being so involved in their activity that their thoughts and actions seemed to ‘flow along’ seamlessly (“flow” being an emic word with those he interviewed). In his earliest studies, these people included surgeons as well as rock climbers and painters. On a personal note, I reached out to him about an unpublished paper of his on rock climbing I discovered while I was studying extracurricular activities as an educational psychology doctoral student in the early 1970s; and some ten years later, while on the leisure studies faculty at the University of Illinois, I invited him to be a keynote speaker for a conference we were holding there and subsequently joined Reed Larson and him in analyzing their ESM data on adolescents in an article for JLR (Kleiber et al., 1986). Once the academic leisure studies community discovered his work on leisure activities, Csikszentmihalyi was invited to do university and conference talks all over North America. In those presentations he was likely to address the ambiguity of leisure as a context that was most “pure” when action was voluntary and enjoyable and incorporated structured activity. But the only experience he consistently associated with leisure itself was the feeling of freedom, i.e., the “free” in free time. He never equated optimal experience with “the leisure experience” as some do. Indeed, his subsequent work with the ESM (moving from pagers to programmable watches for random experience