Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times […] The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. […] For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.
Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur.
Gaining control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery – or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life – that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.
If you misunderstand the problem, your solution is bound to fail, and you won’t know why. So you’ll keep trying the same dumb thing over and over again, wasting your money, your time, your energy, and therefore your life, in the process… none the wiser why you never became what you could have become.
Which explains why, despite a consumption-based solution to an existential unease never having worked before, people will keep on trying it again, and again, and again…