Vivre

When Csikszentmihalyi sticks to his research - the insights of individual task/goal framing and strategy - this book is great. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the book is not that, instead philosophizing on the implications of this research for society and the world as a whole. This is complete with blatant racism ("savage" comes out a few times, as does the theory that indigenous Caribbean Islanders died because they were unable to attain a flow state and so lost interest in having sex), as well as less problematic but equally factually incorrect observations (e.g. all animals other than humans are purely instinct driven, money doesn't relate to scientific output, etc.). Some of these, to be fair, were at the time of writing unknown. But Csikszentmihalyi tendency to wildly extrapolate from his research, combined with a complete ignorance of societal and macro forces, fatally handicaps this book. He also commits the cardinal sin of armchair diagnosing public figures, and using anecdotes to indicate that individual framing alone is enough to overcome macro forces, showing literally no quantitative evidence to back up these pronouncements. You're better off reading one of his peer reviewed papers