36 * FLOWour self, before they can affect the quality of life.
The structure of consciousness is beginning to emerge, but so far
we have a rather static picture, one that has sketched out the various
elements, but not the processes through which they interact. We need
now consider what follows whenever attention brings a new bit of
information into awareness. Only then will we be ready to get a thor
ough sense of how experience can be controlled, and hence changed for
the better.
Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy
One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic
disorder—that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or
distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names,
depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy.
All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesir
able objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our prefer
ences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective.
Consciousness can become disordered in many ways. For in
stance, in a factory that produces audiovisual equipment, Julio Mar
tinez—one of the people we studied with the Experience Sampling
Method—is feeling listless on his job. As the movie projectors pass in
front of him on the assembly line, he is distracted and can hardly keep
up the rhythm of moves necessary for soldering the connections that are
his responsibility. Usually he can do his part of the job with time to spare
and then relax for a while to exchange a few jokes before the next unit
stops at his station. But today he is struggling, and occasionally he slows
down the entire line. When the man at the next station kids him about
it, Julio snaps back irritably. From morning to quitting time tension
keeps building, and it spills over to his relationship with his co-workers.
Julio’s problem is simple, almost trivial, but it has been weighing
heavily on his mind. One evening a few days earlier he noticed on
arriving home from work that one of his tires was quite low. Next
morning the rim of the wheel was almost touching the ground. Julio
would not receive his paycheck till the end of the following week, and
he was certain he would not have enough money until then to have the
tire patched up, let alone buy a new one. Credit was something he had
not yet learned to use. The factory was out in the suburbs, about twenty
miles from where he lived, and he simply had to reach it by 8:00 A.M.
The only solution Julio could think of was to drive gingerly to the service