Something to Be Absorbed In Is Not Found by Searching. It Is Decided by the Connection to Where You Are Headed

The sense of having nothing to be absorbed in usually arrives with impatience attached to it. There are people around who are deep in something. You have nothing of the kind. Even asking yourself what you would like to do on a free day produces no answer straight away.

Ways of finding one are everywhere. List the things that once held you. Sit an aptitude test. Try small things that caught your eye. All of them can be carried out, and carrying them out does raise the number of candidates.

When nothing turns up even then, one thing is still left to move. The order. Instead of searching for an object first, place where you are headed first, and look again at the activities already in your hands from there. Changed to that order, the matter sometimes settles in the form of what I was searching for was already here.

Why should order change the result? Because absorption is not a property that sits on the side of the object.

This is not a turn of phrase. With the same object, a person can once have been absorbed and now not be. The skill has gone up. What is being made is the same. And still nothing moves. If the object has not changed while the result has, then what decides the result is something other than the object.

And that something does not move under searching. What searching moves is the set of candidates, not the conditions under which absorption holds. So the more candidates you add, the more the record fills with tried it, did not last.

What gets taken apart here is one thing: the conditions under which the state of absorption holds. What you should choose is not covered. The material for choosing does not assemble on this side.

Some parts of this are solved by changing the order, and some are not. Solved: candidates that will not line up, and things tried that will not last. Both come from adding candidates while holding no standard to compare them by. Not solved: the skill the activity requires, and the time needed to keep at it. Placing where you are headed does not make the day longer.

So nothing gets decided at the point where you finish reading. What gets decided is an estimate of which of these states you are in. Once the estimate is there, the place to work on next narrows to one.

What follows takes in order what is actually being searched for when someone says they have nothing to be absorbed in, what other than the object belongs to the conditions of absorption, why the sequence of getting better and enjoying it less occurs, and why the same thing recurs even after the object is swapped.

What Is Actually Being Searched For

This sensation calls two separate states by the same name. Never having had one, and having had one that is now gone.

The first refers to a state where the memory of absorption itself is not at hand. Neither as a child nor now is there any recollection of losing track of time in something. Or there is a recollection, but it is being read back as merely having worked through a task somebody else set.

The second is a state where the memory exists but the present does not. You used to do the same thing and it carried you. Now you do the same thing and it does not. The object has not changed.

Spoken of with the same word nothing, they leave different things at hand. The first has no material; the second has material. And the material in the second case is very strong. An observation that the result changed while the object stayed the same shows that the object alone cannot account for the result.

Can you name even one piece of work during which you were not conscious of time passing? The first and the second divide on that single point.

Naming one puts you in the second; naming none puts you in the first. The point here is not to set the bar high. Make the condition hours of immersion, forgetting to eat or sleep and almost every experience drops out. Real absorption is quieter than that, and while inside it you do not notice. You notice when it is over and you look at the clock.

The material is in hand in the second case, which is where the conditions can be identified.

One more thing: the shape of the phrase itself carries a clue. What something to be absorbed in indicates is that the search is aimed at a noun. The moment it is set up as a search for a thing, absorption gets treated as an attribute attached to objects. This object has absorption on it; that one does not.

The activities already in your hands then drop out of the running automatically. Searching, as an operation, only ever looks at what you do not yet have.

The work you are doing now is therefore never examined. In fact that is where the longest hours have gone and where the material has piled up thickest. The frame of searching is shaped so that the densest stock is excluded first.

None of this says the object side decides nothing at all. There are areas where your hands move and areas where they do not, and some things are out of reach physically or by aptitude. What can be said is that the difference operates up to the entrance of the candidate list, and something else decides whether it lasts. Checking the entrance difference again and again will not produce the reason it did not last.

What the Standard Advice Assumes

The advice on offer splits into two lines. One hands you a procedure; the other changes your stance.

The procedure line raises the efficiency of the search. Write out what you used to enjoy. Dig into your values. Take an assessment. Recall activities during which you lost track of time. Work backwards from your spending history. All of it can be carried out, and carrying it out does line candidates up. There is not a single piece of advice in this line that cannot be acted on.

What the stance line doubts is the premise of the search instead. The advice that something to be absorbed in is not found by searching but grows as you do it belongs here. Stop looking for the perfect one, it continues, and move first.

Both lines genuinely work. The procedure side makes visible the candidates that were in your head without ever being laid out. That is no small effect. The stance side changes how difficulty gets read when you hit it. The habit of reading a hard patch as this was not the real thing stops, so that is effective too.

The two lines share one premise. Both place the cause on the inside of the individual.

The procedure side sees the searching as insufficient. Not dug deep enough, not recalled, not enough tried. The stance side sees the posture as wrong. Believing it is something to be found, demanding perfection.

In both, the thing to be moved is the person. And only two terms appear: the person and the object. Inside those two terms, an observation that the result changed with the same object can only be read as a change of skill. Nothing else on the person’s side moved.

Read as a change of skill, the prescription is fixed at one. Raise the difficulty again. And in fact, taking harder work does bring it back for a while. What does not continue is the way it comes back. As long as whoever sets the difficulty sits on the outside, raising it lands you in the same place again. Two terms leave nowhere to put the question of who sets the difficulty.

The stance advice has one more blind spot. The phrase it grows as you do it has no destination inside it.

When trials accumulate without any settled reason for continuing, the reason to continue gets supplied from outside. There was a response, so continue. It was praised, so continue. What grows is the skill, while the origin moves outward. Grow it works only where what it grows towards is already settled.

So the experience of that advice not working does not mean the advice was crude. One place to aim it was missing, that is all.

And doing both at once changes how the record accumulates. The procedure side leaves a list of candidates; the stance side leaves a count of attempts. Both go up, so the sense of progress appears. What is going up, though, is candidates and attempts, not the length of time anything lasted. Only the length is absent from the record, so the condition sitting outside the search never comes into view.

The Conditions of Absorption Include More Than the Object

The state of absorption has had its conditions examined in psychology. And the type of object is not on the list.

Flow, the concept proposed by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, refers to a state of complete immersion in an activity, in which the sense of time distorts and self-consciousness falls away. Awareness of what one is doing thins out, and the activity becomes its own purpose.

Three conditions are set out for this state to arise. That the difficulty of the task and your own skill are in balance. That the goal is clear. That feedback returns immediately.

The first is a condition on a relation, not on an object. With the same object, a rise in skill breaks the balance. Too easy and it turns to boredom; too hard and it turns to anxiety. Balance is a distance between object and person, not an attribute of the object.

The second and the third sit even further from the object. A clear goal and immediate feedback are things prepared on the outside of the activity. Where there is a mechanism that marks your work, both are supplied from outside.

Even when the supply is external, the conditions are met. Absorption does occur. But at that moment, the one deciding the goal is not you.

The same line of research produced an observation that shows this directly. Using the experience sampling method, which pages people repeatedly through an ordinary day to record what they are doing and how they feel, states of flow appeared more often at work than in leisure. And yet, in the responses given at work, the level of motivation came out lower, with more responses of wishing to be doing something else (Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre, 1989, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(5), 815–822).

The hours of absorption and the hours of wanting to be there do not coincide.

This mismatch throws doubt on what the search for something to be absorbed in is aimed at. What is being searched for is not absorption itself but the state of feeling that you want to be doing it. And the two move separately.

The observation is an aggregate of self-reports, not a demonstration of cause. There may be several reasons why the conditions line up more readily at work. What can be said is one thing: whether absorption is present and whether the person wants to be there can be measured apart from each other.

That one thing is enough. Searching for an object you can be absorbed in moves only the first of the three conditions. Who prepares the second and the third — the goal and the feedback — does not change when the object is swapped.

Getting Better and Enjoying It Less Has a Sequence

A state in which the conditions are supplied from outside grows more stable the longer it runs. And that stability is what wears absorption down.

This is a place I spent several years passing through myself.

In 2011 I came out of a music college and called myself a composer. Called myself, and nothing more: there was no steady job. Occasionally a commission for a piece would come in, and I would take it. The rest of the time went into sending tracks to competitions where there was no telling whether they would be picked. Income moved up and down by tens of thousands of yen from month to month, and next month could not be forecast.

Send a track to a competition. It loses. Nothing is said about what was lacking. Send another the following week; it loses again. Inside that repetition I began to think about how to be picked. Move the style closer. Match the length to the brief. What decides it is the first three seconds, I was told, so I worked the opening over.

The rare commissions that did come through were no more open. What was asked for was bright, positive, universally palatable background music. Who would hear it was not disclosed, where it would be used was not explained, and only the revision notes came back. A bit brighter. A bit less angular. Following each note, the outline of the track flattened by one more step.

The technique did go up. Listening to my own work from six months earlier, I could hear the roughness in it.

And making music stopped being enjoyable. I took it for a problem of concentration, changed the hours I worked in, changed the place. None of it held for long. What was left at the end was a conclusion: if the music I love does not carry me, the weakness is mine.

What follows is an explanation given afterwards.

What was happening was a movement in the origin of motivation. The reason for making a piece had moved from my inside to the outside. Outside meaning the commission, the requirement, the judging criteria. What was being made stayed the same, while the origin of what it was being made for had been swapped.

And what drove that movement was the rise in technique itself.

The better you get, the more precisely you can meet an outside requirement. As you meet it, the responses to meeting it multiply. Responses return fast. Competition results and revision notes both come back in the clear shape of a verdict. Your own standard, meanwhile, returns slowly and stays vague. Set a fast-returning standard beside a slow one and the fast one takes the floor.

So the expectation that once I am good enough, absorption will come back faces the wrong way. Getting better also means getting better at answering an external standard. Raise skill alone while the standard stays on loan to the outside, and what gets refined is the way it is lent.

There is nothing wrong with responses coming back. Responses are material. Who it reached and what is being asked for can only be known from them. The trouble starts when material turns into the standard of judgement itself. Read as material, or read as a mark. The same response takes either reading.

The Same Thing Recurs After the Object Is Swapped

If the reading holds — that the origin moved outward — a consequence follows. Swap the object, and where the form is the same the movement recurs.

And it does run that way. Music stops being enjoyable, so something else begins. It is interesting at first. Skill goes up. Outside requirements can be met. Responses return. The fast-returning standard takes the floor. And it stops carrying you again.

Each lap gets shorter as skills come faster. So the verdict I am the type who gets bored gets attached. Once the verdict moves from the phenomenon to the person, the next move disappears. A state can be treated; a trait cannot.

The reason this verdict attaches easily lies on the side of the count. The object differs every time, and only the result stays the same. Change a variable, get the same result, and the cause lies with what you did not change. The inference itself is sound, and what you did not change includes yourself. So it lands on the person. There is one more thing you did not change. The form. The same inference points there too, but form is not recognised as a variable.

I am not saying that swapping the object is always pointless. Where the balance between skill and difficulty has collapsed entirely, swapping is sometimes faster. What can be said is that if you swapped and stopped in the same place, the side you swapped was not the cause.

The search advice rests on one premise: if it were truly something you love, you would be able to stay absorbed in it.

Grant the premise, then turn it over as it stands. If the premise is right, the experience of ceasing to be absorbed counts as evidence that it was never truly loved. And yet, with that same object, you were absorbed before. If a mark separating real from false sits on the object, then the mark was rewritten partway through.

What can be rewritten is not an attribute of the object. What moves with time is the relation between object and person. So whether you can stay absorbed does not work as a test of an object’s authenticity.

Maybe I just got bored remains available as a reading. It remains, but it is a restatement rather than an explanation. It does not say why the boredom came, so nothing follows about what to change next. The reason boredom arrived at an unchanged object cannot be written on the object’s side.

There are cases where the reversal does not reach. Where there has never been an experience of absorption, there is no material to reverse. What can be said here is that for anyone holding the material, the frame that judges an object’s authenticity comes off.

And the question left after it comes off has a different shape. Not which one is real, but who is preparing the goal and the feedback. That question can be answered without swapping the object.

Being answerable also means being movable. Swapping an object carries the cost of discarding accumulation. What was built over years mostly cannot be carried across a change. Moving the origin back does not carry that discarding cost. The object stays where it is.

With No Destination, Judgement Is Taken Over by Outside Responses

Moving the origin back requires somewhere to move it back to. And that somewhere is where you are headed.

Among the conditions listed for absorption, a goal was one of them. A clear goal, and feedback that returns quickly. Hold neither of these on your own side and the only supplier is the outside.

Goals supplied from outside are excellent as practical matters. There is a deadline, there are requirements, and pass or fail is unmistakable. In sheer ease of movement they beat a goal you placed yourself. So the longer you go without a goal of your own, the more the outside ones dominate.

And outside goals never run out. Deliver one and the next arrives. While the next is arriving, judgement is supplied continuously. As long as it is supplied, no need arises to hold a standard of your own. Because the need never arises, the years pass with nothing placed.

Place where you are headed, and what changes is where the meaning of an activity gets measured.

With no destination, whether the work you are doing is good or bad can only be measured by responses. A response returns and it was good work; nothing returns and it was bad. With one instrument only, the presence of a response becomes the mood itself.

With a destination, the same work can be measured on two instruments. Whether a response returned, and whether it moved closer to the destination. The two do not agree. There is work that draws closer while nothing returns, and work that returns responses while drifting away.

Once the second instrument is in, the periods without responses become passable. In activities where responses do go quiet for a time, whether you can pass through decides whether you continue. Measured by outside responses alone, the fuel runs out the moment they stop.

Connection, as used here, means this relation. That the activity sits on the path towards the destination you placed. Not the type of object, but the position of the object relative to the destination.

This does not mean that connection guarantees absorption. Fatigue, deadline pressure, physical condition — absorption breaks off easily for any of them. Connection is one condition, not the whole set. What can be said is that without connection, what breaks off does not come back. There is nowhere for it to come back to.

Nor does it mean discarding outside goals. Deadlines and requirements are part of the practical skeleton. What gets placed is not a replacement for them but a second instrument. The point is that two stand side by side, not that one must be chosen.

On why the view changes after something is placed, and why recognition only moves when the placing happens outside the current range, what cognitive science says about not being able to change and why not acting is not a matter of will take the mechanism apart.

When There Has Never Been Anything to Be Absorbed In

This state includes cases where absorption was not absent but the bar for absorption was set too high.

The word carries a visible intensity with it. Forgetting to eat or sleep. Hours of immersion. Losing sight of the surroundings. Make that the condition and almost all of your own experience drops out.

But real absorption is quiet. And it cannot be observed from inside. While the sense of time is distorted, the part of you that would notice the distortion is itself thinned out. You notice afterwards, and what is left is the plain fact that more time had passed than you thought.

So the handle for searching is not intensity. Can you name one piece of work after which the clock surprised you? The range this picks up is considerably wider.

There is a second, structural omission in this state: the property that activities already in hand drop out of the running.

Inside the work already in hand there may well be stretches during which you were not conscious of time. Assembling material. Listening to someone and finding the structure in it. Tidying a procedure into a form somebody else can follow. These are parts of the job, so they are not counted as candidates for something to be absorbed in.

The reason they are not counted is not that they are work. It is that you already have them. Searching is an operation aimed at what you do not have, so what is at hand falls outside. The nearest material is therefore the last to be looked at.

A neighbouring form of stuckness exists: where the destination itself will not come up. Nothing surfaces when you ask what to aim at. That is not a question about the conditions of absorption but about how the goal is being defined. Having no dream is not a deficiency takes apart the three demands hidden in that word.

Where the direction is roughly in view but will not take the shape of a goal, placing a goal when you have none is closer to what you need.

And even where the verdict is never, the order does not change. Placing where you are headed costs less than adding objects. Placed first, candidates line up in a comparable form. Add them first and what grows is only the number of candidates; the unit of comparison never arrives. With no unit, the added candidates only form a queue waiting to be judged.

What Placing a Connection Costs

Place where you are headed, and part of the work you currently enjoy falls outside the path.

This does happen. Work that returns responses well, gives a sense of traction, and is easy to keep at. A verdict can come back that, seen against the destination, it sits outside. After the verdict the work remains just as enjoyable. The enjoyment does not go. Only its position changes.

And work that has fallen outside the path does not need cutting straight away. Even with the position changed, it is often that side supporting current income. The decision to cut and the decision to know the position can be held apart. Only the second is needed first.

The second cost is the drop felt right after placing. Place a destination and a scale appears against a gap that was never being measured. The distance was there before the placing. What arrived afterwards was the display. Even so, the moment it displays, it feels far.

The third cost is that conversations around you slip out of alignment. The standard other people are using is usually the response side. Widely read, well received, more enquiries. The same words get used while pointing at different things for a while.

All three are real. They are, however, the costs measured against placing nothing at all. Place nothing and none of the three appears. What continues instead is a state in which outside responses take over judgement. That state has its own cost, and it does not show. While responses keep returning, it looks as though nothing is happening.

The reason the direction is still worth taking lies in the number of attempts.

Swapping objects is limited in how often it can be done. Building accumulation in one field takes years, so there are not many changes available. And each change leaves most of what was built behind.

Replacing the origin is not limited in how often it can be done. The object stays, and only what you measure by moves. If it turns out wrong you can place it again, and the accumulation survives the replacing.

That it can be replaced also bears on starting. The more it is treated as unchangeable, the more certainty gets demanded before placing. Certainty is not available before placing. This inversion of order is what extends the period spent searching without ever placing.

On the form in which the origin stays outside, there is a backing on the economic side. Who decides your income is a structural question, and getting out of labour-intensive work covers it whole.

What to Check to Know the Connection Is Working

Checking out of order does not work: if the first is not met, the other two will not return a value.

First, look at whether the destination you placed can be accounted for as an extension of work that is currently returning responses. If it can, it is a restatement of the response standard and will not serve as the second instrument. A state with more enquiries coming in, a state of being more highly regarded — both fall into this shape.

Do this check immediately after placing. Time passes, you grow used to the position, and whether it is a restatement of an external standard stops being visible.

Second, look at whether the work continued through a period when no responses returned.

This is the direct indicator of whether connection is working. Driven by outside responses alone, work stops the moment they stop. Measured against a destination, it continues through. The fact of having continued is itself the evidence that the standard of judgement sits on your side.

Short periods will not decide it. Right after responses stop, momentum alone keeps things moving. What to look at is whether the hands are still moving after the quiet has lasted a while.

Third, look at whether the same work is now catching on something different than before.

Place a destination and information that carries meaning against it starts reaching awareness. Things that never bothered you begin to catch. This catching appears earlier than any change in the amount of activity. Judge by amount of activity and you will read a period that has already started moving as one that has not.

The level of absorption cannot be decided by a length of time. The same thirty minutes takes a different meaning with your current level of skill and with the distance to what you placed. The period before things start to catch works the same way: set a number of months first and the destination drifts towards whatever that period can reach.

With the same object, absorbed once and not now. That observation has been read as material for doubting the object. It runs the other way: the object never changed at all. What changed is what the activity was being carried out towards.

Neither the advice that hands over a way of searching nor the advice that tells you to grow it is wrong. Both see the world in two terms, object and self. Put in a third term — where you are headed — and both find a place. Searching becomes the work of laying candidates out; growing becomes the work of extending skill along a path. Only when the third term is missing does the search fail to end and the skill you grew carry the origin outward.

The time spent searching for something to be absorbed in is not wasted. What that search is being carried out towards, though, may still be undecided. Whether to decide it, and where, is yours.

Where the difficulty sits on the side of turning what you love into income, why turning your passion into a career falls short is closer to what you need.