Long read: How ‘Zombie Flow’ Took Over Culture

He begins by invoking the work of the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who introduced us the concept of ‘Flow’, meaning:

“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.

…The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives”

We all have experienced moments like this and often find those moments producing some of our best work. But what has this got to do with doomscrolling?

Thompson then reminds us of another trend in popular culture where across movies, videogames, TV shows – sequels are on the rise suggesting that the audience prefers some element of familiarity. He then combines the flow and familiarity concepts to explain what is happening on our phones:

“…the principle of familiarity is merging with flow to produce a new kind of high-tech passivity that resembles the experience of flow without fulfilling the meaning of it.

The algorithmic newsfeed—from TikTok to Reels—is carefully engineered to organize compulsive short-term videos around the user’s revealed interests, for the purpose of maximizing the display of advertising squares. Scrolling has a funny way of immobilizing its user, numbing their mind, and producing a kind of disembodied timelessness.

The information systems researcher Shishi Wu coined an interesting term for the effect of short-form video platforms: “Passive Flow.” In her 2024 dissertation at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Wu wanted to understand why so many young users spend more time on social media platforms than they intend to. “This phenomenon cannot be fully explained by addiction or self-control failure,” she wrote. Instead, Wu proposed the theory of passive flow, which has three features. First, users engage without clear goals. The platform mindlessly pulls forward their attention, and they rarely pause to reflect on why they’re doing what they’re doing. Second, they lose self-awareness. They notice their body less and disconnect with the world around them. Third, they experience “time transformation”—that is, they don’t just spend more time than they intended on the site, but also they lose track of time entirely.

“Csikszentmihalyi didn’t say that flow needs to be pointed towards something great,” the author Brad Stulberg told me on my podcast Plain English. “You can experience flow when you’re falling in love or when you’re writing a book. But you can also experience flow scrolling on Twitter, gambling at a slot machine.” In fact, the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who studied Las Vegas casinos, found that gambling addiction is less about winning money than about achieving a “trancelike state” at the machines where the body’s sense of material reality melts away.

…The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen once told me that games can have both a goal and a purpose. The goal of a game is a win; the purpose of a game is to have fun. In toxic games, the goals overwhelm the purpose. You can win a game by mastering its rules but also feel miserable by failing to see that there is a larger game of well-being whose rules you have broken in order to feel like a winner.

I’ve come to believe that something similar has happened in pop culture. Entertainment and tech companies have gotten smarter about putting consumers into bastardized flow states that leaves people feeling drained and sad rather than challenged and enlarged as selves. Modern leisure recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose, which Csikszentmihalyi summarized as “to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful.” Algorithmic flow is flow without achievement, flow without challenge, flow without even volition. What Wu calls “passive flow” and Bloom calls “shitty flow” deserves a harsher and more specific label. To be lost in the lazy river of algorithmic media is to be lost the current of life without a mind. Zombie flow.”

He then goes on to cite Csikszentmahlyi’s example of a British Columbian tribe – Shushwap, which consciously induced challenges to get out of the comfort zone and prevent ‘Zombie flow’.

“The goal of life may be the achievement of ease. But the purpose of life is the overcoming of difficulty.

To end where we began: “If we’re so smart, why aren’t we happier?” Csikszentmihalyi asked. Zombie flow is a perfect answer. It is progress without pleasure. It offers the sensation of optimal experience while scooping out its meaning. The Shushwap had moral elders whose authority derived from their obligation to the community’s flourishing. Our entertainment elders specialize in the opposite aim, to remove every friction and keep us floating in the lazy river of the scroll…

Ten years ago, when I stumbled on Csikszentmihalyi, I was convinced that the great challenge of living was the ability to get into flow. These days, I wonder if a crucial skill to maintaining sanity and self-awareness is rather the ability to get out of zombie flow. “Without challenge, life had no meaning,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote. The elders knew it, too. Life is supposed to be the right kind of hard.”