We tend to imagine happiness as a life of rest and leisure. But after years of study, one psychologist found that our deepest satisfaction arrives somewhere else — in the middle of a demanding task, where challenge and skill are finely matched and the ordinary sense of time and self slips away

The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent forty years demonstrating, in study after study, that this picture is empirically wrong. The person doing the task is no longer thinking about doing the task. If effortful challenge produces more satisfaction than effortless leisure, then most people are actively pursuing conditions that make them less happy. But rest is not what produces satisfaction. It means that pursuing pure leisure — trying to remove challenge from one’s life — is likely to produce less happiness, not more.