The Pleasure Paradox and the pursuit of happiness 193 pursuit of pleasure than this remarkable woman. The wiser for the experience I stated the obvious and said,‘ You’ re right. I think she needs to understand that,’ as I reached over and turned the video camera back on. Happiness requires challenge So what makes us happy if it is not having lots of pleasure? A study done some years ago has shed some light on this issue. In this study participants were given a pager that would go off throughout the day to remind them to stop and rate how happy they felt. The results surprised the researchers. They had expected that most people would record that they were at their happiest during their leisure or relaxation times. After all, this is what we all appear to look forward to. These are the times when we are most likely to be undertaking pleasurable activities. But instead what they found was that the highest ratings of happiness typically occurred while those studied were at work! What was going on? The researchers called this phenomenon‘ flow’. We are in flow when we are doing something that completely dominates our thinking and provides a challenge such that the time just flies by. This is why work rated more highly than spending leisure time doing something like watching TV, which provides little challenge. Kids( and many adults) who play computer games know all about flow. They can easily lose themselves in the game and not realize how many hours have gone by. But while flow is a step in the right direction, it is not too dissimilar from pleasure from other sources. Like certain pleasures it can become an escape and be unhealthy. And again there may not be much left to sustain us when the flow experience is over. We need to step beyond flow as a concept, while holding onto the idea that it gives us, of happiness being associated with challenge. Let me summarize all of the thinking and writing in this area with the following.