What Is Shitty Flow? The Hidden Cost of High Performance

Why the modern flow narrative doesn’t go far enough — and what flow without direction is really costing us, personally and collectively.

For most of my career, I was a true believer in flow.

I trained thousands of people in the Golden Zone model — match your skills to the challenge, notice anxiety if the challenge exceeds your skills, notice boredom if your skills exceed the challenge, and keep calibrating until you find the corridor where absorption takes over and time dissolves. The research was compelling. The 500% productivity boost figure floated around every conference stage. The pitch was simple: flow is the pinnacle human experience, and if we could just engineer more of it, individually and organizationally, we’d unlock something close to our full potential.

I still think flow is real, and I still think the Golden Zone is a useful map. But I don’t think flow is the pinnacle anymore. And I don’t think it’s the objective.

What changed my mind wasn’t a single moment. It was a question that kept surfacing the more I worked with organizations: who is this performance boost actually for?

Is it for the individual, who walks out of the office feeling alive and whole? Or is it for the shareholders, whose quarterly returns depend on the individual metabolizing themselves as fast as possible? Is it for the team, who experienced a rare day of shared purpose? Or is it for the system, which needs coordinated human absorption the way a factory needs coal?

Those questions bothered me because the honest answer, most of the time, was: it depends. And “it depends” isn’t a conclusion. It’s the beginning of a different inquiry.

The first crack: shitty flow

I was watching a Big Think video recently where Brad Stulberg, author of The Way of Excellence, introduced a term I hadn’t encountered before. The psychologist David Pizarro, along with his colleague Paul Bloom, coined the phrase shitty flow to describe the experience of being deeply absorbed in things that don’t serve your values — or worse, actively erode them.

The canonical example is doom-scrolling. All the hallmarks of flow are there: lost sense of self, warped time, total absorption. But when you surface two hours later, you don’t feel satisfied. You feel hollow. Agitated. Slightly ashamed. Pizarro describes it as what happens when your days are full of emails and meetings, you’re depleted by evening, and the thing you reach for is Instagram or YouTube — and the next two hours vanish.

Stulberg’s move is elegant. He argues that what we’re chasing isn’t flow. It’s excellence — which he defines as involved engagement in something worthwhile that aligns with your values. Flow is values-neutral; excellence is values-laden. A scrolling session and a great surgery can both be flow states. Only one is excellence.

I found this genuinely useful. It names something I’d felt for years but couldn’t articulate — that the state itself isn’t the goal, because the state doesn’t distinguish between what’s feeding you and what’s feeding on you.

But the more I sat with it, the more I realized the framework describes only half of the problem.

Two axes, not one

Flow isn’t good or bad along a single spectrum. It runs along two independent axes, and most of the discourse collapses them into one.

Axis one: Does this flow feed you?

This is Pizarro and Stulberg’s axis. Shitty flow leaves you hollow. I’ll call the positive counterpart exhilarated flow — and this isn’t a new idea for me. In my 2012 book Surfing Life Waves, I wrote about the afterglow of flow — what we surfers call stoke.

It’s the reward when you come out of flow state — technically, when the brain returns from transient hypofrontality — and your whole system hums with something that isn’t just adrenaline and isn’t just dopamine. Skill, values, and action have been in alignment, usually in dialogue with something larger than you. The ocean. A piece of work. A conversation. You walk back up the beach already planning tomorrow. And crucially, stoke makes you want to recover. You eat well, sleep deep, stretch, take care of yourself — because you’re hungry to do it again.

Stoke is exhilarated flow. It’s the state flow research keeps trying to describe without quite landing. And a useful diagnostic: how do you feel when you come out of it? If you feel like you need a glass of wine (or other sedatives), it was probably shitty flow. If you feel stoked — tired in the good way, the way that makes recovery feel sacred — it was probably exhilarated.

Axis two: Does this flow regenerate the world, or extract from it?

This is the axis Stulberg’s framework doesn’t quite address, and it’s the one I’ve been wrestling with. A person in exhilarated flow might be regenerating the whole they belong to, or extracting from it. Same inner experience. Radically different downstream consequence.

These axes are independent, which means there are four possible quadrants:

Exhilarating and regenerative — Stoke. The leader who chooses people over profit and watches the team flourish. The surfer pushing two percent beyond her skill at dawn. The grandparent fully present at a family dinner, telling stories the children will remember.

Exhilarating and extractive — Conquest. The founder in full flow building a product whose business model depends on user addiction. The poacher tracking an endangered species, skilled and alive in the hunt. The charismatic operator running the long con on someone who trusts him. They love their work. Their work is levelling something.

Depleting and extractive — Toil. The lawyer grinding billable hours on a case she stopped believing in years ago. The pro athlete still playing under external pressure, love for the game long gone. The friend maintaining a friendship out of guilt rather than care. The flow hole sits inside this quadrant — the pharmaceutical or cultural version where output is high and meaning is absent.

Depleting and regenerative — Sacrifice. Rarer, and the most honorable of the four. The founder on the all-night brief because the team deserves it. The parent coaching their kid’s 6am Saturday game after a brutal week. The caregiver with an aging parent, showing up every day. I call this one running on love. The meaning is intact. The reciprocity is not.

The flow discourse mostly only asks axis one — is this fulfilling you? — or only axis two — is this good for the world? Rarely both. And the two questions don’t give the same answer.

The lawyer who left

I know a lawyer — I’ll keep her anonymous — who spent a decade in litigation. Corporate disputes, mostly. She was good at it. Courtroom work requires serious flow; you’re tracking a dozen threads at once, reading the judge, recalibrating in real time. She got into flow often.

And she was miserable.

Over the years, the flow stopped being exhilarating. It became shitty flow in the Pizarro sense — absorbing, but hollowing. She was winning cases she didn’t care about for clients she didn’t like. Axis one was screaming at her: this isn’t feeding you anymore.

She left and went to work for an NGO for a fraction of the pay. Much lower stakes, smaller cases, less glamour. But she described the difference in one sentence: I can feel the flow again. It’s the good kind.

What happened? Axis one shifted. Her work came back into alignment with what she actually valued. Stoke returned.

Now — and this is important — this isn’t a story about NGOs being good and law being bad. Plenty of NGOs are self-perpetuating engines that accomplish less than they cost. And plenty of lawyers do work that saves lives and changes societies. What shifted for her wasn’t the sector. It was the alignment between her specific work and her specific values. That’s axis one.

Axis two is always, in every context, a separate thing you have to examine. Her story is clean on axis one. Axis two is a question you have to keep asking wherever you work.

The surfer and the burned-out pro

The same two axes show up beautifully in sport.

Think of a surfer in her element. She’s pushing a few percent beyond her current skill — that’s the Golden Zone doing its work — not because someone is paying her to, not because there’s a ranking point on the line, but because she loves the feeling of edging further into her own capacity. She comes out of the water stoked. Tired, happy, already planning tomorrow morning. That’s exhilarated flow.

Now picture a professional athlete who used to feel that way. Years into the career, the external pressure has overtaken the internal love. He still gets into flow — the sport demands it, and his body remembers the patterns — but now it’s a flow he performs inside, not a flow that nourishes him. He comes off the field exhausted in the wrong way. He dreads the next session. His metrics are still elite. Something inside him has gone quiet.

That’s shitty flow in the sporting register. All the physiological markers are the same. The inner experience is completely different. And anyone who’s worked with high performers knows this is the version of burnout that doesn’t show up in training-load data. It shows up in the eyes.

Axis one again. The flow is technically present. The meaning has drained out.

The best version of this story I know is Kelly Slater’s. At the end of 1998, having won five consecutive world titles — arguably the most dominant run competitive surfing has ever seen — he walked away from the World Championship Tour. He was twenty-six years old, at the absolute peak of his powers, and the love had gone. He spent the next three years doing other things. Surf films. Business ventures. Golf. Wave pool research. Just living. In 2002 he returned to the tour, and went on to win six more world titles. Eleven in total. He is widely regarded as the greatest competitive surfer who has ever lived — and a meaningful part of why is that he recognized shitty flow at the peak of his career and had the courage to stop. He came back only when the stoke had come back. That’s not weakness; that’s the deepest possible understanding of what flow is actually for.

What Stulberg’s framework still doesn’t address

Stulberg’s answer to shitty flow is values-aligned flow. Good, so far. But watch what happens when you examine the values he lists as examples: mastery, craft, integrity, community, spirituality, discipline, intellect, wisdom, kindness, creativity.

All wholesome. All beautiful.

Now notice what’s not on the list. Wealth maximization. Power. Dominance. Winning at any cost.

Stulberg’s framework works perfectly if we pre-filter the values before they enter the equation. But in the real world, values aren’t curated. A hedge fund trader might have carefully selected, deeply held, heartfelt values around wealth accumulation and competitive dominance. A team in an extractive industry can be fully aligned around its mission to maximize shareholder return. By Stulberg’s definition, they’re pursuing excellence. They’re in values-aligned flow.

And they can still be levelling a forest.

This is where axis two comes in and the values-alignment frame goes quiet. I wrote in Start With Values that I can’t tell anyone their values are wrong — and I still believe that. Values aren’t a menu someone else gets to edit for you. But if I can’t evaluate values, and values-aligned flow is the goal, then the framework gives me no way to distinguish a team in flow running an emergency room beautifully from a team in flow engineering a more addictive slot machine app.

The framework needs to go further. Or rather, it needs a prior question.

The challenge I couldn’t shake

My philosophy teacher, Nikos Patedakis — who works at the intersection of wisdom traditions and ecological thinking at Dangerous Wisdom, and who has guested on my podcast and consistently challenges my thinking — put the challenge to me plainly:

You can get a team of humans into flow and absolutely, ruthlessly destroy an ecosystem.

That sentence sat in me for weeks. Because it’s true. A logging crew clear-cutting old growth can be in textbook exhilarated flow. A high-frequency trading desk dismantling a retail investor’s savings can be in textbook exhilarated flow. A propaganda unit producing content designed to destabilize a democracy can be in textbook exhilarated flow. The 500% productivity multiplier doesn’t ask what it’s multiplying. It just multiplies.

Csikszentmihalyi himself said this, in the original 1990 book. Flow, he wrote, is morally neutral. The experience is identical whether the person in it is a surgeon, a soldier, a con artist, or a poet. We’ve largely scrubbed this caveat from the pop-psychology version of flow. But it was there from the start.

Which means the real question isn’t how to get more flow. The real question is:

Flow is a multiplier, not a virtue. What are we multiplying, and for whom?

The missing layer: systems and consequences

The second axis isn’t just philosophical. It reflects how systems actually behave.

The systems thinker Donella Meadows spent her life showing that systems respond to incentives and feedback loops, not intentions. A system can produce outcomes no individual inside it would consciously choose. Each person inside can be acting ethically, skillfully, and in flow — and the collective output can still be devastating. This is how we end up with climate destabilization driven by billions of rational daily decisions, none of which the individual decision-makers would endorse if they could see the aggregate.

The economist Kate Raworth makes a related distinction that’s useful here. Some systems are regenerative — they sustain the conditions they depend on. Others are extractive — they deplete them. Regenerative forestry leaves the forest more able to produce next year than it was this year. Extractive forestry leaves clear-cut. Both can employ people in flow. Only one has a future.

Flow fits into this cleanly. It isn’t a virtue. It’s a multiplier. It amplifies whatever system it’s embedded in.

Which brings the question back again, from a different angle. What system is your flow embedded in, and what is that system doing to the world?

The flow hole

A few years back, inspired by biohacker culture, I reached for a nootropic — modafinil — to meet a deadline I couldn’t see another way through. Technical documentation, enterprise client, high stakes.

Sixteen straight hours of flow. The work came pouring out — clean, structured, at volume. I hit the deadline. The client signed. It felt, in the moment, like I’d unlocked a cheat code.

Then I tried to come down.

I couldn’t sleep. Two days later I still couldn’t sleep. My skin broke out in a chronic condition that took weeks to settle. I was listless, wiped, physiologically obliterated. My four-year-old wanted bedtime stories and I couldn’t show up for them. I was there in the room and not there at all.

High performance? Technically, yes. Delivered at a level I couldn’t have hit without it.

But the question is the one I keep coming back to. For who?

For me? No. My body paid. My daughter paid. My recovery paid. The stoke was absent. There was no glow on the other side. Just emptiness and a contract signed for a company I don’t work for anymore.

For the company? Yes. They got the approval. They got the enterprise client. The documentation was excellent. The cost was metabolized by my nervous system, not theirs.

Was I fulfilled? Partly. There was a flicker of satisfaction at the quality of the work. But the physiological cost was severe, and the felt sense afterward was not pride. It was something closer to grief.

I started describing this as a flow hole — a play on the K-hole that people describe on ketamine. A dissociative tunnel you enter and don’t fully remember climbing out of. A flow hole is what happens when the conditions for flow are engineered — chemically, culturally, or through sheer accumulated pressure — without any relationship to meaning, and without the recovery that stoke earns and stoke demands.

This is different from Pizarro’s shitty flow. Shitty flow, in its original framing, is scrolling and gambling — absorption in something trivial. A flow hole is absorption in something productive, but at the cost of your own cognitive and emotional resources, with no stoke on the other side to refill the well. It’s the cognitive equivalent of strip-mining. You emerge impressive on paper and hollowed out in fact.

And it scales. What happens to forests and fisheries is happening to human attention at an industrial scale. Whole industries are now organized around engineering flow holes in workers, consumers, and users. The attention economy is a flow-engineering industry. Much of modern work culture is, too. Every productivity hack, every optimization protocol, every “how to 10x your output” thread is, at its core, a technique for extracting more coordinated human absorption per unit of time.

Which brings me back to the question I started with. Who is this performance boost actually for?

Two rooms

Consider two rooms.

Room one is a late-night product sprint inside a fast-growing AI company. The lead engineer hasn’t slept properly in days. A small dose of Ritalin keeps the edges sharp. A microdose he took earlier seems to be helping with pattern recognition. The code is flowing — clean, fast, precise. Time dissolves. Self-consciousness disappears. The team is in flow. Values fully aligned — velocity, dominance, winning the category. The product they’re building will increase user engagement by double digits. It will also, by design, make it much harder for users to leave. The engineer feels effective, focused, rewarded. By every internal metric, this is success.

Room two is a hospital emergency room. A trauma team working on a patient who came in forty minutes ago with internal bleeding. The team is in flow. Values fully aligned — care, craft, service, the sanctity of the human in front of them. They’re executing protocols honed over thousands of hours of training.

Same neurological state in both rooms. Same absorption, same time dilation, same loss of self-consciousness. Same multiplier.

One room multiplies care into a human life saved. The other room multiplies engagement into a product that may look, in ten years, like cigarettes look now.

I’m not saying the AI team is evil or the ER is holy. I’m saying the framework that celebrates flow as an unqualified good — or even as values-aligned excellence — doesn’t help you tell the difference between these rooms. And the difference matters. It matters enormously. It’s the difference between a civilization that multiplies what regenerates it and a civilization that multiplies what depletes it.

What wisdom traditions have always asked

The productivity frame — Csikszentmihalyi, Kotler, most of the pop-psychology discourse — asks: how do we get more flow? It treats flow as a resource to be harvested.

The wisdom frame asks a different question, and asks it first: what is a human being, and what is this human being part of?

This is the question Nikos kept returning to. And it’s the question the traditions that have survived for thousands of years — Buddhist, Taoist, Indigenous, Sufi, Stoic — have all, in their different ways, kept pointing at. The self that seeks to optimize its own flow for its own benefit is, in every one of these traditions, considered confused. Not morally wrong. Confused. Working from an outdated map of what a human being actually is.

A person is not a bounded preference-machine seeking to maximize its internal states. A person is a node in a web — biological, relational, ecological, ancestral. Flow that serves only the node, at the expense of the web, rests on a category error. The wisdom traditions don’t need to tell that person their values are wrong. They just point out that the self those values are in service of is smaller than the self the person actually is.

This is a gentler critique than moralism, and also a more devastating one. It doesn’t say your flow is bad. It says your flow is working for something that isn’t quite you — and when you notice what the bigger you actually is, the question of what your flow should serve changes on its own.

Values, installed and discovered

Here’s something I’ve noticed across tens of thousands of people who’ve taken the Values Institute assessment. When people do the real work of discovering their values — stripping away the marketing, the inherited ambitions, the cultural machinery — the top values that emerge across cultures are remarkably consistent. Love. Family. Peace. Freedom. Contribution. Connection.

Wealth accumulation as a terminal value? Rare. It shows up, but almost never at the top.

This doesn’t mean wealth doesn’t matter to people. It matters enormously. But it tends to show up as an instrumental value — a means to freedom, to family security, to contribution — rather than a terminal one. When people think carefully about what they actually want, they rarely want money for its own sake.

This suggests something important, and I’ll say it carefully. Many of the values driving our collective flow — the values that fill the boardrooms and the pitch decks and the KPIs — may not be values people have discovered. They may be values the machine has installed. Values that serve the system of extraction, dressed up in the language of personal ambition.

I’m not judging anyone for holding them. I’m observing that the pattern breaks as soon as people do the work. Which is its own kind of evidence.

Flow without meaning

One more thing, and this one I’ll say quietly, because it runs against a position I’ve heard defended in my own field.

Burnout isn’t always caused by too much work. It’s often caused by too much of the wrong work, done well. Sustained, high-performance effort in service of something you don’t actually believe in is one of the fastest paths to collapse.

Flow without meaning doesn’t build resilience. It builds a very specific kind of exhaustion — the kind some in the performance field refuse to name, but anyone who’s lived through it recognizes immediately. You’ve crushed quarter after quarter. Your metrics are outstanding. Your team is “in flow.” And you wake up one Tuesday in October and cannot, for reasons you can’t articulate, open your laptop.

Call it what you want. The body is keeping score. The flow that serves something you don’t actually believe in eventually collects its debt.

What would purposeful flow require?

If flow is a multiplier, and if values aren’t automatically trustworthy, and if the system is constantly trying to install extractive values disguised as personal ambition — then the question becomes: what conditions make flow regenerative rather than extractive? What turns the multiplier into a force for nourishment on both axes at once?

This is the question that sits underneath the FLAME framework I’ve been developing. I won’t dwell on it here, but briefly, the five conditions look something like this:

Fellowship. Flow that’s relationally embedded. You can’t flow-hole alone for long without losing your humanity. Real flow includes the people around you; it doesn’t strip-mine your attention away from them.

Legacy. Flow pointed at something that outlasts the activity. Not the quarter. Not the bonus. Something you’d be proud of if your grandchildren asked what you did with your life.

Agility. The capacity to notice when flow is costing too much, and to respond. A person in a flow hole has lost this capacity. A person in purposeful flow keeps it.

Mindset. Metacognition inside the absorption. Not constant self-analysis — that would break the state — but the trained awareness that can surface when something important is signaling.

Energy. Flow that regenerates rather than depletes. You finish the day stoked — tired in the good way — not scraped hollow.

These aren’t barriers to flow. They’re what distinguishes flow that serves life from flow that extracts from it. Stulberg’s excellence framework, if you extend it outward past the individual, points toward something like this. Fellowship extends excellence into the collective. Legacy extends it across time. Agility, mindset, and energy are the internal conditions that keep flow from becoming its own kind of addiction.

A simpler test

You don’t need any of this to start. Two questions will do.

When I come out of this, do I feel more alive — or slightly diminished, even if I performed well?

And beyond me — what did this flow make more of in the world? More clarity, care, and connection? Or more noise, dependency, and extraction?

Most of us already know the answers. We just don’t always ask the questions.

Where this leaves me

I’m not against flow. I still believe in the Golden Zone. I still teach it. I still experience it — surfing, writing, in deep conversation with my daughter when we’re building something imaginary together. That’s where the stoke lives for me now. That’s where recovery feels sacred because I actually want to come back.

What’s changed is that I no longer think flow is the point.

The point is what flow serves. The point is what we’re multiplying. The point is whether the absorption we’re chasing leaves the world — the person next to us, the team we’re part of, the forest upstream, the generation downstream — slightly more alive or slightly more extracted from.

Brad Stulberg and the researchers he draws on have done important work. Shitty flow is a useful concept. Values-aligned excellence is a useful frame. I suspect if he and I sat down, we’d find we agree on more than we differ on.

But I’d want to press him on the values move. And I’d want to ask him what he’d say to the team in the investment bank who’ve done everything his framework asks and are still, at the civilizational level, part of the problem.

My teacher Nikos might ask it more directly. He’d ask what the forest thinks. And I’ve come to believe that’s the question underneath all of this — the question that every wisdom tradition worth the name has been asking, in its own language, for thousands of years.

What does your flow cost the whole you belong to?

The pinnacle isn’t flow. The pinnacle is participation. Flow that arises from belonging rather than separation. A surfer isn’t optimizing her performance against the ocean. She’s in conversation with it. That’s a completely different thing. And it turns out that’s what the traditions have been pointing at all along — not as a productivity technique, but as a way of being human that doesn’t end in the forest burning down.

So by all means, chase flow. But ask both questions first. Every time.

Is this feeding me?

Is this feeding the world?

And if the honest answer is “no” and “no” — if you’re in a flow hole, working for the machine that profits from your absorption without regard for what it costs you or the world — then the most alive, most resilient, most values-aligned thing you can do might be to close the laptop and go outside.

The forest is already in flow. It’s been in flow for four hundred million years. It doesn’t need the performance boost. It just needs us to remember we’re part of it.