"In communist Russia, the ego goals might be to work in the factory in service to the state. Unfortunately, this is a really shitty goal because it does not provide opportunity for happiness."

I stopped reading here - it is a stupid generalization and a misunderstanding of the Flow concept, of people in totalitarian regimes and of people in general.

People living in communist Russia were not as naive to have as a personal goal "service of the state", just as an employee in corporate America today doesn't necessarily think of "maximizing shareholder value" the whole day (or whatever is on the bullshit bingo du jour).

In fact, the idea of Csikszentmihalyi's flow is that resourceful people can create/find meaningful activities pretty much regardless of the external environment (above some threshold) which leads to a feeling of happiness.

From what I've heared and read, communist factories were often the hotbeds of creative "hacking": given the nonsensical and weakly enforced rules, people used whatever tools and material they had available to tinker and hack together household items for their own use.