Beyond Happiness and Meaning, the Psychologically Rich Life

A recent study reveals a third way to live a good life.

Aristotle told us there are two ways to live your life; by pursuing pleasure (hedonic) or meaning (eudaemonic). Philosophy and science have pretty much followed that dichotomy for two-thousand years. But I never felt that either of these two options fit what I wanted out of life. And it turns out that I am not alone.

The Happy Life

The happy life (hedonic happiness) is a life of high satisfaction characterized by pleasure, stability, comfort, safety, and positive emotions. Happy people maintain a high positive to negative affect ratio by moderating their pursuit of pleasure with avoiding pain. Thus happy people come to terms with less than perfect options and are less bothered by the perceived success of others. Happy people are also more able to find satisfaction in and be grateful for the situation they find themselves in and less likely to feel envious of others.

Stable economic, interpersonal, and political circumstances are essential for living a happy life. But this desire for stability is associated with a tendency to support the status quo and be insensitive to social injustice and inequality.

Living in an environment that fosters the stable circumstances that promote happy people requires a bit of good luck because you are not likely to be happy when you are cold, scared and hungry, or living in an unjust society.

The Meaningful Life

Good luck and good fortune are not required to live a life of meaning (eudaemonic). A meaningful life is one characterized by significance, purpose, and service to others. People in this group tend to see doing work of meaning and significance as more important than their own individual happiness. But they also find doing that work to be deeply satisfying.

People seeking meaning feel compelled to contribute to a cause bigger than themselves — purpose guided by strong ethics, morals, and values. They also tend to engage in repetitive activities such as volunteering, meditating, yoga, or prayer. And like happy people, they seek stability and consistency but with more empathy and sensitivity to social issues.

My Story

Although I am certainly not averse to pleasure or meaning, I have never felt that basing my life on either approach fit me. I do like to go on vacation and enjoy myself, but I don’t seek out luxury. I’m the kind of traveler who saves money on the hotel and spends time exploring the place I am visiting. I’m not big on nightlife, but in the evening I can be found reading about the culture and places I visit.

I’m not drawn to the consistency that drives both of these groups. Whereas many people enjoy timeshares for the security and comfort of visiting a familiar place. I prefer to see new and different places like Australia, Bhutan, and sailing between islands in the Caribbean. The idea of returning to the same place bores me, and I am restless to see what else the world has to offer.

To that end, in college, I enrolled in many classes outside of my major simply because they interested me. Doing so was a risky strategy avoided by other prospective medical school students concerned about maintaining their GPA — and for a good reason. My lowest grade in college came from a creative writing class where I threw myself in with much better prepared English majors. Yet, I fondly look back on that class as my lack of experience meant I learned so much.

As for doing something meaningful with my life, I’m not against the idea. After all, I became a surgeon because I wanted to help people. I want to impact the world positively, but I’m not big on joining causes. Instead, I hope that by living my life fully, I will learn how to live well and serve as an inspiration to others — not by becoming a guru, but through my example.

The Third Option

So neither the happiness track nor the path of meaning seemed to fit me. That is why a research article in Psychological Review by Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate grabbed my attention. They wrote about a third option for a good life, the psychologically rich life.

The authors define the psychologically rich life as “a life characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experience.” This approach to life shares some characteristics with the happy life’s focus on comfort and joy and the meaningful life’s emphasis on significance and purpose but is distinct from both those styles. That is because there are three unique characteristics of a psychologically rich life.

Variety. The psychologically rich life is filled with unique and unusual experiences.
Interest. The rich life is a life of interesting experiences and taking an interest in the world.
Perspective changes. The psychologically rich life isn’t just about having exciting and varied experiences; it is about being changed by those experiences.So what kind of person leads a psychologically rich life?

The personality of the psychologically rich life.

Several personality traits are typical of people who pursue psychologically rich lives. The three main characteristics, according to the researchers, are;

Curiosity
Open-mindedness
Experience emotional intensity, both good and bad.

Some other characteristics associated with the psychologically rich life include a focus on personal growth, autonomy, adventurousness, self-acceptance, purposefulness, and having positive relations with a broad diversity of people.

All of the above traits lead to varied and interesting experiences, but the critical point is that the psychologically rich allow themselves to be changed by those experiences. This welcomeness to change stands in contrast to the need for comfort and stability found in the other approaches to a good life.

The reward of a Psychologically Rich Life

All three means of attaining a good life have their rewards. Those who pursue happiness gain personal satisfaction. Knowing you contributed positively to society is the benefit for a life of meaning. So what is the reward for a life of psychological richness?

By learning from their varied experiences, the psychologically rich develop a breadth and depth of knowledge, complex reasoning skills, and the ability to discern multiple potential causes for the behavior of others, which leads them to the understanding that what they know is neither definitive nor universal. The result is that living a rich life rewards one with perspective and wisdom.

So What Does it Take to Live a Rich Life?

If you want to be happy, then you need time, money, and close relationships. While leading a meaningful life requires moral principles, relationships in the broad sense, and consistency. Both of those approaches require a degree of security and stability. On the other hand, those pursuing the psychologically rich life tend to feel less constrained by norms and more free-spirited. As the researchers Oishi and Westgate say in their paper, “Those leading a happy and/or meaningful lives tend to prefer to maintain social order and the status quo, whereas those leading psychologically rich lives seem to embrace social change.”

If you want to live a more psychologically rich life, it helps to cultivate curiosity, free time, energy, and spontaneity. Grand experiences like living abroad (I’m currently living and working in New Zealand) can help you develop a psychologically rich life. Still, less dramatic short trips in everyday life can suffice. And those events don’t always have to be positive (like enduring two weeks in isolation with three teenagers upon arrival in New Zealand). Psychologically rich people can find ways to benefit from catastrophes and tragedies to make their lives richer, if not happier. The critical point may be that it is not what happens, but the meaning psychologically rich people find in the experience and the growth they take away from it. Again, the willingness to seek out life-changing experiences and be changed by those experiences is the defining characteristic of the psychologically rich life.

How Wide Spread is the Psychologically Rich Life?

Oishi and Westgate tested their ideas in nine countries to ensure it was a universal trait. They found that pleasure-seeking (hedonic happiness) was the most popular choice in every country. Meaningfulness (eudaemonic happiness) came in second. The psychologically rich life came third with between 7 to 17%, depending on the country, saying they would choose the psychologically rich life even at the expense of happiness and meaning. So, although it is not a common approach to life, if you feel this best describes you, you can take solace in the fact that you are not alone.

Conclusion

Since the time of Aristotle, our only choices have been between choosing a life of happiness (hedonic) or one of meaning (eudemonic). But that false dichotomy does not sit well with some people who want a rich life experience, even if that means forgoing happiness and meaning. Oishi and Westgate have now defined a third group of curious and open-minded people who want to pursue an interesting life of varied experiences and changing perspectives. A group of people willing to experience their emotions deeply, both good and bad, and reflect upon those feelings to make sense of them and grow in their understanding of themselves and the world.

After years of trying to pigeonhole myself into the traditional view of what constitutes a good life, I am happy to find a third category that feels right. Knowing this makes me feel more comfortable pursuing the life that speaks to me. Maybe you feel the same. As of this writing, there isn’t much research done on the psychologically rich life, but I don’t think those who want to live psychologically rich lives will need a lot of encouragement to get out in the world and learn for themselves.