It’s the question at the heart of most self-help literature: what makes a good life?
For the past several decades, theories about how to answer the question have focused on two primary components: happiness and meaning. The thinking goes that happiness and meaning are complementary and not mutually exclusive, and a person needs a certain amount of both in order to feel satisfied with their life. For those of you who remember your Philosophy 101 reading, what we’re talking about here is the interplay of hedonism (pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment) and eudaimonia (working for the greatest human good). But what if there’s even more to the good life?
In Life in Three Dimensions, Shigehiro Oishi, PhD, proposes that a good life is comprised of not just happiness and meaning but also a third component called “psychological richness.” A psychologically rich life, according to Dr. Oishi’s research and theory, is one that is “filled with diverse, unusual, interesting experiences that change your perspective.” It is “a life of twists and turns; a dramatic, eventful life…a life that feels like a long, winding hike rather than many laps of the same racing circuit.” If happiness is about accumulating a high frequency of positive events and a low frequency of negative ones, and meaning is about feeling a sense of significance and purpose, psychological richness is about texture, color, and depth. It doesn’t replace or supersede happiness and meaning in the good life equation; it’s a third variable that can sometimes overlap with happiness and meaning but that we should understand and pursue as its own aim.
It’s been a while since I read a self-help book that I felt really did something new—if you read widely in the genre, you know that more often than not, it’s a win if you walk away from a book having gained one or two useful ideas—and friends, Life in Three Dimensions is it. As Dr. Oishi explores the promise of the book’s subtitle to tell us “how curiosity, exploration, and experience make a fuller, better life,” he connects his work to robust bodies of research about personality, decision-making, the impact of adversity, and even aesthetics. That’s right: there are studies about how the art we interact with and the books we read impact how we feel about our lives and how we see the world.
As with most things in life, finding your personal sweet spot of psychological richness requires compromise and trade-offs. Happiness, meaning, and psychological richness are all necessary components of a good life, but none of them is sufficient by itself. How much we value things like security versus freedom, predictability versus novelty, and conflict avoidance versus complexity all play into how we spin the plates of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness. And, sometimes, the components conflict with each other; stability leads to greater happiness, but uncertainty and discomfort can support the development of greater psychological richness. Dr. Oishi emphasizes that there are as many ways to solve the equation as there are people in the world, and none of them is better or worse than any other. If psychological richness is something you value, his goal is simply to help you explore ways to have more of it in your life.
Life in Three Dimensions gave me language for a desire and a way of being that I’ve struggled to articulate for most of my adult life. (Turns out there’s a more scientifically viable explanation than “I’m a Sagittarius!”) If, like me, you are forever in pursuit of a feeling of expansiveness, of a life that is big not in terms of fame or recognition but a breadth of experience, this book will make you feel so seen. And if you’re feeling stuck, bored, or in a place of, “Is this really all there is?” it will point you to new possibilities. Really want to shake your shit up? Get your priorities in line with Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, and chase it with Life in Three Dimensions. I’m sorry / you’re welcome.
Want to hear more? Listen as Book Riot’s Jeff O’Neal discusses life, literature, and psychological richness with Dr. Shigehiro Oishi on this episode of First Edition.
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English (US) ·