Feeling Stuck? Dull? Flat? Here's a Better Path to the "Good Life." | Shigehiro Oishi

32:23Just to reset again to make sure everybody's with us, we've spent the first part of this conversation talking about the ways in which traditionally psychologists have talked about the good life, either through the root of happiness or through the root of meaning. You are now out with a book called Life in Three Dimensions, where you propose a third way for which you coined the term psychological richness. What is psychological richness? So psychologically rich life is a life filled with interesting, diverse, sort of perspective changing experiences. So we all understand what material richness looks like, right?

33:02A lot of money, a lot of asset in your bank account or investment portfolio. We can substitute that dollar with essentially personal experiences or stories you have. So essentially, psychological richness is your richness in experiences and life stories. And some people have a lot of unique, interesting, perspective-changing experiences, while others don't have that many. What I mean by psychological richness is really richness of psychological experiences. Well, couldn't you argue, and maybe this is the point, I would argue for myself as somebody who spent many years as a journalist and my whole life was built around psychological richness.

33:49Couldn't you argue that diversity of experience provides both happiness and meaning? interesting so when you ask people what kind of life events people had and the more challenging and negative events people report you know having the lower happiness people report on average okay so there are some people perhaps despite all they still feel really great about their lives but on average when you just look at the life satisfaction or happiness even meaning in life correlation is usually negative. So for instance, divorce. Divorce of your parents, divorce of yourself, breakup of long-term relationships.

34:38Those things usually reduce one's happiness, but we find that it has net positive effect on the psychological richness, perhaps not immediately afterward, but in the long term. So maybe there was some obtuseness shot through my question because it would go to follow for somebody like me who was a journalist. Even though I was covering very difficult events, they weren't difficult events in my own life. So I would cover a mass shooting or a war, but I was not a combatant or a victim. And so my life in that, it still is, but in that era in particular was incredibly psychologically rich. but it wasn't like I was going through a series of personal calamities.

35:25So it was a kind of superficial version of richness in some ways. So it is totally possible for us to accumulate experiences secondhand, right? I mean, novels, great novels. When you read the great novels, you put yourself in that settings and you're just experiencing, you know, up and down of Anna Karenina, for instance, or whatever that book you're reading. And I think that actually does enrich your life because what you are experiencing there is so out of ordinary, extraordinary, the type of experience you never have in your real life. So the journalists, I think, as an occupational group, have one of the highest level of psychological richness because they witness the things that ordinary people will never witness firsthand.

36:19And they write and report. So they're much more likely to deeply process and remember those kinds of events. And perhaps those kinds of events probably change the way they view the world or person or particular religions or group culture. So I think it counts. Certainly, if you compare earthquake victims to the reporter who is reporting earthquake, the experience itself is very, very different. No question about that. But at the same time, we have huge brain, we can empathize, and we can really vicariously experience a lot of things. So great films, great novel, great music, great arts. I think those are the things that like transport us to the extraordinary realm of experience and definitely contribute to your psychological richness.

37:19Is what you're arguing simply that we should consider psychological richness as a third path to a good life? Or are you being a little bit more prescriptive and arguing that psychological richness is something we should all pursue? former. Essentially, the purpose of this book was that a lot of people are struggling to find meaning in their lives or finding true happiness. And they're trying really hard. There are lots of books that helps them, but they're struggling. And maybe what they're searching is not necessarily achievable or easily achievable in terms of happiness or meaning. And maybe for them, psychological richness might be actually the type of life they've been pursuing.

38:13So I was trying to sort of give one more way to path to a good life rather than this is the path to a good life. So that was my central goal of the book. But at the same time, I think the psychological richness mindset is helpful whenever you have some setback because when you're trying to maximize happiness and encounter setback, it is very, very difficult to overcome. On the other hand, if you have this psychological richness mindset that what matters is whether you learn something new, whether you gain some insight into your life and so forth, then a lot of negative events are the great, essentially, opportunities for you to learn something, change your mind, and so forth.

39:05So I find myself, like when I get lost while driving on the way to somewhere, I mean, I used to fight with my wife, like, why did you say time right and left? But now, with the psychological richness, we all say, oh yeah, it will be fine, it will be interesting stories, and we might see something we hadn't planned. So I think this mindset is actually very very helpful and for me helpful in terms of the happiness as well for the sake of richness so at least in part what you're saying is this is a cognitive reframe available to all of us given that we all will have hard shit in our lives sure sure right in a way it is a coping strategy right i mean there are many many coping strategy religious coping strategy distancing, positive reframings, and so forth.

40:01But I think that if you have that mindset that like, yes, it is tough now, but we'll get out of this, this might become a very interesting story to share with our friends and so forth, that really, I think, helped to get through some of the difficult times inevitably all of us go through. So actually, storying, like telling the story of your own life, you've mentioned it a couple of times, but it's something you dwell on in a big way in the book. Can you say a little bit more about how we can operationalize that in our own lives? So we talked about so far, just having some experiences or reading or watching some of the experiences we have.

40:48But in order for us to actually have psychological richness, just going back to the metaphor of you have to accumulate in the interesting experiences in the psychological memorabilia and portfolio essentially so how can we remember though i mean i love movies so i watch movie a lot especially in summer when my son is around we watch almost every day but you know if you don't reflect you just forget about that movie great movie you watched. So what you need is really talk about the movie you watch next day and discuss what you like and so forth. And I don't write, but if you write a review, for instance, probably you're much more likely to accumulate and remember what you went through and in what way that changed the way you view the world.

41:44So in that sense, write and tell are very, very important. So we're just talking about like memorability, how to remember, curate our experiences and make sure it will stay in a psychological portfolio for a longer period of time. So you can think about one person who is sort of sensation seeker, every weekend they go around and do a wild thing. But if this person doesn't reflect upon their experiences, then they are not really accumulating psychological wealth at all. It is like a millionaire's but spend everything in the party. So what we want is experience some interesting things, but to make it a story.

42:29And by writing and telling, you're really, really just accumulating your experience. So writing and talking about it is really important. So it seems like there are a couple things here to highlight. The first is that we're all having experiences all the time. And to the extent that we want to retain the value of positive experiences or reframe the difficult experiences in ways that can make us stronger going forward, we need to make sure that we're actually remembering the stuff we've done and or has happened to us. And in order to remember it, we need to cultivate the skills of reflecting, inside talking about it with others or writing it down how am i doing perfect okay a plus sorry i wasn't trying to get a gold star although i do love gold stars but mostly what i'm trying to do is make sure i've got it so that the audience has it and can do this stuff in their own lives sure yeah yeah you said it perfect yeah okay exactly but let's just stay with this is the other thing I wanted to get at, let's just stay with the aspect of reframing hard stuff.

43:51We've all had difficult things happen in our lives. How can we learn to tell that story to ourselves and others in a way that it becomes a source of empowerment as opposed to abiding shame or something like that? Yeah, so I think that's where some skill comes into play. I think that some people are naturally good at essentially spotting the way they grew out of that particular experience or difficulties. Others might focus on just the misery they experienced, and they don't focus on what kind of change that came out of that particular difficult experience, for instance. I mean, if you're fired from the job, you might be just still complaining about your former boss.

44:41That's not going to be helpful. On the other hand, thanks to this being fired, I started looking into these new things, and I would never have done that if I wasn't fired. So that was the turning point of my life, for instance. I mean, if you can see that way, then that particular being fired becomes essentially interesting stories for you to remember. But also, you know, you grew certainly, not by choice, but because of what happened. So those are the things I think it is important. But for some people, I think it comes very, very naturally. for others, unless they think about it, stop and think about it, those thoughts do not necessarily come.

45:26Therefore, I think the journaling or just however painful it is, just talking with somebody actually is very, very helpful because those kinds of self-insights sometimes and oftentimes come from conversation with somebody. So this is the recipe for turning the inevitable adversity of life to our advantage, to develop the muscle memory to, and usually it takes time because what is it that Alan Alda says in the Woody Allen movie, Crimes and Misdemeanors, comedy is tragedy plus time. That's a good one. In this case, psychological richness is a tragedy plus time probably, or at least in But to develop the muscle memory to turn all of the things in our lives, all the humiliations and losses into stories that we can use to help ourselves and others.

46:26And by the way, the helping of others is a massive lever for richness and meaning. And one way to develop this muscle memory is to journal, reflect and discuss it with other people. Yeah, definitely.

46:44Coming up, Shigehiro Oishi talks about some skills for developing psychological richness, including building curiosity and openness to new experiences, finding richness in the familiar and tools for becoming more playful. Keep it here.

47:06in the spirit of life in three dimensions we've been talking about these three paths to a good life happiness meaning psychological richness in your view are they mutually exclusive or overlapping i think it's quite overlapping but when you think about for instance freshmen right they just arrived in college what kind of life do they want to have and we ask this question to the freshmen. Most of the freshmen say, oh, I want to have psychologically rich life because I want to explore the world, explore the campus and meet a lot of people. But what is interesting is that by the third year, they changed their mind.

47:45They had enough explorations. So now they want to have a happy life, enjoyment and comfort. Fourth year, they want to have meaningful life because they know the end is near that they want to have some kind of like, what did I do in college? I want to have some kind of legacy for my college life and so forth. So depending on your life stage or where you are or what you want, certainly you might try to maximize richness in certain point of your life, meaning in certain point of life and happiness in certain point of life. And when we analyzed obituary of our New York Times articles, we had 101 obituary analyzed.

48:30Out of 101, two people were rated as having happy life, meaningful life, and psychologically rich life. So it is definitely possible to have all three. But at any given moment, probably you have to pick which one you want to maximize. Because if you want to maximize happiness or meaning, probably you're going to go to something you really care about or something you are very familiar with. On the other hand, if you are trying to maximize psychological richness, you're trying to go beyond the familiarity and do something new. So moment to moment, perhaps there is some conflict, but we have different needs at different times of the day, different time period of our life.

49:20So I think in the end, we could have all three. How do you weave these three threads in your own life? I would be honest to myself. What do I want? When I'm really tired, for instance, I say, oh, I just want to have happiness. I want to be comforted with something familiar, something I know is good. So I just talk to my wife or kids or just do something I always do. On the other hand, sometimes I feel a little bit bored with doing the same thing again and again. Then I try to do something else and try to maximize psychological richness. And probably I should be focusing on meaningful life a little more, but I don't consciously try to maximize that as much as happiness or psychological richness.

50:11But that's me. But ultimately, to me, it is really up to you. What do you want in your life? Do you want to have the comfort, sense of security and stability and happiness? Or you want to make a difference in the world and want to feel like your life is really meaningful? Or you want to experience a lot of different things and learn a lot of different things? Then maybe you're going for psychological richness. And I think it depends on somebody's values, what they care, what they feel most important in their lives. and knowing that is the most important part, just self-knowledge of honestly, what do you want in your life?

50:54And I think that really, really helps to decide on, should I pursue happiness, meaning, or richness? Or if you're greedy, you can go all three, but... Well, I was just going to say, I'm greedy because as I listen to you talk, I'm thinking, I want all three. All three of them seem like components of what I would call happiness something you would call a good life. Sure, sure, sure, yeah. And some of my colleagues said that, yeah, what you're talking about seems like a nutrient and different kinds of vitamins. It looks like in order for us to have a good life, we need a certain amount of happiness, certain amount of meaning, and certain amount of psychological richness.

51:35And I think he's right, that I think happiness, meaning, and the richness could be the essential nutrients, but the different kinds of nutrients for happiness. somebody to have good life or life of fulfillment. So is what you're saying in essence, or at least in part, that this is a really helpful lens through which to view the world? Hey, there are these three aspects of a good life, moment to moment throughout the day, season to season throughout my life. I'm going to emphasize one of these three, but it's very helpful to have, I think the fancy words you academics use is like a heuristic. that's a good one yes heuristics yeah definitely all right so let's talk about some of the skills or i'm using this term skill maybe you'll you'll have a quibble with that within you know so for interested in a life of psychological richness there are some aspects of the human repertoire that we can emphasize or skills that we can develop one of them is openness to experience Can you say a little bit more about that?

52:42Yeah. So openness to experience is one of the big five personality traits. And openness to experience, as it says, is somebody who is open to new kinds of experiences, but also aesthetic experiences. So interestingly, openness to experiences is not really correlated that highly with happiness or meaning. But it is really, really strongly correlated with psychological richness, meaning those people who are high in openness to experiences tend to report that their life is psychologically rich. And these are the people who like to go to study abroad or go to museums and things of that nature. So, yeah, somebody who tried to do something new definitely has advantage in terms of psychological richness.

53:33Another of the big five personality traits that is core to psychological richness is extroversion. Yeah, extroversion is also correlated with happiness and meaning. But essentially, openness to experience might be somebody who is curious about idea or object. On the other hand, extrovert or extroversion is correlated with the curiosity with other people, right? But extroverts like to talk to strangers, talk to other people because they are curious about other people. So it is all about curiosity that essentially gives rise to psychological richness because without curiosity, you're not going to go beyond your comfort zone and try to explore the world and try to learn something new.

54:22So extroversion is correlated with psychological richness in a sense that you are curious about other people and you learn a lot from other people through story sharings and conversations. I'm not an expert in the difference between extroversion and introversion, but I know a lot of most of the people on my team are introverts, which I think is interesting because I'm like a mega extrovert. But the people on my team who are introverts, they're still curious. They just don't have as much of an appetite to talk to people as I do. Yeah, exactly. So number one core of personality, core of psychological richness is openness to experiences.

55:04So introverts, I'm very introverted. So I don't like to talk to strangers at all. I usually don't like to do podcasts either. But essentially, what I have is openness to experience. I am curious about the ideas and informations and objects and cultures and things like that. So as long as introverts have that, you can definitely gain psychological richness. And also another path actually is one of the big five, the agreeableness. When your wife or friend say, hey, do you want to go to a museum? Then agreeable people say, sure, why not? And that's one way to enhance your psychological richness, right?

55:46Disagreeable people say, no, I don't want to do it. Then you're limiting your experiences. So agreeableness, even if you're not extroverted, if you are agreeable, if you're open to experiences, then you can still achieve psychological richness. So there are diverse ways to achieve psychological richness. Well, speaking of diverse ways to achieve psychological richness, I can imagine people listening to this and thinking, well, I'm an introvert. We've kind of litigated that one. But others might think, I don't have the time or the finances to study abroad or travel abroad or have a diverse range of experiences.

56:28And in the book, you address that by saying that it is possible, very possible, to find richness in the familiar. Yes. So if you're not into sort of exploring the world, one thing you can do is actually going back to your favorite book or going back to favorite album or favorite film. And rereading or rewatching those, I think you can find a lot of new things that you didn't notice, you hadn't noticed first time around. And those are the experiences I think that is very, very enriching. And even in the same relationship, I mean, I had dated with my wife like eight years before I got married. and essentially I didn't know at all about her interest or ability to paint until 10 years after being married and some some things you don't find in your familiar others right unless you spend so much time so I think if you're not interested in or you're you cannot afford to explore the world I think you can explore the familiar and find a lot of new things.

57:43And, you know, Google hunting, Will Hunt said this most beautifully, I think. Why would you spend$150 ,000 for higher education when you can spend just$1.50 for overdue book in public library? Even if you don't have resources, there are a lot of free and cheap resources out there, library being, public library being the best one. You can rent movies free, book free. So I think you can do it even if you don't have a huge resources. And oftentimes, we are so ignorant about our own surroundings. So once I wrote this book, I started changing my route to my lecture hall. And I encounter so many things that I hadn't noticed before, the beautiful chapel, beautiful bench and trees and things like that.

58:36So by changing your commute, daily commute a little bit, getting off one station before your usual station and exploring that town, for instance, you might find a lot of interesting things. So I think psychological richness is for everybody. You don't have to be a millionaire to do it. If curiosity is at the root of this, is that a skill that one can develop? Yeah, I think curiosity is a skill. And also, curiosity is something that is constrained by certain circumstances. For instance, we study the division of labor, right? Work professions are so extremely specialized. and specialization actually really, really reduced your natural sense of curiosity.

59:28So if you think about the little children, right, they are really curious about everything. But we just guide them to pay attention, be curious to certain things and not ignore other things. And our job, a lot of time, the specialization happens at the cost of being a generalist. So being a generalist actually is a great way to enhance your curiosity. And if your job is super specialized, then when you come home, you really have to take the hat off and become like kids. Then that's how to nurture, how to get back your natural curiosity. So definitely, I think you can be more curious. Another and related skill, I think, or you'll tell me if it's a skill, but it's certainly an aspect of richness and an aspect of the human repertoire more broadly, is playfulness.

1:00:25Can you just talk about why playfulness is so important in this regard? Yes, because we live in a very professional world where our schedule is fully packed almost every day. And, you know, we have so many responsibilities. So being playful, Eric Erickson defined as taking a vacation from our social and economic responsibilities. And I think we really forget that because we are trying to fulfill our economic and social responsibilities every day, the most responsible adults, right? So that means we are very serious. We try to get things done. Productivity is number one. Always people say, work, work, work, get things done.

1:01:11And that focus really takes us away from spontaneities and playfulness, right? Like when was the last time you just had the glass of wine with your friend without planning? Spontaneous outing. Or be just like five years old. Totally playful. I think at least I forget to be playful unless I remind myself, oh, sometimes I can be playful and I should be playful. So having some schedule like open, you know, slot in your daily schedule. and whenever you feel like taking walk or you know knocking on the your colleague's door and have a conversation to have a cup of coffee I think you know having that type of schedule is really helpful for you to just have one hour or 30 minutes where you can do whatever you want if you want to read novel you read novel but you just be playful be be like child be like a dog chasing tennis ball.

1:02:14I think that is really refreshing because we are all too narrowly focused on productivity and efficiency. So our obsession with productivity is flattening and dulling our lives, reducing psychological richness. And at least one way to counteract that is to put time in your schedule that is dedicated to whatever the hell you want to do to play essentially. Right. Exactly. Whatever you feel like doing at that moment. So that really, I think, gives you some sense of spontaneity and playfulness back. Any other thoughts about how we can up our playfulness quotient? Well, I think if you have kids or if you're, you know, playing with kids or playing with animals, I think is the easiest way to be playful yourself.

1:03:08I mean, when you're talking to your dog, you're naturally way more playful than when you're talking to your neighbors or your colleagues. So I think that playfulness is a beginning and just cherish that playfulness and childlike qualities in your life. Be silly, open to be full. Yeah, I'm hearing three mechanisms in this conversation for increasing playfulness. One is schedule it. The other is take advantage of silly little moments with your pet or your friend or your kid. And the third is to be mindful when you're in those moments, because then you're teaching your nervous system how good it feels so that you'll be attuned to the opportunities going forward.

1:03:59Yeah, yeah. You should savor for those playful moments. Another aspect you talk about in the book, and it's right in the subtitle of the book, is exploration. Well, that may be self-evident, but what do you mean by exploration? So, for instance, you're looking for apartment. And exploration meaning you are just checking out many, many, many different apartments before you settle. explore exploit trade-off this is the academic term exploit strategy is just not looking at many apartments and you just see the first apartment that is acceptable and you know i don't want to spend too much time i'm just gonna go with it so sort of satisfizer is the exploitation person.

1:04:49Explorer is the more the maximizing tendency person. So explore is just essentially looking for it for a longer period of time, more diverse area. So that requires a lot of energies as well. Are you saying that exploration is always a good thing to do or that we need to use our No, no. Just that there is a famous task called secretary task. You're a human, the personnel person who decide, manager who decide to hire secretary. You have 100 applications, right? You just look through the applications and you have to say yes or no. And how many applicants do you look at? But computer simulation essentially says that you have to look at least 37 and then decide on whoever came next who exceeded the best of the first 37 will pick the best secretary.

1:05:51So statistically speaking, you have to explore 37 % of the option really carefully before you settle. If you do this kind of experiment, most people explore only 10 or 15 and then say, this is enough. And actually by not exploring enough, they are not making an optimal decision. So in so many arena, marriage, job, whatever, car, restaurant, we are cognitively speaking lazy. and we rely on heuristics, shortcut. So we tend to not explore enough. So my message is that exploration itself will help you make a better decision because our cognitive default tendency is not explore enough. Well, so how do we override that tendency?

1:06:46So I have essentially just take a dozen heuristics. So at least whatever you do, just try to look at at least 12 options before you settle. And I think that's a very good heuristics to get essentially the best, not the best option necessarily, but the top 10 options. That essentially sort of guarantees that your decision is at least top 10 percent of the available choices. Next time I want to buy some sneakers, I should look at 12 before I pick. That's the suggestions. So of course, sneakers, how many sneakers out there? Thousand? Ten thousand? I have no idea. So if that given population is large, you might need to up a little.

1:07:36But that general suggestion is that the dozen is good. Dozen is good. What about if I'm dating? Dozen is good? I mean, at least you seriously date and meet, and then just move on to the next and so forth. And actually Kepler did this, the famous astronomer. And essentially after he interviewed 11 people very, very seriously, he thought, okay, the number one choice was this person, but this person got sick of waiting. So she said, no, I already moved on. So, you know, exploration, of course, has some risk of losing out the potential one. But in the end, his second marriage using this approach was very, very successful.

1:08:24So I would say, yeah, use it in the dating as well. What have we missed? Are there points you were hoping to get across that we haven't talked about? No, I think we talked pretty much everything. Yeah, well, it's been really fun. A source of richness for me to be a little cute. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book? and anything else you've created that, you know, website, social media handles that we should know about? No, I think, so the title of the book is Life in Three Dimensions, How Curiosity, Explorations, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life.

1:09:02My website is at University of Chicago website. So check out for other specific academic articles. Yeah. Awesome. So I will put a link to your website in the show notes and also a link to your book. Shige, great pleasure to meet you. Thank you for making time. Sure. Pleasure. Thank you for having me.

1:09:28Thanks again to Shige. Awesome to talk to him. Don't forget, there is a guided meditation that comes with this episode and is in fact designed to help you pound the wisdom of this episode into your neurons. It's called How to See Your Life with Fresh Eyes, and it comes with our Teacher of the Month, Sabine Selassie. Sign up over at danharris.com. You'll also get invited if you sign up, when you sign up, to our weekly live meditation and Q &A sessions every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. The next one is tomorrow. Seb will be going live. Very excited for that. Also, don't forget, I've got an IRL live event on November 18th, a live taping of this podcast with Pete Holmes.

1:10:07There's a link in the show notes. Before I go, thank you very much to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

1:10:42Thank you.