Latest / Wellness in Today's World / Ep. 19: "Life in Three Dimensions": The Power of Psychological Richness

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Ep. 19: "Life in Three Dimensions": The Power of Psychological Richness · Wellness in Today's World

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Welcome to "Wellness in Today's World," the podcast where we talk about wellness, psychology, and everything in between.
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I'm your host, Debra Kawahara, and with each episode, we have thoughtful conversations about what it means to live well.
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When we talk about "the good life," most of us have been taught about two dimensions.
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The first is happiness, feeling good,
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being comfortable, enjoying life.
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The other dimension is meaning or purpose.
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And, you know, the Japanese concept of Ikigai has been talked about so much, you know, doing something worthwhile, your purpose for getting up in the morning.
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But what if those two aspects don't tell the whole story?
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What if life can be deeply worthwhile and transformative
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without always being comfortable or tied to a purpose?
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Today's guest, psychologist Dr.
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Shige Oishi, proposes a third way of thinking about a good life, something he calls "psychological richness." It's a way of living life shaped by curiosity, exploration, and
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experiences that change how we see ourselves
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and the world.
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In his book, "Life in Three Dimensions," Dr.
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Oishi invites us to consider some of the most important moments in our life that aren't necessarily happy or meaningful, but they are memorable, perspective-shifting, and deeply
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human.
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I'm really looking forward to this conversation, and I think you will be too.
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Welcome, Dr.
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Oishi.
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I'm going to call you Shige.
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It's a pleasure having you here today.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Great introduction.
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Thank you.
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Let's get started.
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So you open the book by suggesting that psychology has focused on these two dimensions of a good life.
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And I talked about happiness being one and the other having a purpose or meaning-making.
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But what led you to believe that there may be a third dimension,
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something important that was missing from these traditional thoughts?
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Yeah, so I think one thing is that essentially I started my graduate school working on happiness back in 1995.
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And about 10 years ago in 2015, I was appalled to think that, oh my gosh, I spent 20 years on happiness.
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And since around 2000, I also studied meaning in life.
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That summer,
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I just felt like, oh my gosh, what have we learned?
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And what is the most important remaining questions?
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And it struck me when, back in 2015, I realized that psychologists debated which one is more important: happiness or meaning?
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So-called hedonic well-being or eudaemonic well-being?
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And just like "nature versus nurture" controversy in the 80s and 90s,
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in the end, it was just, yeah, of course both happiness, feeling like your contentment, satisfaction, but also I feel like, you know, making a difference in the world, right?
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Meaningful life are both important.
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So then I felt like, oh my gosh, did I waste 20 years of life doing happiness and meaning research?
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After all, this was a sort of obvious endpoint.
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But then I asked the next question,
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which is: if somebody has happiness and meaning in life, is it the full life?
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Is it the complete life?
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And I asked myself, because I was old already and I had tenure at the time, so I asked myself, am I happy?
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And the answer was yes.
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Do I feel like my life has meaning?
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The answer was yes, too.
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My teaching is going well.
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I'm helping my kids play
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baseball and catching and coaching and things like that.
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But then I asked also, like, is my life full?
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And I felt like something was missing.
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And whenever I have some questions, I always ask my graduate students and postdoc, what do you think if somebody says somebody has happiness and meaning?
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Is this person leading a full life?
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And then about half of them said, "Of course, what else do you want?
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Like, don't be greedy, right?
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If someone has happiness and meaning, that's amazing.
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That's so difficult to have both." But then the other half said, "Actually, yeah, you know, maybe something is missing." And when I also thought about the predictors of
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happiness and meaning, I found something striking, that something stable, right?
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That relationship stability,
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financial stability, and those kinds of things are typically the predictors of happiness and meaning.
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In terms of big five personality traits, it was always extroversion and not so neurotic, agreeable, and conscientious.
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Those are the people who lead a happy life and also a meaningful life.
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But what about the openness experiences, which is not super strongly correlated with either of them?
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Meta-analysis by Anglim found that the openness to experiences and life satisfaction or happiness correlation is only 0.08.
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So it's pretty small compared to four of the big five personality traits.
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And then similarly, the meaning in life, the openness is not strongly correlated, 0.2.
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And conscientiousness, for instance, is 0.5 correlation.
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So there's a huge
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missing sort of the type of good life that is based on openness to experiences, openness to others.
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And when you think about somebody's life, some admirable life is actually very much based on the openness to experiences.
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After all, those people who really truly changed the world, like Gandhi,
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and Jane Goodall, and many artists, they weren't just extroverts and not so neurotic, et cetera, et cetera, but they had a tremendous amount of openness to new experiences and
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entertaining new possibilities and trying to sometimes risk their lives to achieve something bigger.
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So that's where I started to sort of feel like something is missing.
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But the key question is, if somebody says, "this person is not happy, this person doesn't find their life to be meaningful," is there anyone who says things like that, but yet from
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your perspective is leading an admirable life?
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So that was the question we asked in the lab.
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And it could be your parents, somebody you know, but it could be some literary figures.
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And as a lab,
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we came up with so many examples.
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So Hermann Hesse's, "Narcissus and Goldmund." The Goldmund is a classic example.
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Instead of being like Narcissus who remained in the monastery, led the virtuous religious life and became a teacher and priest; Narcissus lived the traditional conventional
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religious, virtuous good life,
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full of meaning and societal contributions.
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On the other hand, Goldmund couldn't stand that, so he left the church, became a vagabond, homeless, almost got killed.
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Eventually he found the Virgin, the Madonna's statue, wooden statue, so moving that he decided to become a sculptor.
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But you know, he was adulterous,
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immmoral, in many ways.
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So at the end of the novel, essentially, Narcissus asks himself, "Who led the better life?
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Of course, objectively speaking, my life was better, more orderly, you know, a life of service and virtue.
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But from God's eye, wasn't Goldmund's life, also an equally worthy life?"
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Goldmund's life is truly experientially and psychologically really a rich life.
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A lot of adventures, a lot of unexpected events happened to him that changed him deeply the way he thought about it.
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So, Herman Hesse's "Narcissus and Goldmund," which became an awesome movie, and so forth.
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So that's one example, but there tons and tons and tons of examples.
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So that's how we came up with this idea of psychological richness
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and maybe something is missing from happiness and meaning.
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That is the heart of your book, is that psychological richness that you're talking about.
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So, for the listeners, can you describe what a psychologically rich life is?
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So what we describe as a psychologically rich life is a life filled with diverse, interesting experiences and often comes with a perspective change.
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So Goldmund's journey is a prime example.
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One of the most psychologically rich experiences among those who
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did the study abroad, probably the study abroad, because you went to a foreign country, perhaps your language wasn't that great.
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So the way you view yourself changed, the way you see the world might have changed.
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So in many ways, a psychologically rich life is a life filled with adventure and unexpected events and sort of like learning a lot of things
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as you experience things.
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And sometimes it has a lot to do with sort of the unconventional choices you make rather than very, very conventional choices you make.
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I know when I read the book, you talk about curiosity, openness, exploration, perspective-shifting.
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And then this last point about, you know, that psychological rich experiences may not be comfortable.
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They may be unexpected or unusual or...
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They may even be like struggling or difficult experiences.
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Why do you think that that's essential as part of a psychologically rich life?
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You know, some trip you make is you plan in advance, and everything goes well, and you had a good great time.
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you...
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So that's a very positive experience, happy experience, maybe even meaningful if you found something to connect to your purpose and stuff.
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But at the same time, if everything was as planned, there's no surprise, there's no unexpected changes in the way you think about it.
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So that might not be psychologically deep or rich.
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Oftentimes, perspective change comes from unexpected events.
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And often those are negative because we, especially Americans, tend to expect positive things to happen to them.
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And the positive thing is sort of the default.
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So whenever we ask college students, just think about something good that happened to you over the last two weeks.
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And then we ask, just thinking about those positive events, did it change the way you think about yourself and the world?
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And they say, "No." On the other hand, when we ask them to think about something negative that happened to you, and then ask, did it change the way you
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think about yourself and the world?
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And they say often, "Yes." And that's the key: that you have to realize something new, something there that you hadn't realized before.
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And the personal growth, for instance, cannot be achieved without any kinds of perspective changes.
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Because you're just staying the way you are.
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If you're just essentially doing the same thing and confirming
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your existing self-view and then the worldview.
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Instead, when you're exposing yourself to a very different culture or very different school of thought, then that really challenges the way you normally think about...
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and it's difficult, it's uncomfortable, but at the same time, it is very rewarding and something different about that experience than just, "this is exactly how I...
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think about" and then everybody else confirming, you know, the way you view the world.
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I know in the book you kind of share your father's story and you contrast it with your own life.
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So I wanted to ask you in reflecting on both of your paths, how did that shape your thinking about, you know, these three dimensions and the psychological richness?
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Yeah, it is funny.
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So my father's 92 years old, a farmer who lives in a small town in Japan.
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And essentially he quit agricultural high school at age 15 and fully took over his farm.
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He's a first son of the Oishi family.
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So he essentially led his entire life just like his father, his grandfather, great-grandfathers, and so forth.
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And...
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I wasn't really thinking about his life and my life until I actually started writing about my book and I realized how divergent our paths became.
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But also how much his life fit straight into the textbook case of a happy life.
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Very stable marriage, very, very stable social relationships.
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You know, happiness is the frequency, not the intensity of positive versus negative emotions.
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That's the title of Ed Diener's famous book.
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The point is that when ordinary people think about what makes us happy, we think about rare, intense events like marriage, birth of a child, or promotions, or buying a new
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house, new cars, and things like that.
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But we know from the research...
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Yes, those things make us happy, but not for that long.
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Instead, what makes us sustainably happy is interaction with the people you love, and your neighbors, and your family members, and so forth.
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So my dad really, I realized, my gosh, this is the reason why he was so happy, especially toward the end...
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I mean, it hasn't ended yet, but of his life.
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And me, I'm a happiness researcher, but you know, I mean, I'm just moving around and trying to achieve my academic career and research and getting grants and things like that.
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It's just very hard, way more frequent encountering of the blocks and failures if you pursue my type of life.
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So I realized, oh, if I just wanted to have happiness, then I should have just taken over the farm.
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That would have been my path through the happy life, perhaps meaningful life too.
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But I took a completely different path.
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Then what was I pursuing?
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Perhaps I was pursuing a psychologically rich life rather than a happy life or a meaningful life, per se.
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So I think that's a pretty dramatic
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contrast between my dad's life and my life.
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And you know, we cannot say which one is better.
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For some people...
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and many, many people do love having a happy life.
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So then we have the prescription, and we know how to get it.
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On the other hand, if you're not after that kind of life, then we have a vocabulary like, okay, you're probably chasing a psychologically rich life.
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So, you know, as you were talking, one of the things that came up for me is what if someone, yeah, stays in the same place, right?
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And pretty conventional life, but can they still have a psychologically rich life?
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Yeah, so I think even if you stay in that one place, doing the same job for many, many years, it is possible to find psychological richness because oftentimes we are neglecting
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a lot of things in our familiar environment.
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For instance, I have my office here at the University of Chicago.
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When I teach, I have to walk
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like five minutes.
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You know, before writing this book, I would always take the same shortest possible path, right?
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Because I don't wanna waste my time.
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But now that I wrote this book and it's like, yeah, it's important to find something that I haven't been seeing in a familiar environment.
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So I decided to leave my office, you know, 10 minutes before the lecture instead of five minutes before the lecture
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and then take a different path.
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And it's just unbelievable how many buildings and the bench and trees and the church and the stained glasses that I hadn't paid attention to, although I come in here every day.
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So I think it's the same way for everybody.
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We are so routinized because by routinizing, we are making our life more productive and efficient.
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But at the same time, we're seeing the same thing again and again.
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And we don't have to live like that, even if you commute to the same place.
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You can change the commute.
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On the way to the office is difficult, right?
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But on the way home, you have a little more flexibility.
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So perhaps you change the route, maybe stop over some neighborhood that you never visited, even within your same city.
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By just opening up even within your neighborhood and the city, and you take a mini vacation in your own city, and then visit and be like a tourist, that alone actually makes
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you realize and discover so many amazing things you weren't aware of before.
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So I totally believe that you could maximize psychological richness even if you're sort of geographically and
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resource-wise constrained by certain geographical regions.
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You know, it's interesting because what I connected it to is the brain and longevity research that shows you learning, you know, a new skill, how beneficial that is just
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overall to your health.
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And so this psychological richness piece seems to fit really well with that research.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And also, I think a lot of people, from Erik Erikson, thought that essentially the lifelong goal is to gain wisdom, right?
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His life stage model, the last stage is wisdom versus despair.
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Unless you experience a lot of different things, not just being the smartest in the class,
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but sometimes the dumbest in the class like I experienced when I did the study abroad, right?
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In Maine, I just couldn't understand anything.
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And those kinds of things really help you to empathize with people from different backgrounds.
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And then really, I think if you want to become wiser, then of course you need a lot of diverse experiences.
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And of course you don't have to have that firsthand diverse experience.
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You can gain a lot of second-hand experiences through literature, art, films, documentaries, and listening to somebody's personal stories and so forth.
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So I think if you have the mindset of openness and in pursuit of psychological richness, absolutely, as you said, I think it is good for your brain, first of all, because you're
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trying to learn new things constantly.
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But at the same time, the real prize, I think, is the wisdom.
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Because if you just live the way you live and are content with it and never try to learn something new, then it is really hard to understand why different people have different
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opinions and values and behave completely differently.
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And you cannot give wise advice to the next generations if you don't have that capacity.
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The words that come is "expansiveness" and "broadening," like your horizons.
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Mm-hmm.
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Yeah, exactly, exactly.
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You have to broaden your horizons.
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And sometimes it comes from, like, accidental events, not all intentional.
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I mean, study abroad tends to be something like you intentionally do.
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But I think those things actually happen in a natural disaster, right?
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In Japan, as you know, so many natural disasters happen.
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Obviously, nobody wants it.
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And then, you know, it's not good for happiness or even meaning.
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So I did my sabbatical in 2013.
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I stayed in Kobe, Japan because there was a 1995 earthquake.
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So I wanted to see how they were doing.
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The latest data at the time we had, 16 years even after the earthquake, the people who lost their house were still reporting lower level of life satisfaction, more negative
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emotions, and more physical health problems
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compared to the Kobe residents who had partial damage or no damage at all to their house.
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But what's amazing is that you hear so many stories that that experience really changed the way they view the world.
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Their value changed.
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So we did the additional survey throughout Japan and asked their value orientation.
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This is a typical Schwartz value orientation: power,
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achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, conformity, and security, traditions, and so forth.
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And we asked later, have you been affected by the earthquake directly?
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Did you live in the city when these major earthquakes happened?
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So just checklists.
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And then we separated these two groups of Japanese, the natural disaster victims and non-
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natural disaster victims.
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Non-natural disaster victims, Japanese, tend to say achievement is way more important than the natural disaster experiencer, who says benevolence is so important.
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And kids' interviews from COVID-19 is really moving.
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You ask, what do you want to be in the future?
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Usually, typical
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10 years old, 12 years old Japanese will say soccer players, baseball players, president, whatever.
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But these kids really say firefighters, nurses, doctors.
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And then we actually did the study of looking at how many people applied for firefighting positions, teachers' positions, and social worker positions in Kobe area from 1990 to 2010
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or so.
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And then we compared with the Tokyo area where there was no major earthquake during that time.
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And you clearly see in 1995, the popularity of pro-social occupations spiked in Kobe.
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So value changes.
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And also, I think that really is the psychological richness: The natural disaster victims might not become ever happier or find more meaning than before,
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necessarily, but I think they really do have a different view on life.
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They often say, "I almost never say hi to the neighbors, but I realized that the neighbor was just trying to find my dog." And that kind of kindness and humanity, in the ordinary
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time, you don't see that.
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Only at the time of emergency you see and realize, my gosh, I thought he was kind of like a
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cold person, but actually amazingly caring person.
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So really those are the experiences.
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So some are intentional, but unfortunately a lot of bad things happen in our life.
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And many of us do learn something new about humanities and the world.
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So I'm hoping that the psychological richness does capture not just sort of the intentional self-improvement kind of things, but also these, you know,
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sad, unfortunate side effects, but actually there's some positive to natural disasters and others.
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You argue that variety and perspective change matter more than constant novelty.
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Can you talk about that a bit more?
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So I think that we all know somebody who is extremely sensation seeker who needs to go to some new places, do some crazy things.
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And psychological richness is not really about being a sensation seeker all the time.
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Because sensation seekers, what they are doing is essentially they have sensation deprivation, so they go on some trip and then go back to the baseline, but then, you know,
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they get bored, so they have to go back again and go back again.
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So they're not, in a way, accumulating their experiences, perhaps because they tend not to be very reflective.
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And what is more important is that you don't have to have constant new things happening in your life, just that once in a while, when it happens, you reflect upon it and you talk
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about it with your family, friends, and so forth.
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Then it becomes an important, memorable story.
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So then you're accumulating each new experience.
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So in the end, what you want to have is just like the materially wealthy person in their portfolio, they have lots of assets.
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So we're talking about psychological richness.
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So in a psychological portfolio, we want to have a lot of interesting experiences and stories and accumulate over time.
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So that's why I don't think it's necessary to have so many different experiences every day.
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Just that you have to really take stock of what happened, reflect upon it, and make sure it stays in the memory in a deep way so that you can accumulate over time.
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You know, I think about the lifespan, right?
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And we have certain things that typically in someone's lifespan they're doing.
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And you talked about Erikson.
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From a lifespan perspective, do you think that people tend to gravitate towards one of the dimensions more at certain times in their lives?
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Sure.
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I think when we had kids, I think we didn't have capacity and energy to explore the world, right?
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We're just like so tired of just taking care of two kids.
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So I think there are times during life that we probably try to make, say, life meaningful by devoting ourselves for our kids' or others' lives.
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But some of the time we have
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more time and resources to explore the world.
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So I think, you know, if you're newly retired, for instance, all of a sudden you find a lot of time.
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So then this is again, another time of exploration.
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So when we look at the age variation in the preference for the happy life, meaningful life, and rich life, we don't see actually very clear chronological relationships.
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I think in part because, say 65 years old, some of them think, "Oh, I'm going to work 10 more years." Some of them counting to retire.
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And then some of them been retired for five, six years.
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So I think that's the reason.
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Because when we ask college students, what kind of college life would you like to have ideally?
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Happy college life, meaningful college life, or psychologically rich college life?
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Then we see clear
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differences across different generations.
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The freshmen prototype, the most popular response is psychologically rich college life.
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I want to explore what college offers me.
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But then the second year already, they are seeking a happy life.
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And then by the fourth year, they're looking for the meaningful life because they know their time in college is ending.
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So they are reflecting, "what was the point of my being
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in college" and so forth.
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So I think different stages of life, we prioritize different things.
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And that's perfectly natural and perfectly fine.
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Just that if you feel like, oh, I've been doing the same thing for a long time and feel like you're stuck, then I think that's the time, maybe you should just intentionally try
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to expand a little bit of psychological richness.
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And if you feel like, my gosh, I tried too many things, then maybe you just
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shift the strategy to the happiness and okay, just what's most important and just hang out with the people you like and so forth.
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So, you know, I think just our needs change, our values change, depending on the life circumstances.
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So I think these three dimensions give you the different tools, and depending on your situation, I think you can just employ what is the best.
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So you talk about these three dimensions and they kind of seem like they're interrelated or interdependent.
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And that it's probably context-dependent.
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It's probably depending what's kind of going on in your own life at the time.
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For the listeners, if they're perhaps, and I'm going to focus on psychologically rich because that's what you're trying to introduce to people.
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What might be ways that people, without upending their life, what might be ways, you know, you talked about even just taking a different route
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Right.
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Right.
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your appointment or whatever.
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What could be other ways that people could engage in that start building more psychological richness in their life?
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I think one way you can do it is ask for recommendations for books and films to watch because we often like certain things and then gravitate and avoid certain things.
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So we're limiting sort of the exposure to the new things.
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So the best book I read two years ago was the book given by my former student, and it was a book about North Korea.
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The title is "Nothing to Envy." And it looked really depressing.
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I know North Korean situations a little bit.
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If I were in the bookstore, I would never have picked up the book, right?
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Because I was just like, I'm not interested in it.
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I don't want to read that.
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But because it was a personal gift from my former student, I read it.
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And it was like truly eye-opening.
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I mean, truly eye-opening.
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So I think that new learnings
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and exposure to psychological richness comes from those kinds of things.
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Just encourage others to make suggestions and then follow the suggestion.
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Similarly, if you are not super adventurous, you're not going to try new restaurants and whatever.
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So what you want to do is, "Debra, hey, let's try this." And then you should say, "OK, I don't think so, but I should say yes." And then if you increase
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the probability of saying yes to your friend's suggestion to do something, then you're expanding, essentially, the chance for psychological richness.
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So I think those are the little things actually, it's not just you, like, you know, it's like who you are surrounded with.
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If your partner is incredibly adventurous, then that's great, right?
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Just tagging along, your life would be really rich.
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But if
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your partner happens to be a very homebound person, then maybe you find some friends who like to go out and occasionally you do that.
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So I think those are the things you can definitely do.
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What would be good questions that we ask ourselves in terms of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness?
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Mm-hmm.
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So I think, do you find your life to be interesting?
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And if you feel like you're not very interested in anything at this point of life, then that's a sort of sign that you're lacking psychological richness.
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So maybe try to increase psychological richness.
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I mean, happiness and meaning, you know, you probably know whether you're happy or not, or you feel like
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you're making a difference in the world or not.
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So I think, you know, do you find your job interesting?
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Do you find your life overall interesting?
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How can it make it more interesting?
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And then, you know, the answers usually are right there, right?
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Like, remember who you were when you were five years old, right?
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You were way more spontaneous.
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You see something and then you want to do it and you just do it, right?
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Being playful and being spontaneous.
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And unfortunately, as you go to college and professional life, it makes you a really very serious person because you have a lot of things to do.
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And then you forget, like the child, you know, a child of you.
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And that's what you need if you feel like you're bored, you find your life to be, you know, not so interesting.
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So I think that's the question you want to ask.
35:23
So I'm going to end with this question because this is kind of what I usually ask people, because you spent decades kind of getting to this conclusion or this kind of thought.
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What would you want people, if there was a takeaway of kind of your life, you know, your life's work, you know, what would you want them to know
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that, you know, after studying this after, you know, your trajectory on this what would you want people to know about this?
35:56
Yeah, I think that if you find your life to be missing something, then maybe that missing something is psychological richness.
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And you just have to lead a life based on your sort of true curiosities and just mindset of explorations and trying out something new.
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Small and big.
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And I think the answer when somebody suggests "let's do this," a good answer is, "yes."
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And you want to think about regret.
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We regret the things we did in terms of short term, but in the long term, at the end of life, we tend to regret the things we didn't do.
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So, regret of inaction.
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If you do it, even if it didn't turn out well, then you can say, "At least I tried." So I think our
36:56
research shows that, you know, we are very conservative.
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We tend to lean toward the familiar things and familiar restaurants and so forth.
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So once in a while, break away from it and you will feel really great, I think.
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And in the long run, you have fewer regrets.
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So that's the takeaway.
37:23
You know, as we wrap up our conversation today, what was really compelling for me about your work is that it really to me is saying, go back to that time in your life where you
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had wonder and curiosity and openness in terms of your life.
37:44
And that going back to that is going to give you that psychological richness that will expand kind of the complexity of life.
37:54
Mm-hmm.
37:54
Ironically, to be wise, you have to be a child.
37:59
Again.
38:01
So if today's conversation resonated with you, I really highly recommend Dr.
38:07
Oishi's book, "Life in Three Dimensions." It's a thoughtful book that opens up new ways of thinking about a well-lived life.
38:17
As we close, I want to thank you, Dr.
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Oishi, for being here today, sharing your wisdom and your work.
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And for the listeners, thank you for joining me.
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As always, please remember: Wellness is a journey, not a destination.
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Until next time, take care, stay open and curious.