This week’s Better You, Backed by Science is on what makes a good life.
What makes a good life?
Most of us would probably say happiness.
Others might say meaning.
And those are also two of the main ways psychologists have traditionally thought about a good life.
But researchers Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate have proposed a third possibility.
They call it a psychologically rich life.
A Psychologically Rich Life
A psychologically rich life is one filled with varied, interesting and perspective-changing experiences.
And here’s what I find fascinating.
Those experiences don’t necessarily have to make us happy.
Think about some of the experiences that have shaped you most.
- Maybe it was travelling somewhere very different from home.
- Reading a challenging book.
- Having an unexpected conversation.
- Starting a new job.
- Living in another country.
- Going through something difficult that changed the way you saw yourself or the world.
You might not describe all of those experiences as happy.
But you might still be glad they became part of your life.
That’s psychological richness.
And researchers have found that psychologically rich experiences can include both positive and negative emotions.
High or Low
For example, in one study, students who studied abroad became psychologically richer over the course of a semester, while students who remained on campus did not show the same change.
Interestingly, there weren’t corresponding increases in their life satisfaction or sense of meaning.
Something had changed, but it wasn’t simply that they’d become happier.
They’d encountered different people, places, customs and ways of thinking. Their lives had become richer in experience.
And I think there’s something important in that.
We naturally judge events according to whether they felt good or bad. But perhaps that’s not the only question worth asking. Because a good experience doesn’t always have to feel good.
Sometimes its value lies in changing how we see.
An experience might score:
low on pleasure but high on perspective.
or,
low on comfort but high on discovery.
or even,
low on happiness but high on becoming.
Because perhaps some experiences are valuable not because of the emotional state they produce, but because we don’t quite emerge from them as the same person who entered them.
Of course, none of this means we should seek out suffering or romanticise difficult experiences.
It simply means that happiness isn’t the only way an experience can have value.
Sometimes an experience can be uncomfortable, challenging or simply unusual…
and still make our life richer.
Try This
So here’s something to think about this week.
Look back on an experience in your life that wasn’t necessarily enjoyable at the time, but which changed you in some way.
Maybe you learned something.
Or saw the world differently.
Discovered something about yourself.
Or simply became a slightly different person because you’d lived through it.
And instead of asking:
“Did this make me happy?”
Try asking:
“Did this make my life richer?”
Because perhaps a good life isn’t one in which every experience feels good.
Perhaps it’s one that gives us plenty to feel, think about, learn from and become.
References
Oishi and Westgate’s paper. Link.
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