The big idea: What’s the real key to a fulfilling life?

1 day ago 2

What if I told you that we could all be rich? Not in dollars or pounds, yen or rupees, but a completely different type of currency. A currency measured in experiences, adventures, lessons learned and stories told. As a social psychologist, I have dedicated my research career to a simple, but universal question: what makes for a good life, and how can we achieve it? For much of human history, we have been presented with two possibilities: pursuing a life of happiness, or a life of meaning. Each of these paths has its benefits and proponents, but decades of psychological research have also revealed their limits.

The current cultural conception of happiness, for example, can work against us finding fulfilment. Historically, happiness tended to be defined as the result of “good luck” and “fortune”. Today many expect it to come from individual effort and success. But this, in turn, makes unhappiness and negative emotions such as sadness or anger seem like personal failures.

Ask the Danes and Finns, who consistently rank among the happiest people in the world, what their secret is and they’ll tell you this: lower your expectations and be content with what you have. It is a recommendation backed by plenty of evidence. Paradoxically, happiness is easier to achieve if you don’t want too much of it. We assume that the big things in life will make us happy: a wedding, a promotion or a new car. They do, but not for long. Studies show that we adapt to our new conditions more quickly than you might think, something psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill”. Instead, it’s the daily walks with your dog, the weekly coffee with your best friend and the monthly romantic dinner with your partner that provide a more enduring happiness. It sounds good, doesn’t it? But it leaves something out. It’s a bit like being a college student who only takes easy courses to be sure of getting good grades. Might there be more to life than simple pleasures and cosy comfort?

Then there’s the meaningful life. We often imagine that meaning flows from trying to change the world, à la Steve Jobs, Greta Thunberg or Mother Theresa. The pressure to realise this kind of grand vision can be immensely taxing, and feels out of reach for most of us. Once again, the research shows that lowering your sights and focusing on the little things can offer a more achievable sense of meaning. Often people find it in routines like taking care of family, volunteering in the community or maintaining a religious practice.

Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. But there is also a dark side to the pursuit of meaning: researchers have found that it can encourage people to draw sharp lines between those who belong in their group and those who don’t. The rituals and love that bind us to our chosen way of life can come at the expense of compassion for those unlike us. Rightwing authoritarians and members of terrorist organisations, for example, tend to report leading more meaningful lives.

None of this is to say that happy or meaningful lives cannot be a good ones. But both models fail to capture the breadth of human experience. What of curiosity, ambition and exploration? Or failure and resurgence? Thinking about what happiness and meaning leave out, and the traps they can set us, led me and my research lab to sketch out a third route to fulfilment: psychological richness. A psychologically rich life is one filled with diverse, unusual and interesting experiences that change your perspective; a life with twists and turns; a dramatic, eventful life instead of a simple and straightforward one; a life with multiplicity and complexity; a life with stops, detours and turning points; a life that feels like a long, winding hike rather than many laps of the same racing circuit. Such experiences can kickstart the psychological immune system, making us more resilient. Not only that, embracing the pursuit of psychological richness can make us less prone to regret: it matters less if the thing you did went wrong. You did it regardless, and chalked up another experience.

A life of psychological richness is also accessible to everyone, whatever their circumstances. In times of illness, bereavement or financial ruin, happiness or meaning can seem out of reach. A mindset focused on richness is able to incorporate these disasters into the tapestry of life, confident in the knowledge that things will change again soon.

In any case, a psychologically rich life can have meaning and happiness as its byproduct. Take Linda, the taxi driver I met in Riverside, California. Her life has been psychologically rich by any standards: she gave birth to two of her grandchildren as a surrogate for her daughter, whose medical condition made it dangerous to deliver a baby. She finds happiness in regular visits to her children and grandchildren and finds meaning in her previous career as a public servant and the donation of one of her kidneys to her ex-husband. In her retirement, she drives part-time because she enjoys conversations with her customers, and it funds her annual travel abroad.

In the end, perhaps no one said it better than Eleanor Roosevelt: “The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear”.

Shigehiro Oishi is professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and the author of Life in Three Dimensions (Torva).