A Psychologically Rich Life: Beyond Happiness and Meaning

[AxelHeyst]

Erin Westgate is a boredom researcher but she explores psychological richness.

...she studies boredom, interest, and why some thoughts are more engaging than others. ​... Much of her research has been on the conditions under which people enjoy or do not enjoy their own thoughts. She has extended that work to the larger question of why people become bored, developing a new model of boredom that explains what boredom is, why we experience it, and what happens when we do. As part of this, she is investigating our desire for a life full of interesting, perspective-changing experiences - or a “psychologically rich” life.

I found her via Peter McGraw's podcast episode with her (solid transcript in that link, although both of their voices are lovely so I give the audio a 10/10).

This is her recent paper A Psychologically Rich Life: Beyond Happiness and Meaning (pdf) I've only skimmed it yet but it looks... well, rich.

Psychological science has typically conceptualized a good life in terms of either hedonic or eudaimonic
well-being. We propose that psychological richness is another, neglected aspect of what people consider a
good life. Unlike happy or meaningful lives, psychologically rich lives are best characterized by a variety of
interesting and perspective-changing experiences. We present empirical evidence that happiness, meaning,
and psychological richness are related but distinct and desirable aspects of a good life, with unique causes
and correlates. In doing so, we show that a nontrivial number of people around the world report they would
choose a psychologically rich life at the expense of a happy or meaningful life, and that approximately a
third say that undoing their life’s biggest regret would have made their lives psychologically richer.
Furthermore, we propose that the predictors of a psychologically rich life are different from those of a happy
life or a meaningful life, and report evidence suggesting that people leading psychologically rich lives tend
to be more curious, think more holistically, and lean more politically liberal. Together, this work moves us
beyond the dichotomy of hedonic versus eudaimonic well-being, and lays the foundation for the study of
psychological richness as another dimension of a good life.

A couple interesting bits from the interview:

Let’s pause. You said that a happy life or a meaningful life may be a boring life. Let’s help people understand that.

It’s a somewhat provocative thing to say, but when you look at what, for instance, predicts happiness in life, it’s mostly stability. Those are things like having a core group of friends or family, having enough money, or having this stable, secure lifestyle, which is enjoyable but can also be repetitive or monotonous. The same thing goes for meaning that the kinds of things that facilitate a meaningful life being embedded in a community and having the same routines all the time. These are all things that are good for meaning and you want for meaning, but they’re also things that we know can lead to boredom.

I’m sure you’re familiar with this idea, especially in the natural sciences and biology of this trade-off between exploration and exploitation. It’s that if you find something good in life, essentially, you want to stick to it and make the best out of it because if you strike out for something new, there’s no guarantee there’s going to be something as good or better out there. You want to stick to what’s been rewarding in the past because you know that it will probably be enjoyable, rewarding, and meaningful in the future.

That’s what is often called this exploitation strategy, but the downside is that after a while, it turns into Groundhog Day and you start wondering about what else is out there. That’s this exploration phase that you can strike out and try something new. There’s a risk in that because it won’t be monotonous and it will be different. Hopefully, it will be psychologically rich, but it also has the potential to go terribly.

[AxelHeyst]

I finished the paper and highly recommend it. You can skip the podcast if you read the paper, unless you're interested in their commentary on solo poly life.

This jumped out at me:

We suggest that a happy and/or meaningful life relies on an
exploitation strategy, in which people take advantage of familiar
environments and deep social ties, more heavily than an exploration
strategy. In contrast, a psychologically rich life relies more heavily
on an exploration strategy by expanding horizons and broadening
social ties. In rapidly changing environments, a psychologically rich
life might be most adaptive for learning and accumulating resources,
whereas happy and/or meaningful lives might be more advanta-
geous in stable, benign environments. Ideally, people might com-
bine all three, balancing exploitation and exploration strategies as
needed.

[7Wannabe5]

Very interesting (see what I did there.) Obviously right up my eNTP alley. Thanks for the link.

[guitarplayer]

From the research paper, a Singaporean newspaper obituary of one person judged as having had a psychologically rich life (PDF p7. second column):

Instead, he [Louis Cha] continued to re-read and revise his own novels, which he found deeply moving. He would cry upon re-reading his favorite characters’ breakup (the very same breakup that he himself had authored)

This in relation to the thread on art.

[7Wannabe5]

I think the paper also backs up my long-held notion that most people do not accept "boredom" as a valid motivation. For instance, if somebody broke up a long-term relationship, "just" because they were intensely bored with their partner*, few people would fault the boring partner for failure to stay interesting. And, this would be in very good alignment with all the factors likely to contribute to a "happy" and/or "meaningful" life as opposed to a "psychologically rich" life. However, most people would validate leaving a partner who made life extremely unpleasant (for example, the behavior of an alcoholic rager) and/or engaged in behavior opposed to maintenance of meaning in the relationship (for example, continuous cheating or emotional absence.) Obviously, the same holds true for other factors contributing to stability such as long-term career.

Some members of my family were recently reminiscing about how they all were worried that I had completely lost my mind when I converted to Islam during the course of my second "marriage", so I explained to them that it was due to the fact that I am even more tending towards "open to new experiences" than "rational." I wish I could find more experiences as likely to give me the feeling that is like glaciers breaking off in my brain, and everything swirling around in a new chaos to be sorted out.

[mountainFrugal]

I wish I could find more experiences as likely to give me the feeling that is like glaciers breaking off in my brain, and everything swirling around in a new chaos to be sorted out.

Inducing chaos to find a new equilibrium somewhere else? This is often how I view decisions that will bring about major change, especially to my base levels of comfort.

For instance, many people value security, stability, and comfort—and thus desire a happy life. Others aspire to make a difference in the world, and seek a meaningful life. Yet others value adventure and harbor a love of learning, desiring a psychologically rich life instead.

I think this is important to recognize in addition to the other components of "The Good Life". The distinction described in the paper is an important nuance, but it seems like all of these three factors are somewhat correlated with one another and are not mutually exclusive ( I think the authors agree). I get that the authors are trying to provide additional evidence for this other factor, but it is often phrased as people only fall into these categories, but I think is harder to disentangle the covariance between the factors. While I personally enjoy the "psychologically rich" life as it brings me the most engagement, these other components are nice as well and likely provide the basis for a new equilibrium. Right @7w5?

There is a entire chapter in Algorithms to Live By on the explore/exploit tradeoff if folks are looking for another perspective on this.

[7Wannabe5]

While I personally enjoy the "psychologically rich" life as it brings me the most engagement, these other components are nice as well and likely provide the basis for a new equilibrium. Right @7w5?

Absolutely. That's why I have described my ideal lifestyle as The Adventure Cottage Library. I've actually been having a bit of a late mid-life crisis of "meaning" lately, due to a bit too much chaos. I semi-resolved it by re-framing what I have been and continue to be about as something akin to Legacy of Literacy. My adventure-zone is the cutting edge where brand-spanking new words are being added to my vocabulary , which oddly does sometimes result in what would objectively be described as real-world adventures far beyond the new book rack at my local library.

[mountainFrugal]

In thinking about this a bit more, I think that I get quite a lot of meaning from doing something intellectually challenging or new. It is actually hard to disentangle these from my personal perspective. However, I could start to imagine someone loading nearly only on the "psychologically rich"... the philosopher that comes to mind is Diogenes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes

[jacob]

Methinks that [the field] of psychology suffers somewhat a poverty of imagination being constrained by the convention of using statistics to look sciency. ("If it can't be p-tested, we're not even going to think about it!"). For my Stoa3 talk (long in development/still not finished, and now maybe not to be a thing anymore since Peter seems to have moved on/changed the format), I used Bartle's game model, which makes it clear that humans look for their enjoyment in at 4(*) different and distinct ways: achievement, winning (killing), socializing, and exploring. In particular, each type has an optimal preference for what kind of games (and life) they find optimal.

(*) Subject to further refinement. Others have expanded it to 8.

The absolute downside of simplistic (frequentist approaches) statistical framework is how it removes "differences in kind" and fixes everybody on a variation around average. This is likely why "a meaningful and happy life" is associated with the game of life that achieves/socializers like to play because that is the dominant type in the current culture. What this paper does is to recognize that some humans prefer to explore. (Such humans are ironically likely to end up in academia and wonder whether the research-based average-fit fits their own narrative and thus write such papers in the first place.) Yet other humans---a significant fraction---like to "kill". IRL, killing is more figurative and more about "dominating others" with their opinions. The world has a significant percentage of such killers, maybe 20-30%. The fraction of humans who prefer to explore---in the words of the paper: living a psychologically rich life---is the smallest one of the four.

[mountainFrugal]

I was poking around on the Bartle's model wiki page. It seems like Radoff "improved" the model a bit to fit more of the actual game play data from various games: https://web.archive.org/web/20110521045 ... tivations/ . His axes are single player to multiplayer (X) and quantitative vs. qualitative (Y) for whether the player is "winning". In this model I think that academia could be in the achievement/immersion border, but because of scarce grant funding and/or faculty positions, it is more often in the achievement/competition realm leaving many potentially fruitful ideas under-explored.

I realize that all of this is more complicated and if it were easy to communicate in more than 2D we should .

[7Wannabe5]

@mF:

Clearly intersects with this model which I encountered in my Project Management course: