Posted on:Oct 10 2020
One of the things my life has taught me over the years is that a good life doesn’t necessarily mean an easy one.
Philosophers have offered up two classic answers to the question, “What makes a good life?” - you may have heard of them, even studied them back in your college days - and both are captured by different Greek words for happiness, hedonia and eudaimonia. A hedonic life is free from pain and full of everyday pleasure - calm, safe, and serene. A eudaemonic life is a virtuous and purposeful one, full of meaning.
Maybe, like me, you pretty quickly think, “Hm, something’s missing here..."
It turns out there’s a new study which makes the case for a third important element of a good life, and they call it “psychological richness.” And apparently this study showed that ordinary people all around the world agree about this third element too.
Have to say, I appreciate the update on those early thinkers’ ideas - philosopher Lorraine Besser at Middlebury College and psychologist Shigehiro Oishi at the U of Virginia are speaking directly to ordinary me. With 57 years lived, I definitely subscribe to the view that a good life is one that is interesting, varied, and surprising, even if some of those surprises aren’t necessarily pleasant ones.
Aside from the unattainableness of steady-state happiness, doesn’t it sound kind of boring? Not so much the happy part, but rather the steady-state part...imagine day after day after day of "calm, safe, and serene." Yes, I realize I'm posing this question amidst record-breaking chaos and that "calm, safe, and serene" is likely exactly what we're all craving ! That said, adventures, explorations, and crises may be painful, but at least they’re interesting.
And then there are those unexpected turns that may involve straying from our original purposeful path, that may lead us to act in ways that are less than virtuous...detours like trading on an inside tip, or “till death do us part” not panning out, or cheating to get ahead... Who doesn’t have something that didn’t go as planned or hoped, or was a wrong or bad decision, or one-way-or-another created a big mess of things with nary a stitch of hedonia or eudaimonia in sight?!
Here's where we take a few calming breaths...
You may wonder if a psychologically rich life is one you’d actually want or if it’s one for the sort of people who write philosophy articles. So the researchers asked. Turns out, when push comes to shove, if we have to choose between psychologically rich or happy and meaningful, people go for psychologically rich.
The second part of their experiment gets at why. Instead of asking people what kind of life they would choose, the researchers asked what people regretted about the life they have actually led. Did they regret decisions that made their lives less happy or less meaningful? Or did they regret passing up a chance for interesting and surprising experiences? If they could undo one decision, what would it be?
When people thought about their regrets, they were even more likely to value psychological richness.
And we're not going for psychological richness just to avoid boredom. The unexpected, even the tragic, can have a transformative power that goes well beyond the hedonic and eudaemonic.
Take some time to reflect on your life experience...find for the first time (because timing is a thing) or refresh for the umpteenth time the psychological richness your life no doubt offers up.
So, yeah, I’m glad for this research...it makes a lot of sense and it’s a useful reminder to get on board with psychological richness because it's not just death and taxes - we all mess up and life throws curve balls.
I’d guess those interview subjects who were asked about their regrets did a pretty good job of not wasting the learning that is the only consolation for our painful experiences. I’d guess they possessed traits like curiosity and courage, and learned - be it in fits and starts or in a slow and steady crescendo or maybe in one giant, tectonic, core-rattling life event that changes everything - to work with life rather than against it.
This is where we strike richness.
It’s like the line in that Leonard Cohen song - it’s the cracks that let the light come in.
