The Health Curve

What Is a Good Life? The Science of Meaning, Happiness, & Health | Prof. Shigehiro Oishi, University of Chicago

• Dr. Jason Arora • Season 1

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What does it really mean to live a “good life”?

Is it daily happiness? A sense of purpose? Or a life rich with experiences that stretch and change us?

In this episode of The Health Curve, I sit down with Prof. Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Chicago—one of the leading researchers on wellbeing and author of Life in Three Dimensions. We explore his three-part lens for thinking about a fulfilling life: happiness, meaning, and psychological richness.

We talk about why these dimensions don’t always point in the same direction, how culture and personality influence what we prioritise, and how even difficult experiences can add depth to our lives.

If this conversation resonates with you, subscribe and share it with someone who’s been reflecting on these questions too.

SPEAKER_00:

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you all had a great break. We've got a great episode to kick off 2026. So in this conversation, we're going to attempt to answer the very small question of what is a good life? Yep, you heard that right. I'm very grateful to be joined by Professor Suguhiro Oishi, who is a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. He is a leading expert on happiness, meaning, and culture, and author of the amazing book, Life in Three Dimensions. We're going to talk about happiness, meaning, and psychological richness and how they shape our health and well-being. Professor Shugahiro Oishi, it's wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. And so there's a lot I want to cover in this episode. Your field of work is incredibly fascinating, and you've made a lot of very important contributions to the field. Can we start at the beginning, if that's okay? Just tell us a bit about your background and why you chose to pursue this particular area of research.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, sure. So I'm a psychologist. I was a psychology undergraduate major and then got PhD in social psychology. In my graduate school, I worked with Ed Dina, who was at the time called Dr. Happiness, one of the only, maybe one of the three people who were studying happiness back in 1995. So from the first year in my graduate school, I started working on happiness. But because I'm you know Japanese, I was always sort of curious and spec, you know, like skeptical about some findings from the US. For instance, like self-esteem is really important for happiness and things like that. So I focused on cultural sort of angle and cultural understanding of what is happiness and what is well-being and things of that nature. So I got my PhD in 2000 and I studied my faculty position at the University of Minnesota that year. And my first student, Mike Stigger, was very interested in meaning in life. And up to that point, I was like, no, the meaning in life is too vague, too abstract, you cannot really study. But he was very persistent. So in the end, he did his dissertation on the meaning in life, and he created the questionnaire to assess the meaning in life. So, and then now that paper is cited like 6,000 times. I mean, he became the Mr. Meaning in Life. So I studied happiness for, you know, since 1995, meaning in life since about 2000. And this is about like 10 years ago, around 2015, I was a full professor at the University of Virginia, and it just hit me at the time that, oh my gosh, I studied happiness for 20 years, and I felt really old. And I asked the typical midlife crisis question, well, what have we learned? What was the biggest, you know, questions in the field? What might be the remaining questions? And actually, that was the time that I came up with the idea of psychological richness, because the field was sort of the biggest question in the field was which one is more important? Happiness or meaning to make ourselves happy or make other people happy? In the end, however, after a lot, hundreds and hundreds of studies, kind of consensus was that, you know, both are important, which is kind of like a nature versus nurture controversy in the 1980s and 1990s in psychology, which one is more important? Is it genetics versus environment? And of course, in the end, both are important. So it was a little bit disappointing, and I was a little bit depressed that wow, I spent 20 years, and I feel like you know, that might have been the stupid questions to pursue. But then it occurred to me, am I happy with my life? And the answer was yes. Am I, you know, do I, you know, see my life to be meaningful? And the answer was yes too. But when I asked the questions, is it the full life? Is it the complete life? I couldn't say yes. And I felt something was missing. And that's when I started thinking about what might be missing. And those missing features are something like adventure, curiosity, and certain challenges and you know, things of that nature. And those are not the typical predictors of happiness or meaning in life. So I started to look at the literature, look around, essentially trying to find the people. Are there any examples of people who say they're not happy, they don't find their life to be meaningful, yet leading an admirable life? So that was the sort of the question that I asked to my graduate students and postdoc and undergraduate. Can you think of anyone? It could be a fictional character, it could be a game character, it could be anyone. I was so surprised. So many people, students were able to just say, yeah, what about this? What about that? So in the end, we compiled a collection of fictional characters as well as the real character who seemed to be someone who doesn't seem so happy, doesn't seem to find their life to be particularly meaningful, but leading a psychological rich life, the rich in experience and the stories, such as Anthony Boding, you know, Oliver Sachs, and people like that.

SPEAKER_00:

So it seems like, of course, as a preeminent researcher in the field, given the nature of your work, you cannot escape having to look through this from a personal perspective. And it sounds like early in life there was this question around cultural differences, and then you, of course, moved around yourself, right? You moved from Japan to the US. And then later in life, there was again this personal lens that came back in where you were examining your own life and thinking, well, you know, happiness meaning, have those two been enough? And so, how has your personal journey played into how you've approached the field?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so because I moved around a lot, another line of research that I did quite a bit was the residential mobility. What happens when people move? And the findings were quite bleak. So a lot of public health research and other research actually shows that the childhood mobility is associated with adulthood difficulties, including depression, anxieties, and drug abuse and that type of stuff. So that was depressing. But at the same time, we found that uh some of the personality characteristics are important, like extroversion, essentially protect movers, because even if you had to move around a lot, if you're extroverted, then you are able to make new friends in the new places, then you're okay. Whereas the introverts who moved around, who had the trouble making friends in the new places, were the ones who were really struggling in the end. But anyway, so initial phase of residential mobility and well-being research was pretty negative. I mean, it pretty sounds negative. But at the same time, when we thought about other things, well, yes, of course, it is difficult to move to new places. But at the same time, you meet new people, learn something new. Just like, you know, study abroad, you know, living here abroad, it is very, very challenging. But at the same time, you really expand your horizon. So I wanted to sort of pay more attention to the positive side of this type of nomadic life, difficult but challenging life. So that's how I sort of try to incorporate some of the earlier residential mobility work into the current work on the psychological richness.

SPEAKER_00:

Just to pull on this thread, there's a clear tension here. In this case, the question is: should you move then or not? What is the risk benefit when we think about the opportunity for psychological richness versus the risk to happiness here?

SPEAKER_01:

What is interesting about happiness research was that when we think about like happy life, we often think about very, very intense positive events like promotion or getting married and things like that. But what was interesting was that those events do make a difference in well-being, but it's a really short live. Longitudinal study often shows that positive impact or effect of those intensely positive events is short-lived. Within six months, people tend to go back to the baseline. Instead, the happiness research shows that what helped individuals increase their happiness and remain happy tend to be small, positive social interactions. So having a cup of coffee with your friend, taking a walk in the neighborhood and saying hi to your neighbors every day and things like that. So in general, happiness research portrays the life of very stable, comfortable kind of lifestyle. So that's great. But at the same time, if you really focus on maximization of happiness alone, then you're definitely avoiding all kinds of difficulty or changing job, changing country, city, and things of that nature. And another tension here is that very interesting social psychology research and regret. So when we think about short-term regret, what do you regret about last week? We tend to say things like, oh, I said a horrible thing to my wife or children or something like that. Right? Something you did, that regret of commission, action. But in the long run, when you are, you know, imagine you are just you know in the dying bed, and what you know did you regret for your life? That type of moment, people often regret that they didn't do things. So the regret of inaction. So one tension you're raising, I think, which is a really important point, is that if you try to maximize happiness, you can do so by essentially just surrounding yourself with the familiar others and frequently interacting with your families and friends and things of that nature. However, in the long run, that might give rise to a very, very big regret in life because that prevents you from taking up on very adventurous decisions. So if you so this is the value, you know, judgment. What do you want to really maximize in your life? Do you want to maximize the comfort and enjoyment in everyday life at the risk of having some one big regret at the end of your life? Or you might compromise your comfort and you know everyday happiness, but maybe in the end, you have fewer, bigger regret in life. So I think the maximization of psychological richness sometimes comes with the ex at the expense of happiness. But you know, it's a trade-off. So I think that is a really important part. And you have to ask yourself really honestly, what is your value? What do you care?

SPEAKER_00:

So, how do we define happiness, meaning, and psychological richness? Yeah, that's a great question.

SPEAKER_01:

So, happiness in the science of happiness is often defined as the subjective feeling of positive emotions. So filled with you know joy, happiness, uh, comfort, satisfaction, and of that nature. So essentially, this is not a happy mood per se, but you're happy about where your life is going. So certainly satisfied with life. So life satisfaction is often equated with the happy life, life of contentment, satisfaction, and so forth. In terms of meaningful life, it's really defined by three things. One is a significance. So whether you think your life is significant, your life matters. Two, whether your life has a purpose and sense of direction. Three, do you feel like your life is coherent? A sense of coherence. So we have so many different roles we play. Those things fit together neatly, or do you feel like your life is fragmented? So that's the meme of life. Finally, psychological rich life is defined as a life filled with diverse, interesting experiences that comes with a change in perspective in life.

SPEAKER_00:

If one is cognizant of these three definitions and checking in every now and again across these three domains and thinking, you know, happiness is fleeting, but it needs to be there. And so am I happy often enough? Let's take that as one question. The second being meaning, is my life joined up enough that I can ascribe my life to some sort of coherent meaning that matters to me? And then thirdly, psychological richness. Am I exposing myself to enough new things, perhaps, that provide me a psychologically rich life? Is that a healthy way to think about it if we think about these three domains? And how would you define the overarching concept here? Is it fulfillment that we're talking about? Or have I just added a fourth domain?

SPEAKER_01:

No, no, no. I think that essentially we think of good life as many dimensions. So what I think about is like good life is a very big question. There are in many ways you can have a good life. But one way to think about good life is happiness, as you said. Am I feeling contentment in my life? It is important to check, right, whether you're content or not. And if you're not content, there are certain things you can do. Meaningfulness, of course, is another dimension where do I, you know, am I making enough contribution to the societies? Am I making other people happy? And that's a value, like important value, widely shared across different religions, different cultures, and so forth. And then psychological richness, ask another different questions. Am I doing a new thing enough, learning enough, curious enough to explore the world? So I think those are the good questions to ask, to check, to see if you have enough balance in your life as well. And when you have all three, I would definitely think that you're leading really fulfilling life and really good life. Some people who don't care about meaning or richness, I think just having a life of contentment might be for this person equal good life. Some religious person who cares about their contribution to other life and doing the right thing according to certain principles, they might not care necessarily about the happy life or psychological rich life, and then they might equate the meaningful life as the good life. And that's fine too. So for me, there are many different ways to define a good life. And actually, we sort of analyze many, many texts that refer to good life and essentially cluster around these three dimensions. So I think you know, you want to check yourself about these three different aspects. Some people, my colleague, uh said the interesting thing. These three things look like a vitamins. Like you need each of them. So maybe you can think of these as a nutrient. You need certain kind of contentment, you need certain level of meaningfulness, and you need perhaps a certain sense of richness and refreshness, you know, vigor. But it's really up to you how you want to construe your good life. I am not here to say, here are the good life, and here is what you should do. For me, so far, the good life was really dominated by happy life and then a meaningful life. So I was trying to add the third dimension through which some people who are not really interested in happy life or meaningful life could still live a good life.

SPEAKER_00:

And is it possible to dissect the complexities of the human psyche and of our existence to say we can develop an index for an individual where, like a personality test, they do some sort of test to understand what sort of weighting might be most relevant to them at a given point in time or phase of their life. And then they can start to look at those three dimensions, you know, in a more actionable way. Has that been done or is that something that can be done?

SPEAKER_01:

I think it is very difficult to do. But the one important part is that philosophers probably think of a good life as sort of the objective things that they can list. Psychologists, we tend to think that the good life is very subjective. So even if objectively speaking, Mother Teresa did so many good things, even so, the subject, the person might not feel like they did enough. So there are so many subjectivities. So it is impossible, I think, to really quantify this huge complexity of human experiences as an objective index. At the same time, what psychologists like me are doing is just giving each individual opportunity to reflect upon their life and evaluate whether it's complex enough, it's deep enough, rich enough, using their own sort of the standard. Although, you know, of course, we give specific definitions and examples of in this way, you can say you had a lot of interesting experiences, the first hand or reading book or watching movie or secondhand as well. So so I think your point is well taken that there wouldn't be the golden standard. It's it is not gonna be like the dollar that you can objectively measure, like how much, oh Jason, you have a million dollars, I have$20,000. That's very, very objective. But here we're talking about how much unique, interesting experiences we each feel. And I might have only 20 really unique, interesting experiences. And I might think, oh my gosh, I have really rich life. You might have 100 interesting experiences, but your expectation might be thousands. So you might feel impoverished psychologically speaking. So there are lots of subjectivity play into this evaluation of whether you think your life is going well or not.

SPEAKER_00:

And that takes us very nicely onto the next part of this episode. I want to ask you a bit more about some of the reflections you've had over the course of your career and all the research you've done. You talked about residential mobility. You've mentioned income just now. Can you talk a bit more about things like income and inequality and how that impacts happiness, meaning, and psychological richness? I want to go back to the cultural contrast as well, but just to sort of start with income and any other things that you've seen where there are patterns to this.

SPEAKER_01:

So here's the depressing news. In 1995, when I started out in the field, the consensus was that up to maybe property line, today's maybe$25,000 or so. Of course, the more money, the happier. But once you meet the minimum threshold, the more money doesn't translate into more happiness. Indeed, the correlation between household income and self-reported happiness was pretty small.1 correlation or from 0.1 to I was so surprised. In 2006, Danny Kahneman published a science paper saying, oh, you know, we used to say 25,000. It's actually 50,000. Okay. 2010, Kahneman and Deaton published another paper, revised to 75,000.

SPEAKER_00:

Is this inflation or something else?

SPEAKER_01:

No, no. Even if you adjust for inflation, it is somehow the newer data is coming out as you know, the threshold is going up, up. 2021, there's another new study that shows, you know what, there is no like saturation point. It just goes up, up, up. The more money you have, the happier you are.

SPEAKER_00:

So is that still the view in the field or is that being challenged still?

SPEAKER_01:

It's becoming the common view. So we used to say, well, money matters up to some point, but you know, extra money doesn't matter matter that much. But Killingworth's, Matt Killingworth's latest study seems to suggest that the more money, the happier. And we did sort of the comprehensive historical analysis, and the money happiness correlation has increased over time in the United States from the 1970s to you know the more recently. I mean, really linear. So income happiness correlation is now like 0.2, 0.25, 0.30. So substantially stronger now, although it's not super linear. So the role of money now seems to be much more important. And what we found in our research actually was that when we look at the European country, the pattern is similar. 1970s and 1980s, money happiness correlation was small. More recently, it's much stronger. And when we look at this, it looks like the income inequality seems to be playing a role. Back in 1970, income inequality was quite small. So the bottom 20% of Americans were not that unhappy. But when you look at the bottom 20% from 2012, 2014, 2018, 2020, and so forth, they are substantially less happy than in the 1970s. The top 20%, they remained happy. It didn't change historically speaking. So in other words, the gap between rich people and the poor people just expanded in the United States and in Europe. But interestingly, in Latin American countries, that's not the case. And when you look at the income in Ego, actually from the 1990s, it has shrunk in some cases. And those countries, actually, you see that happiness gap between rich and poor has uh shrunk as well. So I think this is really changing. Understanding of the role of money in happiness change, depends on the particular societies and depending on how impoverished the poor population is and so forth. So yeah, it is it is very, very big becoming even more difficult for Americans without the means to feel happy. And that wasn't the case in the 1970s.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And they say comparison is the thief of joy, right? And now with the technology we have, social media, etc., it's a lot easier to compare in extremes. How much of that is playing a role here, do you think?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we haven't, I mean, in my own research, I haven't really looked at the social media roles. So this is really other people's research, Gene Twinge and you know, Jonathan Haidt and others. But it is very clear that the social media made the social comparison, especially upward social comparison, very, very serious. We were shielded from this huge, you know, actual income inequality in the 1970s and 80s. Of course, there was a tabloid newspapers and stuff, but it was relatively limited. Every day we're bombarded by your friends and so forth's best possible moment in their life. So we're generalizing this as, oh, Jason went to another fancy Michelin style restaurant, and then you generally, oh, he lives such a fancy life. But of course, people just post that best possible slice of life. But we don't know that. Therefore, we are really feeling bad about ourselves. Of course, the anxiety level is really high, especially among the vulnerable younger generations, since 2012 when the social media really exploded. So it seems it is true that the social media is making our life a little bit more difficult. And if you want to be feel happy, I think that's one thing you can really do. Just sort of stop engaging in the sort of the social media so that you don't have to engage in abward social mobility unnecessarily.

SPEAKER_00:

We'll get back to this conversation in just a moment. But if you're finding this episode helpful, here's a quick ask. Take a second to follow or subscribe to the Healthcare podcast wherever you're listening. And if someone else in your life would benefit from this episode or any of the others you've heard, please send it their way. All right, let's get back to it. I guess there's there's a concept around happiness and money to explore a bit more in that people who may have more money and more income are not free from the struggles of life that people with less money have, anxiety, and this is reflected in anxiety, depression, suicide, these sorts of things. Is it that simple that more money does generally facilitate more happiness today? If we define happiness again as a short-lived, you know, sugar rush, if you will, a fleeting experience, you know, an emotion, a feeling. Is there more to it than that?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, actually the income, life satisfaction correlation is a lot stronger than the sort of the momentary mood or emotional experiences. So, in general, when we ask how satisfied are you with your life, then material wealth is more strongly correlated. And this correlation has increased over time. Of course, this doesn't mean that rich people are all happy. Obviously, there are a lot of depression and suicide and struggle in that population as well. But I think one thing that has changed really dramatically over time is that back in 1970, the wealthy people are really working a lot. The work hours usually were really long, whereas the less wealthy people are not working as much. But they tended to have good, reliable, stable, say, factory jobs or office jobs or something like that. Now there are a lot of wealthy people with a lot of free time and retired early, startup monies and sold, et cetera, et cetera. So that doesn't guarantee happiness, but certainly there are more people who have money, but also time too, because the time, flexible time, is very, very important for somebody to feel happy. And I think some of the struggle among medical professions, like especially residents and so forth, is the time, right? I mean, they just work so hard, they don't have free time. So money now can buy time, therefore, they tend to be happier compared to the 1970s. But that doesn't guarantee, of course, the perfect mental health, because they have their own social comparisons, family dynamics, and all other things as well.

SPEAKER_00:

So this is happiness. How about meaning? And I'd seen in previous research that poorer nations often report greater meaning. Is that right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

So if you just look at the American population, Americans, then the richer people tend to say their life is more meaningful too. Perhaps because they donate more money and things like that. But if you expand the sample to include African countries and things like that, it's just really astonishing. In a very impoverished African country, over 95% of the population say, yes, my life has an important meaning and purpose. So Gallup asks this yes-no question. Do you feel that your life has important purpose or meaning? Yes, no. 95% of population in Ethiopia, you know, Nigels and those places say so. Americans are quite high too. 90% of Americans actually say yes. But only 70% perhaps of people in Hong Kong, a little over 70% of people in Denmark say so. And Denmark is a really interesting case because Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world. So many people are quite content and satisfied with their life, but they don't find necessarily that their life has a meaning. So that's the interesting part. The money and meaning correlation is very complicated within the United States. It's positively correlated, but internationally it's negatively correlated. The poor nations tend to have more people with that sense of purpose.

SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk a bit more about these world happiness reports that seem to always come out every year saying that Scandinavian countries and Australia are basically top of the list almost every year. And there's always a call out about how poorly the US is doing. Can you talk a bit about that? And how is it measured? Like what's the methodology and how does it relate to the work that we've been discussing?

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. So this World Happiness Report relies on the Gallup world poll. And the most famous ranking is usually based on this Cantral Vada scale. This asks the question: just imagine the worst possible life. What might be the worst possible life for you? Okay, so that's zero. And now think about the best possible life. What might be the best possible life for you? And a lot of people say a lot of money, you know, great job, great family, blah, blah, blah. So let's imagine that's 10. So zero is the worst possible life, 10 is the best possible life. Now think about your life now. Where does it stand? So that's the scale. And in the Scandinavian country, the national average goes about 7.7, 7.8. US is usually a little below 7. And place like Japan is about 6, and a lot of African countries are 5, 4. Afghanistan, this last year was 1.3 or something like that, just the lowest ever recorded. So certainly it reflects certain conditions. The country in a war or post-war chaos, of course, most population, most people say this is close to worst possible life. And even the best country, it rarely goes above eight. So it's 7.7, 7.8, and so forth. So that's the methodology. But what is interesting is that if you ask Danish or Finn or Norwegians, how come you guys are so happy relative to the rest of the world? And they say, well, it's not exactly happiness, it's more like contentment. We don't desire that much. We're grateful for what we have. They have low expectations, they say. Is that right? Exactly. So essentially, if your best possible life is things like, okay, having a job, having a friend, instead of having a job that pays me a million dollars, have a big house, big extended family, happy family, or whatever, then it is very difficult, right? So it depends on that sort of the expectation. If your expectation is a decent life, then a lot of people can say that's that my life, current life is pretty close to that. Whereas I feel like Americans have very unrealistic expectations about their lives. Therefore, they always feel like they are not quite there yet. So one way to manage this is to manage your desires, right? If you manage your desires and ambitions, and you can say, this is good enough for me, which is called satisfiser. So if you become satisfizer, then you can actually increase your happiness given the same amount of success you have and given the same kinds of conditions you have.

SPEAKER_00:

And this starts to get at some of the major cultural differences, the major sociopolitical differences as well, where you know someone growing up in the US may find it a completely alien concept that they should put a cap on their ambition, right? Whether that's to do with how famous they become or how much money they make, or you know, winning the Nobel Prize, or you know, however you want to define it. How is this discussed in the research community and how is this research? Like what is the right thing for a human being for them to live X kind of life, whether it's a good life or a fulfilling life?

SPEAKER_01:

I must say this has not been discussed that extensively. I think you have to have sort of cross-cultural and cultural lens to really understand what's wrong with a lot of successful people who say they are not really happy, right? In many ways, they have a little bit too competitive or ambitious goals in their life. But of course, if you're trying to maximize your performance, then that's great, right? Michael Jordan always wanted to do it better. Is that the happiness maximizing strategy? No. Because you want to be better, you want to be perfect, you're trying to improve yourself constantly, then that's a very, very stressful life. But at the same time, objectively speaking, you might achieve more. So I think it's again the tensions and trade-off. It is really the weird that Americans want everything. Therefore, they have high ambitions and high happiness. But if you really care about your happiness, then you should just really, really mod modify sort of the push, put the cap on your ambitions. And that will make you really, really happier very, very easily. But at the same time, you might regret in the end of your life because you might think, oh, I might have been able to achieve a little bit more. So always there is a trade-off. But that what science tells us is that there are a lot of different ways to live your life. So you really want to know what is your value? You really want to maximize your performance, or you want to be just a happy person and pleasant person for people around you as well.

SPEAKER_00:

It's really hard, isn't it, to tick all the boxes or even to say what is the right approach. But this, I think it gives people a you know a framework to think about these different things because we're often lost in our emotions and our feelings and don't know how to make sense of them, right? I'd like to move on to your phenomenal book, Life in Three Dimensions, which I'm actually reading at the moment. I haven't finished it yet, but you know, the spoilers are up to you, of course, for our listeners. This explores the concept of psychological richness in detail, right? So we've talked about the inspiration behind exploring this concept. Can you tell us a bit more about what you explore in your book?

SPEAKER_01:

So in my book, I start with sort of the examples. Here are the examples of somebody who lived a very psychological rich life, like Steve Jobs, Oliver Sachs, and people like that. And also we talk about who leads a psychological rich life and what are the personalities, sort of the correct of people who lead psychological rich life. And the spoiler is openness to experiences. Those people who are open to be full themselves is the people who tend to lead a psychological rich life. But also, there are many, many other ways you can lead psychologically rich life. For instance, being playful is very good, spontaneous, also helpful, and things like that. But we also asked the question, right, can adversity turn into psychologically rich experience? Because in the past, I did a lot of research on earthquake victims and things of that nature, because I'm from Japan, of course, Japan has a lot of earthquakes. Unfortunately, if you ask their life satisfaction, even 16 years after the earthquake, physically speaking, they're fully recovered. Still, they are not as satisfied and happy with their life compared to those residents of the same city who did not lose their house because of earthquake and so forth. But what is really interesting is that if you talk to them, they often say their values and their perspective in life change dramatically. And often their common experiences is that, you know, they're not necessarily really close to their neighbors, but when the earthquake happened, the neighbors just work, try to find, you know, their dog. And, you know, they really see the new humanities at the time of disaster. So you see a lot of dramatic shift in value from more selfish achievement-oriented value to more pro-community collective value. And I think those are the things that experiences that enrich their life. Nobody would choose to have an earthquake in your life. But when it happens, certainly they you know discover something new. And so long as they discover something new, learn something new, they often feel that their life is richer. So psychological richness can be intentionally pursued by you know going abroad, challenging yourself. But at the same time, we can you can really enhance your richness through these unintentional tragedies, some cases. And we are human, uh very, very resilient. So of course, there are some people who end their life after traumatic events, but many of us keep going and oftentimes use these traumatic events as a springboard for growth and new discoveries. So psychological richness to me is a useful mindset because when we have happiness-maximizing mindset, the things like earthquake is really devastating. It's very difficult to recover from that. But when you can say these difficult things help us grow, then we can get over these difficult events much, much easier. So my book talks about those kinds of things, and with essentially whether you can find some richness from the familiar. So most of the thing we talk about is doing something new, something you didn't, you know, you haven't experienced before. But at the same time, sometimes you can find the richness in your favorite band, like Beatles, listen to the same song again and again and discover something new that you hadn't recognized before. You can read your favorite book and sometimes you know notice and identify with a different character than before. So these are all enriching experiences. And finally, I would say that you know, not just the experience, but what matters is what we remember. So we have to work hard to maintain our experiences in our memory. And how can we do that? Oftentimes by talking with your friends or family. Oh, remember this happened, you know, when you we did this and that. Oh, write it down as a journal. And those are the wonderful ways. So write and tell is another way to really accumulate your psychological wealth. So those are the little tips and things I wrote in my book.

SPEAKER_00:

And these days, take a picture and put it on Instagram, I guess, is the other version of that.

SPEAKER_01:

Actually, I use the Facebook to keep my kids' sort of baseful, you know, historic moments. So it is really nice to have it somewhere so that you can always go back and share and talk about.

SPEAKER_00:

And in the beginning of the book, you talk about the happiness trap, the meaning trap as well. Is there a psychological richness trap too? And can can you talk a bit more about what do we mean by trap?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So happiness trap, in short, is that you're trying to maximize happiness so much that you become so vulnerable to the negative emotion. You try to do best to avoid negative emotions, challenges, and you just stay in the comfort zone. So essentially, that's the happiness trap. The meaning trap is also that you want to make a difference in the world. It is very difficult to do in a grand scheme. So in the end, you have to sort of scale down into your neighborhood or family and make a very small contribution every day, which is how to build a meaningful life. But at the same time, some people through that make a very sharp in-group versus outgroup, us versus then. So some of the meaning trap is that that sometimes give rise to right-wing authoritarianisms and some case like terrorist and things of that nature. So that's the meaning trap. So psychologically, richness trap. I didn't write about this, but potentially it's that constantly trying to seek sort of new experiences. If you try to maximize it too much, so I would say sensational seekers tend to be trapped in, I think, the richness trap, because they're always looking for some you know highs in their life. But rather, what you need to do is occasionally you need to do something new, but then you really reflect upon and talk about, write about, and make sure you keep in your psychological portfolio and memorabilia so that you can accumulate these unique experiences. So definitely there will be trap for everything. But but this book, I think if you read carefully, you know how to get out of the trap for the all three as well.

SPEAKER_00:

It seems like the conventional wisdom of balance and the middle path seems to be what makes sense. So there isn't one right way to do this, but contemplating these different dimensions and balancing your approach to each of them, i.e., the middle way, seems to hold true here. Do you agree?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, I think that essentially at some point, at some day, you might want to maximize happiness or meaning or richness, and you can just sort of balance all three. If you ask freshmen in college, which one would you like to pursue? A happy life, meaningful life, or rich life, then 45% say, of course, psychological rich life, because I just got here, I want to explore the world. But the sophomore already say, the majority say, oh, I want to be happy. And then by the end, the senior year, they say, Oh, I want to have a meaningful life. I want to have legacy in my college life. So definitely, depending on your life stage, the suitable maximization strategy might shift, even given the same year, right? Depending on your how tired you are, how much you already explored, how much contribution you feel like you made, you might prioritize different things. So definitely, I think that is a great strategy to just monitor and just try to make sure everything is in balance. At least uh one is not just you know on the bottom. I think is a good is a certainly very, very adaptable strategy.

SPEAKER_00:

And normally what we do towards the end of these episodes is we try and make this actionable for listeners, you know, so that they can navigate their own health journey better and whether it's we're talking about emotional health, mental health, physical health, etc. We've started to touch on that already here around how individuals might be able to approach these three dimensions, they can monitor each, they can reflect on it. Is there anything else you would advise individuals for how they may find it useful to think about this?

SPEAKER_01:

So, number one thing, I think, is that when we ask, should I do this or should I not do this? We are often lazy that in the end you say, oh, let's not do it, it's too much work. But remember, oftentimes, Nike is right. Just do it, and that will make your life much richer. So just do it. That's my number one tip. Number two is that when you have a difficult decision to make, then ask yourself in five years, in 10 years, in 30 years, would I regret if I don't do this? And oftentimes that long-term perspective will help you make better decisions. And again, we are very biased towards the familial, easier, lazier option. So if you feel like you might regret in 20 years, 30 years, you're much more likely to do it. So think about the long-term regret. Regret in the long term is often in action, not the action. The number three we already talked about, but be playful. We are so serious. The professional life is always very much routined, so it's very difficult to be just like a child. But we have to remind ourselves be playful, just let yourself be full, open to full. Just take a vacations from your social and economic responsibility once in a while. And just be like a dog or be like a five years old.

SPEAKER_00:

That helps. This is really helpful for individuals. How about as a society, humankind? How do we need to start thinking about this more proactively in the way we you know we design employment, we design education, we design urban spaces, all these sorts of things? How can we start to utilize this as a framework to help people live good lives, if you will?

SPEAKER_01:

I think that's wonderful questions. And I ask myself as well, what is a good society? What is a society that maximizes people's happiness, the meaning in life, as well as psychological richness? And again, depending on which dimension you focus on, you can create and design different kinds of society or organizations or city. I think if you focus on the happiness, then you want to really focus on safety, comfort, and enjoyment, frequent interactions with the neighbors. If you think about the meaningfulness, then really you want to think about the volunteer opportunities and religious institutions and those places where they can find some purpose. On the other hand, psychological richness, then you really want to have some art, some bookstores and coffee shops and really random encounters of the peoples and ideas. So I think the managers and politicians and policymakers, I think we want to think about like what do we want to maximize? What kind of environments afford psychological rich life, meaningful life, and a happier life?

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much for joining me, Professor Oishi. This has been really fascinating. I'm sure our listeners will get a lot of benefit from it. And I encourage everyone to read your book, Life in Three Dimensions. It's an excellent read so far. I can't wait to finish it.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much for having me.