Why Some Lives Feel Full While Others Feel Flat

Spoiler alert: it's not about money

Hello! And welcome to the new readers who’ve joined since my last post.

I’m delighted to share insights from two terrific books I devoured recently.

In this post (an 8 minute read), you’ll learn:

• What we’ve been getting wrong about The Good Life;

• The dimension that rounds out our understanding;

• How to add more of this dimension to our lives

Intrigued? Read on!

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First, some context.

I’ve been fascinated by happiness research since my first psychology class in college. But my interest wasn’t satisfied by the academic studies alone; I wanted to know what I should do differently on a day-to-day basis to increase my happiness.¹

I read Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project when it came out in 2009. I relished how it translated a wide range of research — from philosophers to scientists to novelists — into actionable insights (it’s what I aim to do in this newsletter!). Apparently a few others did too; it’s sold more than 1.5 million copies and has been translated into 30 languages.

Since then, I’ve read countless popular books related to happiness and its cousins (joy, purpose, meaning, fulfillment) — I even co-wrote one.

After a while, many of these books start to sound the same: cultivate deep relationships, live in alignment with your values, etc., etc. (NB: Money and Love is unique in important ways and you should definitely still pick up a copy!)

Photo by Jacqueline Munguía on Unsplash

Recently, I discovered two books that add a crucial missing element to our collective understanding of The Good Life, or a life that feels worthwhile to the person living it.

Thanks to Kurt Gray, I picked up a copy of Shigehiro Oishi’s book Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life.

When I wrote about it on LinkedIn, Elizabeth Weingarten mentioned she’d recently read a complementary book by Lorraine Besser called The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of The Good Life and How to Cultivate It, so I picked up that one too.

Oishi and Besser collaborated on an influential research paper in 2020 and while their books focus on the same missing element — psychological richness — they’re different and both worth reading.²

This post draws insights from these books, which are now included in the Practically Deliberate recommended reading list. (Did you know this exists? My librarian mother would be proud.)

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Our thinking about The Good Life has been too limited

For a long time, the recipe for what makes for a life worth living boiled down to two things: happiness and purpose.

Oishi, who studied with one of the founders of the positive psychology movement, Ed Diener, explains that the first wave of positive psychologists asserted that The Good Life is about happiness and pleasure — feeling good.

Then came other researchers who asserted that The Good Life is about meaning and purpose — feeling fulfilled.

The problem with focusing on happiness is that it’s fleeting; it goes up and down frequently depending on internal and external conditions (like a balloon or a batting average in baseball).³ Pursuing pleasure can also make us complacent.

The problem with anchoring on fulfillment is the arrival fallacy. We overestimate the connection between success and fulfillment (e.g., I’ll feel satisfied when I [fill in the blank: get promoted, find a partner, have a child, get tenure, buy a house, etc.]). The long-awaited thing happens, we feel good for a short time, and then for the most part, our happiness returns to its previous level.

Oishi also notes that anchoring on meaning can also make us overly focused and narrow (case in point: the scores of mid-life parents who pick their heads up and realize they’ve neglected so much during the intense parenting years — I can relate!).

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The missing dimension: psychological richness

Oishi asserts that there’s been a missing element in the way we think about The Good Life: he calls it psychological richness.

Happiness and meaning are important, but they’re not the only things. As Besser puts it, they’re two legs of a three-legged stool.

The third leg? Psychological richness or as Besser calls it, “the Interesting.”

Just like the things that make us happy and those that give our lives meaning, what we find interesting is personal — it’s unique to each of us.

There are some patterns, however. Psychological richness is typically characterized by experiences that:

• Are novel and unusual;

• Are challenging and complex;

• Teach you new things, and;

• Push your thinking and ultimately change your perspective.

These experiences might not make us feel particularly good (in fact, they provoke a wide range of emotions and can sometimes be downright unpleasant) and may not be inherently meaningful, but they add an important texture to our lives.

And these experiences accumulate. As Oishi notes, “If happiness is like the batting average that changes with every game, psychological richness is more like the total number of career home runs: it adds up.”⁴

So how do you find psychologically rich experiences?

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Seek — but you might not find

We can’t pursue the interesting in the same way as we pursue happiness or meaning, but we can set ourselves up to find it.

If you’ve ever sat in a lecture, performance, or talk and willed yourself to find it interesting, you can understand why there isn’t a guaranteed formula.

Here are some of Besser’s suggestions of what to do in service of finding the interesting:

• Try new things

• Especially by yourself

• These can be vicarious experiences, like watching a documentary or reading a book about someone else’s adventure (or even on an usual topic)

• Push your boundaries (outside of your comfort zone but not in the danger zone)

• Pay attention to your emotions (one suggestion for how to do this, which I’ll elaborate on in a future post, is by using an app called How We Feel).

These might not lead to the interesting every time, but they make it more likely that you will find it (or, more likely, it will find you).

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The frequency illusion can work in your favor

I read Oishi’s and Besser’s books within a few weeks back to back, and something fascinating happened: I started having more psychologically rich experiences.

It’s likely due to the frequency illusion, more formally known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

You’ve probably experienced it as well. You learn about something new — a word, concept, name, etc. — and then suddenly start noticing it everywhere. It feels like the thing has become more common, but it's really that your brain is now primed to recognize it.

In this case, it’s a good thing. Being aware of the concept of psychological richness can prime you to experience it in a few different ways:

• It helps you reframe experiences. Right after I finished Oishi’s book, we took our kids to Disneyland for the first time. Despite its billing as the “happiest place on earth,” happiness was not my dominant emotion there. While it was gratifying to see how much my kids enjoyed it, it wasn’t an especially meaningful experience. But interesting? You bet. The people-watching alone was epic! I felt a range of emotions, and I ultimately changed my perspective from anti-Disney to being glad we went.⁵ I shared more of my reflections here.

• It helps you say yes to things. Shortly after we returned from our vacation, a friend texted me. She’d signed up for a brush pen calligraphy class one evening the following week — did I want to join? I looked at my calendar. It was a busy day within a busier week. But the class sounded — well — interesting. So I said yes and showed up. Guess what? It was novel, challenging, complex, and pushed my thinking! I’m so glad my friend asked (thanks, Marie!) and I’m so glad I said yes, because it was a psychologically rich experience. Also, I now have deep respect for people who do brush pen calligraphy.

Making b’s is hard — and I have two in my name!

• It helps you keep an eye out for the interesting. After I finished Besser’s book, I took a trip to Tucson. I was amazed by how many interesting experiences I had in a place I’ve visited many times before. One example: seeing the white blooms of several Argentine saguaro cacti on my daily 6 am walks. I learned these flowers open only at night and last just one day, their luminous petals perfectly designed to attract nocturnal pollinators like bats and moths. I’ve never noticed those cacti before, and I found them interesting (and beautiful). See my pictures of them here, if you’d like.

I’m grateful to Oishi and Besser for expanding the field of happiness research — and my own perspective — with their important work.

There are still a few weeks of summer left, at least where I live. I hope this post helps you experience the interesting in the coming weeks. I’d love to hear about it if you do!

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Abby’s Latest

Last year, I wrote a full post about the items that made our first international family adventure more enjoyable. It ended up being very popular!

This summer, we took a roadtrip and carried a lot more food with us. Here are three food-related recommendations that helped make our trip a success:

• This portable cooler keeps food very cold and costs way less than a YETI

• This middle seat console holds a large quantity of snacks and provides a natural barrier between my children (always helpful)

• This plastic container is perfect for hikes and has held up for years — and it’s currently on sale.

Deliberately yours,

Abby

1. Sadly, I graduated before Laurie Santos started teaching her wildly popular class on happiness, “Psychology and the Good Life” — so I didn’t get to take it in college.

2. Lorraine L. Besser & Shigehiro Oishi (2020): The psychologically rich life, Philosophical Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2020.1778662

3. Like my kids, husband, and in laws, Oishi is a baseball fan.

4. Shigehiro Oishi, Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life (New York: Doubleday, 2025), p. 10.

5. By the way, our kids are 10 and 12 and I have zero regrets about waiting until this age for a Disney visit.