What do we mean when we talk about a good life? Shigehiro Oishi, the Marshall Field IV Professor in the Department of Psychology and the College, has centered his career on understanding human well-being, including what factors predict a happy life and what benefits follow. In his most recent book, Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life (Penguin Random House, 2025), excerpted here, Oishi proposes a psychologically rich life as one worth pursuing.—Laura Demanski, AM’94

Yoshi was born in a small mountain town on the island of Kyushu, Japan, known for its green tea and clementines. Like his father, grandfather, and every male ancestor before him, Yoshi has lived his entire life there, cultivating rice and tea. He chose this path after just a year of agricultural high school, when he dropped out to become a farmer. At the age of twenty-seven, Yoshi married a woman from a neighboring town and had three children. He played in a neighborhood softball league into his fifties and enjoyed annual neighborhood association trips to various hot springs. He still lives in the same town; he still has the same wife; and he still has the same close friends he has known since elementary school. In making these choices, Yoshi followed the path laid out by his ancestors, connecting with them through common threads of not just blood, but occupation, place, expectations, and way of life.

Yoshi is my father, and I am his son a world away. After my eighteenth birthday, it took me exactly eighteen days to leave our small town for college in Tokyo. In my fourth year of college, I got a scholarship from Rotary International to study abroad in Maine. Before I started the program in Maine, I attended a summer English program on Staten Island in New York City. I had just broken up with my girlfriend in Tokyo and was tired of being in a relationship. I simply wanted to improve my English. Yet, I met a student from Korea and fell in love. She was about to start graduate school in Boston. I was about to start a year in Lewiston, Maine. During the 1991–1992 academic year, I took a Greyhound bus to Boston to see her every weekend. In May, I had to go back to Tokyo. Though my career plan before studying abroad was to work for the Ministry of Education in Japan, and I hadn’t had any intention of attending graduate school in the U.S., by then I was determined to come back. In June 1993, after graduation, I left Japan for good. Next were stops of varying lengths in New York City; Champaign, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Charlottesville, Virginia, before moving onward to Chicago. Along the way, I married the Korean woman I met on Staten Island and we had two children, born in two different cities. I have not seen any of my elementary school friends in years.

Three decades after leaving my hometown, as I get older and try to maintain what remains of our family connection, I often find myself wondering how my life could have diverged from my father’s to such an extraordinary extent. I wonder why he didn’t move away when he had the chance, and why, in contrast, I have moved so many times.

My father’s life has been stable, familiar, and comfortable. An annual cherry blossom party in spring, the Obon dance festival in summer, a foliage tour in fall, and hot springs in winter. It’s a cozy life, a good life. My life, on the other hand, has been far less stable, far less familiar, and far more stressful with constant deadlines for lecturing, grading, and writing mixed with countless rejections (e.g., grants, papers, book proposals, job applications). Though I love my job most days, I do envy my father’s simple, convivial life sometimes; I wish I could spend an evening drinking sake with my old friends every week, reminiscing about our school days and talking about life on the farm. But in my most honest moments, I know that I could not have lived like this: I had an intense yearning to see the outside world, too intense to follow the well-trodden life path of my ancestors.

I think back to when I was graduating high school, when I was faced with the question framed in the immortal words of The Clash: “Should I stay or should I go?” It was easy, then. Just go. As I get older, though, it has become more and more difficult. This question has been at the center of both my personal life and my academic research for decades. I imagine most of you have also asked yourselves that very same question, not just once or twice, but many times over. Some of you might be like my father: loyal, prudent, and nostalgic, prioritizing a stable life. Others may be more like me: impressionable, whimsical, and risk-taking, embracing an adventurous life. There are, of course, trade-offs between a stable life and a mobile life, a simple life and a dramatic life, a comfortable life and a challenging life, a conventional life and an unconventional life. But which one gets us closer to a good life?

Ed Diener, my graduate school advisor, was one of the first researchers to study happiness. He published a paper entitled “Subjective Well-Being” in 1984. Ed and his students, such as Randy Larsen and Bob Emmons, went on to publish a series of papers on subjective well-being throughout the 1980s, legitimizing the scientific study of happiness within psychology. Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [AB’60, PhD’65] then built and popularized positive psychology based on the study of happiness as well as other related topics like hope, optimism, and flow.

Then, in 1989, Carol Ryff published a paper entitled “Happiness Is Everything, or Is It?,” presenting an alternative model of a good life that focused on autonomy, self-acceptance, purpose, positive relations, environmental mastery, and personal growth. Along with Ed Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination theory, Ryff’s approach to the good life has come to be called the “eudaimonic approach”—a meaningful life, in short—in contrast to Ed Diener, Daniel Kahneman, Dan Gilbert, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and others’ approach to the good life, which has come to be called the “hedonic approach”—a happy life.

Over the last two decades, well-being researchers have debated the relative importance of hedonic vs. eudaimonic well-being. For example, people who say their lives are easy tend also to say they are happy, but don’t necessarily say their lives are meaningful. Workers are happier during a break than during work. However, they feel more engaged during the work than during the break. Some researchers even claimed to have found different epigenetic patterns between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, suggesting that our very genes are expressed differently. However, other researchers found that almost all people who say they are happy tend to also say that their lives are meaningful, and vice versa. The overlap between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being is so great that some researchers argue that they are virtually the same thing. Others argue that both happiness and meaning in life are so important that there is no point debating which is more important.

My own take is that happiness and meaning are both important. But they do not capture an adventurous, unconventional, and dramatic life. So psychologists have never had the adequate vocabulary to describe such a life. In a way, the happiness vs. meaning debates parallel debates in psychology over the most important factor in predicting intelligence: nature (genetics) or nurture (environment). In the end, both nature and nurture are important. Then Carol Dweck proposed and popularized a third idea: the growth mindset. How we think about our intelligence—specifically, whether we believe that intelligence can be improved—is also important in predicting intelligence and human performance, she showed.

Over dinner one day, my wife asked me if I could fix the broken window sash cords in our living room (our late-nineteenth-century Victorian house had original double-hung windows that still operated with sash cords). I answered, “We should just hire someone. I’m not handy.” Our second son, who was in middle school, immediately responded, “Dad, that’s a fixed mindset! You can get better!” It turned out he had just learned about Dweck’s growth mindset in school. My son’s suggestion motivated me to fix the window and become a better handyman, a small example of how concepts like growth mindsets broaden the way we think about the self, others, and the world. Just as the growth mindset revealed a new dimension of human intelligence and ability, I hope that psychological richness can reveal a new dimension of a good life.

How, then, is psychological richness different from happiness and meaning? The main body of my book answers this question in detail. But, very briefly, happiness is a subjective feeling that rises and falls to indicate where one’s life stands. It is a bit like a balloon. With the right wind and air pressure, it floats high. Smooth sailing. Life is going well. But when the weather is bad, it deflates. Grounded and stuck. Life is not going well. In another sense, happiness is like your batting average in baseball. It goes up and down, but what matters most is the frequency of your hits. An infield hit is as worthy as a huge home run when it comes to the batting average. You should aim for as many hits as possible. In other words, frequent small, pleasant social interactions add up to long-term happiness more quickly than occasional big promotions.

The snag is that happiness—like the batting average—changes over time; one season you hit well; another season not so well. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James declared, “To begin with, how can things so insecure as the successful experiences of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed?” So it goes. The fragility of happiness.

Meaning in life, on the other hand, boils down to whether your life has a “point.” When you’re devoted to making a difference in the world, your life certainly has a point. You see the fruits of your labor, your legacy. There is a reason for your existence. But when your efforts are not making a clear difference, it is harder to see the point of your life. The Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi sang in the song “Pointless”: “Of all the dreams I’m chasing … Everything is pointless without you.” Imagine that he broke up with this woman. His dedication would be wasted, and his life would feel pointless.

Tolstoy was happy and productive. Yet, without any obvious loss, he had a sudden existential crisis at about the age of fifty (years after the publication of War and Peace): “I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large property which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I was more respected by my kinsfolk and acquaintance than I had ever been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without exaggeration I could believe my name already famous. … And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life.” So it goes. The precariousness of meaning.

Psychological richness is different from happiness and meaning in the sense that it is not about an overall feeling of where life is going or what the point of your life is, but about an experience, or more precisely the accumulation of experiences over time. In the same way that material richness can be quantified by money—the more money you have, the richer you are materially—psychological richness can be quantified by experiences. The more interesting experiences and stories you have, the more psychologically rich you are. Just as you can accumulate wealth and become materially rich, you can accumulate experiences and become psychologically rich. 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.

A psychologically rich life is not for everyone. It suits the curious more than the content. The comfort and security of a happy or meaningful life provide a safety net that a psychologically rich life, with all its unknowns, often lacks. Yet the paradox of happiness and meaning is that the complacency they foster can make for an incomplete life with major regrets, doubts, and unanswered questions. Thankfully, our lives are not zero-sum games in which we must choose a single path to a good life; some people lead happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich lives. Therefore, anyone can benefit from the lessons of psychological richness research. By reminding ourselves that what counts is not just the destination but also the journey, we learn to find value in seeking new experiences and new knowledge, hopefully leading to a life without regrets, or at least fewer regrets.

From the book: LIFE IN THREE DIMENSIONS: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life by Shigehiro Oishi, PhD. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Shigehiro Oishi.