What makes for a good life? Is it pleasure or enjoying the passage of time, as James Taylor once sang? Or is it more about living life with purpose and contributing to other people’s well-being?
While we at Greater Good have found both happiness and meaning probably play their roles in the good life, recent research by Shigehiro Oishi and his colleagues suggests there’s a third pillar of the good life: psychological richness. This kind of life entails seeking challenging, novel, and complex experiences—ones that engage our minds, shape our perspectives, and stimulate deep emotion.
Now, philosopher and researcher Lorraine Besser has written a new book, The Art of the Interesting, to explain what psychological richness looks like and how to attain it. She makes the case that pursuing what’s interesting to you can enrich your life beyond happiness and meaning, benefitting not just you, but society at large.
We spoke with Besser about her book and its message.
Jill Suttie: What are some of the benefits of pursuing a more psychologically rich life, according to research?
Lorraine Besser: Our original studies were really focused on understanding the [psychologically rich life] and showing that it’s a distinct form of the good life, which overlaps with other good things but is its own species. The research has shown that when you have more psychologically rich experiences, it can lead you toward a more expansive sense of self. You feel more connected to everything—your environment, other people, whatever—in a non-evaluative way.
And more engagement with the world like this pays off. When we develop skills of noticing and being curious about what’s going on around us, it gives us feelings of connection to the world and a sense of agency. So, one thing [researchers] are showing is that it can encourage more activism for climate change, because it removes this barrier of something feeling too huge. It helps people overcome hurdles when things seem too overwhelming.
It can help us in the political environment, too. Having a framework that’s non-evaluative means we’re not always closing off our minds to different sides. So, you can just engage with something [or someone] in a non-evaluative way, and it can give you a sense of deeper connection. And I think life always goes better when we’re in touch with the world around us in this way.
JS: Could you offer a couple of concrete tools from your book that you offer to people seeking more interesting experiences?
LB: The first and most important thing is to loosen our grip on planning. Many of us are planners, and planning is essential to many things. But often we get in this mode where we’re too focused on the plan. We’ve narrowed our attention so much on what we need to do to get where we want to go that we’ve set up a yardstick, where we evaluate everything on how it’s going to contribute to the plan.
For the interesting to really take hold in our minds—and by the interesting, I’m referring to this experience of robust cognitive engagement that stimulates new thoughts and emotions—we’ve got to give it the space to happen. And so, we’ve got to loosen the grip on our plans, let other things in that we might overlook, and open up space for the interesting.
Once you’ve got that open space, it’s all about what you do with it. I’m a big advocate for learning. So, start to pay attention to the sparks of the interesting in your mind, seeing what lights you up and makes you curious. We’ve all got that spark of interest somewhere, but it’s different for each of us. The best way to pursue it is indirectly, through learning what that spark feels like and then letting it expand.
I’ve made a list of random facts in my book [that are interesting to me]. You could do the same by just Googling something or opening up a news page, then reading the list and seeing where your mind lands, what captures your attention. Something will, and what you want to do is seize on that and learn to pay attention to how that feels. Once you’re familiar with the feeling, allow those sparks to expand into ripples of thoughts and emotion. Invite in a mindset that allows exploration.
I talk a lot about the importance of noticing details around you, giving something a chance to spark you. But it’s also really important just to bring a sense of curiosity. Once curiosity takes off, our minds will go somewhere very interesting.
JS: It sounds like this might require slowing down. What would you say to folks who are super busy—maybe, working people also taking care of kids or elderly parents or both?
(Balance, 2024, 288 pages)
LB: One of the best things about the interesting is that you don’t actually have to change your life or what you’re doing in order to experience it. What I would say to somebody who’s caught up [in busyness] is to start identifying their wasted time—the times when they can’t be productive, like sitting on the subway, doing the grocery shopping, sitting in a doctor’s office. These are the kinds of moments that you can really enrich, and they’re already moments that you have available.
Nobody’s working 100% of the time, right? We all have these moments, and the key is to operationalize them, to seize on them. You might say to yourself, “OK, I’m really bored sitting here on the subway, but let me look at what that guy’s wearing and think about what an interesting combination that is; and why would he choose to wear something like that?” We can be curious just in our minds, and it doesn’t really matter what we end up thinking about.
I encourage folks to look around. You don’t have to seek out more interesting experiences. In the day-to-day, there’s lots of opportunities to have an interesting experience, and the first place to look is that wasted time.
JS: One of your chapters is titled, “Turning Obstacles into Adventures.” How does one actually do that, beyond just being curious?
LB: [Pursuing the] interesting involves a non-evaluative perspective, right? So, when you’re having an interesting experience, you’re not immediately saying, “This is good; this is bad.” When you’re experiencing an obstacle, you’re in that evaluative mode. You’re experiencing whatever it is as a setback to some pursuit or somewhere you want to go.
Our experiences of obstacles come entirely from how we’re framing our experience. It’s natural to see things as obstacles and then begrudge them. But I think it’s important to recognize when that’s happening and to accept that obstacles are a part of life, that they will arise, and oftentimes there’s not much we can do about them. Sitting around and begrudging [an obstacle] and lamenting it is not going to pan out in any positive direction. But recognizing when we’re doing that, and then just stopping and saying, “OK, how can I approach this situation differently?” can help.
JS: Do you think some people are just naturally more apt to seek novelty and be curious than other people?
LB: Openness to experience [one of the Big 5 personality traits] is a predictor of psychological richness. The more open to experiences you are, the more comfortable you’ll be embracing novelty, challenge, and complexity.
But the good news is that anyone can develop more openness to experience by pushing the boundaries of our comfort zones. It doesn’t take much—even reading a book about a different time and place will help us develop more openness, as will trying new things, taking up other people’s perspectives, and making even small changes to our routines, be it taking a different route to work or watching your nightly news on a different channel. These are small, easy moves we can make to become more open and to invite psychological richness into our lives.
We’ve got to remember that it’s something we are all capable of. It might be more natural for some people than for others. That’s true for happiness and meaningfulness, too—they play a bigger role in some people’s lives than others. There are just individual differences in how we respond and in what resonates with us. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t play a bigger role in our lives if we wanted it to.
JS: It seems like children start out being highly curious and open to wonder, but that school, with its demands on getting “the right answer,” might train them out of it. What do you think?
LB: When we think about the mind, we mostly think about the cognitive stuff—rationality and structure, not emotions—and we tend to train youth to develop those. That’s why we all carry around [the belief] that this is what we should be doing when we’re using our mind.
But there’s a huge benefit to unstructured cognitive engagement and using your mind that’s not in the service of a plan, purpose, or end goal. So, the way we can stimulate this in children is through actively giving them the space to do that—whether it’s through creative writing, practices of noticing, or asking open-ended questions and encouraging whatever happens. We can certainly begin introducing this at a very young age, where we encourage imagination and transforming [kids’] experiences by just having more fun with whatever they’re doing.
Yet we somehow drop that [encouragement] when [kids] get older, right? That stuff becomes less of a priority. But we should be paying attention to the different shapes it can take throughout life. You don’t want to be stuck in the imaginary play of a two year old forever. But you can certainly think about being more creative. Putting ideas together, writing poems, doing something creative, all of that will engage those parts of the mind.
JS: What do you want readers to take away from your book?
LB: I’m hoping to offer a different way of understanding the good life and a way that acknowledges the complexities of life and allows us to thrive even when challenged. I spend a lot of time in the book showing that happiness has limits and that fulfillment is hard to obtain. So, I think it is a real mistake to put too much focus on one aspect when there are really different things that can enhance our lives in different moments. A lot of life gets squeezed out when we’re too focused on happiness and meaning. And we want to take charge of that and be able to enjoy all aspects of our life.
The important thing about [pursuing] the interesting is that it’s really up to us, and it’ll give you a tool to enhance your life in ways that are accessible. It really will help you understand and enrich your conception of what it means to live a good life.
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