Paul Rand: Picture this, you’re born, raised, and live your entire life in one place.

Shigehiro Oishi: My dad is 91 years old now and he’s a farmer.

Paul Rand: You marry young, raise a family, and you never leave the town where you grew up.

Shigehiro Oishi: Just like his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather.

Paul Rand: You know everyone and everyone knows you.

Shigehiro Oishi: My entire Oishi family was essentially a farmer.

Paul Rand: That’s Shigehiro Oishi, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, and one of the world’s foremost experts on happiness and meaning.

Prof. Shigehiro Oishi:

Shigehiro Oishi: I mean, he talked to only like what, 10 people? In any week maybe. So he lived very small, cozy, very traditional life.

Paul Rand: Now imagine something completely different. You leave home as soon as you can. You travel, change jobs, move cities, meet new people. Your life is full of new experiences, challenges, and stories.

Shigehiro Oishi: I left my hometown at age 18, went to college in Tokyo after I came here. First I was in New York City and then did my PhD at Albany-Champaign. My first job was at the University of Minnesota, so moved to Minneapolis and then I got a job from University of Virginia and essentially just kept moving, and moving, and moving.

Paul Rand: So which one sounds like a better life?

Shigehiro Oishi: I mean, a lot of important life decisions revolve around should I stay or should I go, right? Should I stay with my current job or should I take the job offer? Should I stay in Chicago or should I move to New York City? Should I stay with my current partner or try on somebody else?

Paul Rand: It is going to be impossible for us not to put a sound clip from The Clash into this taping.

Shigehiro Oishi: Exactly.

Paul Rand: Yeah. It is inevitable.

Shigehiro Oishi: Right?

How to live a good life?

Paul Rand: What’s the secret to a good life? Some say it’s about happiness.

Shigehiro Oishi: Hedonic psychologist or hedonic well-being is considered as personal happiness and life satisfaction.

Paul Rand: Others argue it’s about meaning.

Shigehiro Oishi: So you know well-being is essentially you are making difference in the world. Person who lives that life feels that their life is significant, their life matters to others.

Paul Rand: But what if neither is enough? What if there was a third way that nobody has considered yet?

Shigehiro Oishi: If you don’t have stable social relationships or financial situations, it’s very difficult to feel happy or making difference in the world. But some cases, I mean, they are leading very admirable life. And then if you think psychological rich life is a viable dimension, then maybe they can justify and see that their life is actually worthwhile.

Paul Rand: Psychological richness. It’s the focus of his new book, Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make for a Fuller Better Life.

Shigehiro Oishi: What’s the ideal life look like? I think it requires self-reflection. Just honestly to yourself. What you want is some comfortable, pleasant life and a happy life, or you really want to make a difference in the world? Or you want to experience a lot of different kinds of things regardless of the positive or negative outcomes of it.

Paul Rand: For many people, psychological richness may be the answer to finding the deep satisfaction in life when they have struggled to find happiness and meaning.

Shigehiro Oishi: There are very clear sort of set of advice we can give. If you want to maximize happiness, obviously you should be hanging out with your best friends, and families, and neighbors and so forth and meaningful life. Of course, you should just decide what cause you care most and try to volunteer and do things repeatedly for extended period of time. But if that’s not something you want, then maybe psychological rich life is the life you want.

Paul Rand: Welcome to Big Brains, the podcast where we explore the groundbreaking research and discoveries that are transforming our world. I’m your host, Paul Rand. On today’s episode: finding a new way to a good life.

MUSIC: Should I stay or should I go?

Paul Rand: The University of Chicago Leadership and Society Initiative guides accomplished executive leaders in transitioning from their long-standing careers into purposeful on-court chapters of leadership for society. The initiative is currently accepting candidates for its second cohort of fellows. Your next chapter matters for you and for society. Learn more about this unique fellowship experience at Leadforsociety.uchicago.edu.

Paul Rand: Would his father have been better off going instead of staying? To find an answer, Oishi first needed to understand the fundamental forces that drive human fulfillment. And for decades, psychologists believed that the answer came down to two things, happiness and meaning.

Shigehiro Oishi: I was essentially a graduate student working with the doctor happiness at Dina, and at the time we thought happiness was the only path to a good life. So we studied a lot about what makes people happy and so forth. And then I was really shocked that somebody else really criticized the happiness and what’s wrong with happiness. And Carol Riff says, “Oh, is the happiness is everything or is it? If Hitler was happy, then it’s okay. He led the good life.” And then obviously Hitler didn’t lead the good life. So Carol Riff and people like that proposed that maybe personal happiness is not really a great indicator of whether this person is leading good life or not.

Paul Rand: It’s hard for people to probably think the way we’re oriented that happiness is not actually a great measurement of leading a good life. But you spend a lot of time talking about why it isn’t and even have some analogies to help us understand while correlating happiness in good life aren’t on the same page.

Shigehiro Oishi: Just that I think the culture now is that we care so much about maximizing happiness, that we get into sort of the trap that we think that the happiness is this golden standard of whether you’re doing well in life and you’re successful in your life or not. And when you have that equation and happiness become personal failure, and that’s where the things get really, really weird and really tragic sometimes. If you just try to maximize happiness all the time, then it is really difficult to accept some of the negative events that happen to you.

Paul Rand: So if happiness isn’t the golden ticket to a good life, well, what about meaning? Could devoting yourself to something bigger, giving back, making a difference, actually be the answer?

Shigehiro Oishi: So more of the making other people happy rather than making myself happy. That was the second path to the happiness. So the first one was sort of hedonic approach. Whatever subjectively feel good about your life, that’s great. But the second approach was eudaemonic approach to well-being that you should be good behaving good, do a virtuous thing, and make a difference and contribution to the society.

Paul Rand: If we think through this idea of meaning and thinking that good life is coming out of a sense of meaning, that one seems also challenging, where there’s questions about how does having a meaningful life not lead to a good life?

Shigehiro Oishi: If somebody thinks they’re leading a meaningful life, I think that’s great. Good for you. You did it. You’re doing great. But this is just the empirical findings that I find sometimes troubling is that, for instance, people who are high in right-wing authoritarianism, these are the people who endorse the items that is like complete absolute conformity is important for the function of society. And these are the people who tend to say, “Yeah, my life is meaningful.” And those people who are not endorsing in those items, anti-conformist say they don’t find their life to be particularly meaningful. 

Shigehiro Oishi: One of the key dimensions of meaning is coherence. And when you are anti-conformist, obviously, it is kind of hard to feel like your life is really, really harmonious and everything put together. So what troubles me about the meaning in life is finding things like that. But also there are a lot of cases where young person who is aimless, and confused and just all of a sudden find this organization like terrorist organization find very, very attractive. And some of the sociological ethnographic research shows that they are attracted because these organizations give them very clear guidance as to what the life should be.

Paul Rand: And the meaning to that life?

Shigehiro Oishi: Exactly. What you are doing will give rise to the huge thing. It’s related to the huge movement. So then they sacrifice their life and thinking that their life is making difference in the world, but some case maybe misplaced meaning. So that’s the sort of extreme case of the concern that I have.

Paul Rand: Well, and I think many folks, I’m sure familiar with the story as you talk about Tolstoy and after he is done with War and Peace and he thinks about suicide and because he thinks his life has no meaning.

Shigehiro Oishi: Yeah, that’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?

Paul Rand: Yes. But you can’t control externally what more meaning would you want in life? But he is lost by this.

Shigehiro Oishi: Exactly. So even when you have objective an incredible accomplishment, he already had written War and Peace, and then he was famous. He owned a huge properties, loved his wife and children and so forth. Yet he had this sense that his life is not adding up to anything meaningful. Frankly, I have a hard time imagining that. But that was a subjective feeling, true feeling he felt. And indeed, a lot of accomplished people kill themselves sometimes, and it’s very difficult for others to understand. But again, meaning is a very, very subjective thing. Some people can find the meaning with the little things. Other people, even though there are a lot of evidences for your meaning, they don’t see it.

Paul Rand: And you really talk about Americans in particular that link the concept of personal achievement and happiness together. And the idea that when you see somebody profoundly successful that kills themselves, it is very incongruous to how we look at the world. Why would they have done that? And so linking personal achievement and happiness is definitely not the key?

Shigehiro Oishi: Right? I mean, the research is very clear that the happiness is not these big success in life, but the small things in life. So at Dina, my advisor, have this wonderful chapter entitled, Happiness is the Frequency, not the Intensity of Positive Emotions.

Paul Rand: Okay, that’s a big point, isn’t it?

Shigehiro Oishi: Yeah, it is really big. So intense positive events or emotion often happens when you get promotion, or where you get engaged, or wedding or things like that, those relatively rare events. So imagine I ask you just look back last six months of your life, what kind of life events happened to you? Some people had this intense positive event and other people didn’t have. Initially, you look at the correlation, then the people who are happy tend to be those people who had recently these big promotions and things like that. But surprising thing is three months later, six months later, you just go back and this impact of the recent big positive event just totally disappears.

Paul Rand: Got it.

Shigehiro Oishi: Definitely when you get married or when you get promotion, of course you’re intensely happy. But it doesn’t last. It doesn’t last.

Paul Rand: So you’re saying we should get married a lot of times, is that what you’re saying?

Shigehiro Oishi: Well, no. But if you can have a small maybe ceremony or the celebration every month, every half a year or something, that’s better than the marrying like five times.

Paul Rand: I got you. Okay, good. Good, good, good.

Shigehiro Oishi: So we totally misguided that big promotion, going to the great elite university, and marriage, and child and whatever is the key for happiness. No. It’s walking your dog every day and say hi to your neighbor having a coffee with your best friend every week or going out for romantic dinner with your spouse. Those are the things that little joy and that comes frequently. And those are the things that contribute to your happiness.

Paul Rand: You did talk about some research done by Dan Gilbert, and that was really the idea of tenured versus untenured professors, which is certainly a close-to-home analogy for you.

Shigehiro Oishi: Definitely. So this is the great studies. So they asked current assistant professors, “What do you think? How would you feel if you got tenure?” And everybody said, “Of course, I’m ecstatic.” And then they ask, “Oh, if you didn’t get a tenure, how would you feel?” And then everybody said, “Oh my gosh, I’ll be depressed, miserable.”

Paul Rand: I failed.

Shigehiro Oishi: I failed. And I think that’s very intuitive, consistent with our intuitions. But what’s interesting is that he went to associate professors who did get tenure and associate professor elsewhere who did not get tenure. And the good news is that the people who denied tenure, they were a lot happier than the current assistant professor envisioned. The bad news is that those people who did get tenure, they were not that much happier than when they were assistant professor.

Paul Rand: Well, you talk about this as a happiness trap.

Shigehiro Oishi: Yeah, this is the effective forecasting era that we make, that we think that these big important events will make a huge difference in our happiness. But in reality, these big events, we just hedonically adapt very, very quickly. And Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson coined the term psychological immune system. Just like when the virus gets into your body, your immune system attacks it. It’s like when something bad happened, psychological immune system just attack and remove it. So those associate professor who denied a tenure, essentially just their psychological immune system worked and got used to it. And they often say, “Oh, actually at the new university, new college, the people were much nicer. People respect me and etc.” So there were a lot of positives that they hadn’t envisioned. But also we have natural healing power essentially within ourselves, which we totally underestimate.

Paul Rand: The more Oishi dug into happiness and meaning is sources of a good life, the more he realized while there are many pros, there are also some cons.

Shigehiro Oishi: And the more I read about this, I just started to question, so this really sounds like a very stable life, the type of life my dad lived. And at the same time, we know a lot of people who move around a lot, right? Explore, adventurous. And so just purely, I just had this question then just life of adventure, life of curiosity. Is it not a good life as far as the psychologist defined it? So that’s where I sort of started to think about this new concept of psychologically rich life.

Paul Rand: What if there was a third way to a good life? That’s what Oishi discovered when he stumbled upon psychological richness. More on that after the break.

Paul Rand: How can we improve communications at work? Why did McKinsey’s former CEO go to prison? How irrational are we really? According to Chicago Booth’s, Richard Thaler and Harvard’s Steven Pinker. And our stock markets actually efficient? The Chicago Booth Review podcast addresses the big questions in business policy and markets with insights from the world’s leading academic researchers. We bring you groundbreaking research in a clear and straightforward way, find the Chicago Booth Review podcast, where wherever you get your podcasts.

Paul Rand: Let’s talk a little bit about this idea of a third way of having a good life. And you talk about this as having a psychologically rich life. Tell me what a psychologically rich life means?

Shigehiro Oishi: So we define a psychologically rich life as a life filled with diverse, unusual, interesting experiences, and often that come with perspective change and have a lot of life stories to tell. So my dad had a very happy life, but at the same time, because the way he lived his life experiences are pretty homogeneous and pretty limited. So in that sense, his life might not be so psychologically rich. So the key of the psychologically rich life is really boils down to three factors, novelty and the diversity of emotions, emotional experiences. And the third one is the perspective change. How many times you change the way you view yourself or the world.

Paul Rand: You used words such as newness or novelty are important terms of psychologically rich. What do those words mean in relation to psychologically rich?

Shigehiro Oishi: Yeah, for instance, we did 14 day, two weeks daily diary studies, and we just simply ask students, just keep record of how the day went. How happy were you today? How meaningful your day was, etc., etc. But then also we ask, “Did you do anything new today? Yes or no? Did you meet anyone new? Yes or no? Did you eat something new? Yes or no?” And what we find is that on the day they did something new, or met somebody new, or ate something new, they felt that the day was more interesting than the day they didn’t do anything new, etc., etc. And we also asked, “How typical or atypical was today?” And a happy day was usually a typical day. The psychologically rich day was atypical day, atypical day when they did go hiking, when to concert, and things like that. So when I say the novelty is important, what I mean is did you do something new? Did you meet someone new? Did you eat something new?

Paul Rand: Well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a quote/ unquote “positive experience” either, does it?

Shigehiro Oishi: No, no, no, no, no. So this is interesting thing. In the same daily diary study, we ask, “So how much did you feel sad and angry and so forth today as well as happiness?” Right? And of course, the happy day and meaningful day is the day when they weren’t angry, or sad and so forth. And what surprised me was that on the day they said it was a psychologically rich day, interesting day. They had quite a bit of negative emotions like anger and sadness as well. So I’m sure by the end of the day they resolved it. But these negative emotions oftentimes gives you surprise. You are not expecting the negative event to happen all the time. 

Shigehiro Oishi: So oftentimes when we ask in another study, when we ask them to write about negative experiences, what’s interesting is that when they do write negative experience, they tend to say, “Oh, this made me think about the world and the way I view about myself differently than before.” And compared to when we ask, “Okay, tell me about the best thing happened to you last week and the second-best thing happened to you.” They love writing about it. But those things do not change the way they think about the world or think about the way they view themselves. So perspective change often happens when the negative events happens and negative emotion happens.

Paul Rand: Yeah. You spend a lot of time about changing perspective, and can you tell folks how you change perspective?

Shigehiro Oishi: I think the greatest example came from the focus group when I asked undergraduate students. “Okay, tell me what was the unusual, interesting event that happened to you over the weekend?” One student said, “Oh, for the first time in my life, I went to professional wrestling match and I was expecting some cheesy violence and coordinated thing and so forth.” And she was so surprised that when she went there, actually there were lots of kids cheering for wrestlers, and she was wondering, why are there so many kids? And it turned out that WWE was doing huge anti-bullying campaigns and brought these kids. So for these kids, for wrestlers were the role models. So she had this pre notion that, oh, this is sort of the light entertainment and cheesy violence and so forth. But then she was so moved and experienced a bunch of different emotions and essentially came back with a completely new perspective and different view on professional wrestling and professional wrestlers. So that’s not just a novel and a lot of different emotion, but really experience that resulted in the perspective change.

Paul Rand: One of the other studies that was really interesting is this idea of richness and the idea of the distances people will travel to find a mate and how that ties together.

Shigehiro Oishi: Right. So there is a classic study by sociologist James Bossard. He looked at the marriage certificates in Philadelphia area in 1930s. So he knew exactly where these people lived before they got married. And what he found is astonishing. More than half of the people who married that year in Philadelphia, they lived within 20 blocks. 34% of them lived within five blocks. What that mean is that we are not rationally sampling the best ideal made, right? We are just selecting from the familiar others that you’ve seen or in the neighborhood. Bossard said this beautifully that, “Cupid might have a wings, but their wings are not adapted for a long-distance flight.” But this is 1930s. So well back then there was a racial segregation, ethnic segregation and everything. So maybe that’s the reason why people are marrying to the neighbors essentially. So there’s a very nice replication studies in the Netherlands in maybe published in 2008 or so.

Shigehiro Oishi: So these are the people who dated after the dating websites and so forth became very popular, and they just replicated exactly the same thing. So looking at the cohabitation certificate, median distance before marriage is less than four miles. This is the modern Netherlands. The killer is that at birth, on average, they were separated only 15 miles away. So we still live in a very, very, very small world. And there is a tremendous familiarity bias that we like familiar others, and we are not exploring enough in terms of if you’re thinking about the maximizing the best potential mate.

Paul Rand: Just go further. Go outside your zip code.

Shigehiro Oishi: Exactly.

Paul Rand: So many folks, of course, spend a not insignificant part of their waking hours at work. And how people see work is a direct impact on how they feel about their happiness or their impact in the world. Talk about work and how it fits into psychological richness?

Shigehiro Oishi: So I found this great data set compiled by pay scale. So there’s like millions and millions of people filling out the job satisfactions and meaning in job. One finding over 500 occupations. One finding that was really interesting was that the people who are satisfied with their jobs tend to be people who have high paying job like surgeons and data scientists and things like that. But when you look at the people who find meaning in their jobs, these are the teachers, social workers, police officers. So for meaning in job, the pay, the income is not really strongly correlated with it. That’s interesting. But when I looked at the old occupations, what I found particularly interesting or puzzling was that, for instance, our director whom I admire, or writers and editors, their average job satisfaction is really low, but I thought they would find their job to be meaningful. But it turned out that meaning in job is also very low. And interestingly, I look at the funeral directors. So funeral directors are equally dissatisfied with their lives, with art directors and writers and so forth, but the funeral director is really finding their job to be super meaningful.

Paul Rand: So what does this tell us?

Shigehiro Oishi: If you had only two dimensions in good job, then your advice would be, “Hey, art director, maybe you should consider becoming a data scientist or funeral director.” But of course they wouldn’t because probably if we had the third dimension of how interesting and creative their job is, probably these people score quite high. And I think that there is a third dimension in the job too, that psychologically rich job that they have more freedoms, what they do is different day to day, year to year. So something is missing in the pay scale data too.

Paul Rand: One of the words that, goodness, you can’t open up any sort of business publication without reading a story about productivity. But in this world of psychological richness, productivity doesn’t exactly marry up as a great compliment, does it?

Shigehiro Oishi: That’s right. I mean, we are evaluated every day, every week, every month by productivity. So of course, from the company’s perspective, they want to maximize productivity because maximizing productivity leads to maximizing profit. Our day-to-day life, it’s just so geared toward how to get things done, be more efficient. But what happens there is that when we are so focused on productivity, I think we consider a lot of peripheral activities as waste of time. And that’s the mistake from the psychological richness perspective. If you have this goal, oh, I need to write up 10 papers this year and so forth, and then you’re not going to read the relevant books, but oftentimes we find something refreshing and something new from doing something completely unrelated to your central goal.

Paul Rand: That’s a great point. So this idea of give yourself the gift of some productive downtime is of great value?

Shigehiro Oishi: Exactly. And I really hope that, I mean, American companies and universities just focus too much on productivity.

Paul Rand: But as you talk about this, I think the understanding I’m getting to is that it’s not one better than the other of these. You’re just giving a third leg of a stool to try for people to find the true level of meaning, or value, or happiness or satisfaction in their life. This is another leg for them to be thinking about what resonates most with them.

Shigehiro Oishi: So some people don’t like unfamiliar environment and they want to be in the familiar, comfortable situations. And if that’s your values, and if you think that’s the life you want to live, and then that’s perfectly fine. And I think the happiness is the path to a good life if you are inclined to that. And some people really care about making difference in the world, then maybe a meaningful life is for you. But there are people who don’t care about happiness or making difference in the world that much, right? Yet some people lead a admirable life. Anthony Bourdain, for instance, I think he wasn’t so much into a meaning in life or happiness, but you had unbelievable life experiences.

Paul Rand: Exactly.

Shigehiro Oishi: And so he brought a lot of the culinary diversity to the American audience, and that world is very Eurocentric. So I feel like he made a huge difference in the world. But just like Tolstoy, he didn’t feel that way. He didn’t feel that way. So that’s why he ended his life.

Shigehiro Oishi: So he wasn’t probably happy. He wasn’t probably feeling that his life is particularly meaningful. But nevertheless, I think a lot of people admire the way he lived, adventurous, audacious, very, very empathic toward the people who lead tough life and different lives. So that’s one of the point that even if you don’t feel like happiness is within your reach or meaning is within your reach, if you are a type of person like Anthony Bourdain, then I think the psychological richness and psychological rich life might be the third way to reach a good life.

Paul Rand: So should you stay or should you go? The answer so many others is, it depends. All three of these ways of life come with pros and cons, risks and rewards. The point is that understanding there are more than just two paths to a good life expands our thinking about how to get there.

Shigehiro Oishi: I think when you have this question, should I go or should I stay? We have this bias and laziness of say, “Oh, okay. In the end, just let’s do the same thing again.” The sure gain is more attractive than potential gain with the risk of failure. So we should tell ourselves once in a while, we should say, “Yes, yes, yes, we should go.”