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The Little-Known Secrets To A Good Life, with Shigehiro Oishi

2025/2/6
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Shige Oishi: 我认为在人生的重要决策中,我们常常面临选择,例如“我应该留下还是离开?”、“我应该接受这份工作邀请吗?”、“我应该和现在的伴侣在一起还是尝试寻找其他人?”。心理学家们长期以来认为,幸福和意义是美好生活的两大支柱。幸福,或者说享乐主义的幸福感,指的是个人的快乐和生活满意度。而意义,或者说追求卓越的幸福感,指的是你为世界做出贡献,让你的生活对他人有重要意义。然而,我认为可能还存在第三种方式,那就是心理丰富的生活。这种生活方式强调体验多样性、新奇感和视角转变,即使这些体验可能伴随负面情绪。我认为,心理丰富的生活可以为那些在传统幸福和意义中找不到满足感的人们提供一种新的生活视角和价值。 Shige Oishi: 我也认为,我们不应该将幸福视为衡量生活好坏的唯一标准。当我们将幸福置于至高无上的地位时,不快乐就会被视为个人失败,这会导致很多困惑。同时,我认为,即使是追求有意义的生活也可能存在问题。例如,有些人可能会通过加入恐怖组织来寻找意义,但这显然是一种错误的意义。即使是像托尔斯泰这样功成名就的人,也可能因为感到生活没有意义而想要自杀。所以,我认为,幸福和意义都是非常主观的,我们应该根据自己的价值观和偏好来选择适合自己的生活方式。重要的是要认识到,除了幸福和意义之外,心理丰富也是一种有价值的生活方式。

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This podcast contains brief conversations about suicide. If you or someone you know is currently struggling, you can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing 988 or 1-800-273-8255. Picture this.

You're born, raised, and live your entire life in one place. My dad is 91 years old now, and he's a farmer. You marry young, raise a family, and you never leave the town where you grew up. Just like his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather. You know everyone and everything.

Everyone knows you. - My entire Oishi family was essentially a farmer. - That's Shige Oishi, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and one of the world's foremost experts on happiness and meaning. - I mean, he talked to only like, what, 10 people?

in any week maybe. So he lived very small, cozy, very traditional life. - 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. I left, you know, my hometown at age 18, went to college in Tokyo.

You know, after I came here, first I was in New York City and then did my PhD at Urbana-Champaign. My first job was at the University of Minnesota, so I moved to Minneapolis. And then I got a job from the University of Virginia. And essentially just kept moving and moving and moving. So which one sounds like a better life? I mean, a lot of important life, you know, decisions revolves around life.

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? You know, it's going to be impossible for us not to put a sound clip from The Clash into this taping. Exactly. It's inevitable. Right. What's the secret to a good life?

Some say it's about happiness. Hedonic psychologist or hedonic well-being is considered as personal happiness and life satisfaction. Others argue it's about meaning. So eudaimonic 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. But what if neither is enough? What if there was a third way that nobody has considered yet? You know, 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 if you think about

psychological rich life is a viable third dimension, then maybe they can justify and see that their life is actually worthwhile. 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. What's the idea of life look like? I think it requires self-reflection. Just honestly to yourself, what you want is something

some comfortable, pleasant, you know, life, 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. 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. 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, you know, families and neighbors and so forth. And meaningful life, of course, you should just decide what cause you care most and try to, you know, volunteer and do things repeatedly for an extended period of time.

But if that's not something you want, then maybe psychologically rich life is the life you want. 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. Should I stay or should I go?

The University of Chicago Leadership and Society Initiative guides accomplished executive leaders in transitioning from their longstanding careers into purposeful encore 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.

Would his father have been better off going instead of staying? To find an answer, Oishe first needed to understand the fundamental forces that drive human fulfillment. And for decades, psychologists believe that the answer came down to two things, happiness and meaning. I was essentially a graduate student working with Dr. Happiness at Dena. And at the time, you know, 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 happiness is everything or is it?

If Hitler was happy, you know, then it's okay. He led a good life. And then obviously Hitler didn't lead a good life. So, you know, Carol Riff and people like that propose that maybe personal happiness is not really a great indicator of, you know, whether this person is leading a good life or not.

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 why correlating happiness and good life aren't on the same page.

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, you know, 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, unhappiness become personal failure. And that's where the things get really, really weird and really confusing.

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? 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 eudaimonic approach to well-being, that you should be good, behaving good, do a virtuous thing and make a difference and contribution to the society. 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? 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 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 item 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 those items, right, anti-conformist, say, yeah,

they don't find their life to be particularly meaningful. 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 troubled me about the meaning in life is findings like that, but also that, you know, there are a lot of cases where people

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 attractive because these organizations give them very clear guidance as to what the life should be. And the meaning to that life. Exactly. Like what you are doing,

will give rise to the huge thing. It's related to the huge movement, right? So then they sacrifice their life. And

thinking that their life is making difference in the world, but some case may be misplaced meaning. So that's the sort of extreme case of the concern that I have. Well, and I think many folks are, I'm sure, familiar with the stories you talk about Tolstoy, and after he's done with War and Peace and Antiquity, he thinks about suicide, and because he thinks his life has no meaning.

Yeah, that's kind of ridiculous, isn't it? Yes, but you can't control, you know, externally, what more meaning would you want in life? But he is lost by this. Exactly. So even when you have objective and incredible accomplishment, right? He already had written War and Peace, right? And then he was famous. He owned huge properties, loved his wife and children and so forth. Yet he had this sense of,

that his life is not like adding up to anything, like, you know, meaningful. I don't, frankly, I have a hard time imagining that, but that was a subjective feeling, right? True feeling he felt. And indeed, a lot of accomplished people, you know, 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 sort of evidences for your meaning, they don't see it. And you really talk about Americans in particular that link the concept of personal achievement and happiness together. And the idea that, and 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. 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 Edina, my advisor, have this wonderful chapter entitled happiness is the frequency, not the intensity of positive emotions. Okay. That's a big point, isn't it?

Yeah, it is really big. So intense positive events or emotion often happens when you get promotion or when you get engaged or, you know, 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, right? And other people didn't have. Initially, like, you know, 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

But surprising thing is three months later, six months later, you just go back and these impact of the recent big positive event just totally disappears. Got it. 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. So you're saying we should get married a lot of times. Is that what you're saying? Well, uh, no, but if you can, if you can have a small, maybe ceremony or like, you know, the celebration every month, every, uh,

half a year or something that that's better, better than the marrying like five times. I got it. Okay, good, good, good, good. So we are totally misguided that big promotion, going in going to the great, you know, 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 a romantic dinner with your spouse. Those are the things, the little joy, and that comes frequently.

And those are the things that contribute to your happiness. 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. Definitely. So this is a 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. Right.

And then they ask, oh, if you didn't get a tenure, how would you feel? And everybody said, oh my gosh, I'll be depressed, miserable. I failed. I failed. And I think that's very intuitive, consistent with our intuitions, right? 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 were denied tenure, they were a lot happier than the current assistant professor envisioned. Wow.

The bad news is that those people who did get tenure, they were not that much happier than when they were assistant professor. Well, you talk about this as a happiness trap. Yeah. This is the affective forecasting error 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, you know, the virus get into your body, your immune system attack it. It's like when something bad happened.

psychological immune system just attack and remove it. So those associate professors who are denied tenure essentially just

their psychological immune system worked and you know got used to it and they often say oh actually at the new university new college you know the people are much nicer people respect me and etc so so there were a lot of positives that they hadn't you know envisioned but also like we have natural healing power essentially within ourselves which we totally underestimate the

The more Oishe dug into happiness and meaning as sources of a good life, the more he realized while there are many pros, there are also some cons. 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, you know, 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 psychologists define it?

So that's where I sort of started to think about this new concept of psychologically rich life. What if there was a third way to a good life? That's what Oishe discovered when he stumbled upon psychological richness. More on that after the break. 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 are 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 wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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, you know, 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 sort of you change the way you view yourself or the world? You used words such as newness or novelty are important terms of psychologically rich. What do those words mean in relation to psychologically rich?

Yeah. For instance, you know, we did 14 day, two weeks daily diary studies and we just simply ask students, like, just keep record of how the day went. How happy were you today? You know, how meaningful your day was, et cetera, et cetera. 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. The atypical day when they did go hiking, went 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? Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be

quote-unquote positive experience either, does it? No, no, no, no, no. So this is an 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, right? Like you're not expecting the negative event to happen all the time. So oftentimes when we ask in another study, like 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 happen.

happens and negative emotion happens. Yeah, you spend a lot of time about changing perspective. And can you tell folks how you change perspective? I think the greatest example came from the focus group when I asked undergraduate students, you know, okay, you know, 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, right?

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 then it turned out that WWE was doing huge anti-bullying campaigns and brought these kids. So for these kids, pro 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. 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. Right, right. So there's 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 means is that

We are not rationally sampling the best ideal mate, right? We're just like selecting from the familiar others that you've seen in the neighborhood. So Bossard said this beautifully.

that Cupid might have wings, but their wings are not adapted for long distance flight. But this is 1930s. So like, well, back then there was a racial segregation, ethnic segregations 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, maybe published in 2008 or so. 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. And 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, you know, and we are not exploring enough in terms of if you're thinking about the maximizing the best potential mate. Is go further, go outside your zip code. Exactly.

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.

Yeah. So I found this great data set compiled by, you know, 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, you know, people who have high paying job, you know, like surgeons and doctors.

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, right, or writers and editors, their average job satisfaction is really low, okay? 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 looked at the funeral directors,

So funeral directors are equally dissatisfied with their lives, with the art directors and writers and so forth. But the funeral director is really finding their job to be super meaningful. So what does this tell us? 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." Right?

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. 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? 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 productivity.

You know, profit. Our day-to-day life is 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 irrelevant books.

But oftentimes you, we find something refreshing and something new from doing something completely unrelated to your central goal. That's a great point. So this idea of give yourself the gift of some productive downtime is of great value. Exactly. And I really hope that, I mean, American companies and universities just focus too much on productivity.

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 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. So some people don't like unfamiliar environments.

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, then that's perfectly fine. And I think the happiness is the path to a good life if you're 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 an admirable life.

Anthony Bourdain, for instance, I think he wasn't so much into a meaning in life or happiness, but he had unbelievable life experiences. Exactly. And so he brought a lot of the culinary diversity to life.

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.

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, you know, adventurous, audacious, very, very, you know, empathic toward the people who lead tough life and different lives.

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're a type of person like Anthony Bourdain, then I think the psychological richness and psychologically rich life might be the third way to reach a good life. So should you stay or should you go? The answer, like so many others, is it depends. All three of these ways of life come with pros and cons, risks and rewards. The

The point is that understanding there are more than just two paths to a good life expands our thinking about how to get there. I think when you have this question, should I go or should I stay?

We have this bias and laziness of saying, "Oh, okay, in the end, let's just do the same thing again." You know, the sure gain is more attractive than potential gain, right? With the risk of failure. So we should tell ourselves, once in a while, we should say, "Yes, yes, yes, we should go!"