Deep Dive into LIFE IN THREE DIMENSIONS by Shigehiro Oishi [Teaser]
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Really, our new catechism, Rebecca, Life in Three Dimensions by one professor, Shigeru Oishi, PhD. 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman was our maybe like conversion text. And when we start our cult, this will be one of our foundational reads. So I was going to ask you, and maybe this is recency bias, but I don't really feel like I've ever identified with a book as much as one of these pops. It's not pop psychology because it's real research. It was written for a general audience. Yes.

But this is real psychology that is deeply researched. Yes. And it's not a problem solving thing. It's not like how to win friends and influence people or negotiate. It also isn't, it doesn't solve a problem because I'm not like looking, but just in terms of like, yes, I get this. This makes so much sense to me. This gives me language and categories and structure for thinking about things I've felt wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's it really this really articulated something that I have felt something that I have done in my life without realizing, like necessarily that this is the thing that I was doing. I was telling you last week, like, I love to have science validate my life choices. And it was cool to feel like I think you use the word seen it was cool to feel seen by a writer.

I think this sits right alongside 4000 Weeks for me. Both are books that I think would have been really paradigm shifting if I had read them earlier in life or at a different stage of life experience. And I'm so, so glad like to have the language for this. I can feel already that this will be the book I recommend more than any other book this year. Like I've already been recommending it widely and sharing it with friends and

I guess for folks who are just joining us on the life in three dimensions journey, we should tell them what it's about. So Oishi is a psychologist who researches originally happiness, but now is interested more in the broad question of what makes a good life. And there's a deep body of research about what happiness looks like, what it's comprised of.

There's a pretty deep body of research about meaningfulness. And for a long time, psychology has talked about those as like the two primary components of a good life. And Oishi is proposing there's a third component and it's psychological richness, which is a life that's filled with diverse and unusual and interesting experiences. And most critically, something that changes your perspective.

Yeah. Experiences that change your perspective and that accumulation of those over time leads to a sense that your life has been rich. Man, I loved it. Yeah. And it's not like I think it's also not extremely goal oriented. I mean, a little bit towards the end. It's not like you should live this way because this is a good way to do it. It's saying like.

In terms of making your life valuable to you, yourself. Yes. A good life. This is why it's the third dimension, right? Because happiness and meaning are fairly well trod. And I'm sure there's other things that can be done. But like this other piece, the umami of life. Yes. I think that's a great way. For lack of a better term. It needs like slightly stickier marketing. And the umami of life isn't interesting. Right.

That's an interesting pass. Well, remember, when we were kids, umami didn't exist. We couldn't taste that shit. It just didn't happen. We didn't know what umami was. It is like the thing that gives it more dimension. I really appreciated that there isn't value judgment about these three components that Oishi, I think, is very intentional about saying, we all want all of these. Everyone wants to be happy. Everybody wants their life to be meaningful. And people want to feel a sense of interestingness. Everybody wants to have an interesting story.

and to feel that your life has been interesting. And he's kind of like, you get to pick, like you're making the stew and you get to decide how much happiness you want to go after, how important meaning is to you and how much you're going to build around psychological richness because they're often in conflict with each other, which I think is one of the most interesting things that he, that one of the things that makes up happiness or some of the components of happiness are like,

Less friction, you know, conventional, consistent, predictable, a lack of friction in your life, harmonious and conflict-free. Safe. Safe. Yeah. That you're not going to bump up against a whole lot. And it's not the intensity of those happy experiences. It's the frequency of them that makes a life happier or less happy. And components of psychological richness...

require us to be uncomfortable. Having your perspective changed is almost always uncomfortable. Going on a trip or having a difficult conversation with your partner or moving, taking a new job, like...

Like, those are big ones. You don't have to do these big things to have psychological richness, but those are made of friction. They're made of uncertainty and they can produce less happiness. But I think it's an interesting way to say, like, in any experience that we have or in most experiences that we have, like, it might not be a happy experience, but can you add it to the meaning pile or the psychological richness pile and it still be an important component of your life, even if it doesn't produce happiness?

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