Lorraine Besser, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at Middlebury College, who specializes in the philosophy and psychology of the good life and teaches popular undergraduate courses on happiness, well-being, and ethics. An internationally recognized scholar, she was a founding investigator on the research team studying psychological richness.
What’s the big idea?
Living a good life has traditionally been seen as the outcome of obtaining happiness and meaning. Now, the greatest advancement in many lifetimes adds a third dimension: the interesting. Learning to master the interesting gives you the power to enhance your own life at any and every moment.
Below, Lorraine shares five key insights from her new book, The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It. Listen to the audio version—read by Lorraine herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The good life involves more than we’ve been told.
For centuries, philosophers and psychologists have thought about “the good life” in terms of a basic dichotomy: it’s a matter of happiness, or of some form of meaning, or maybe both. These are important dimensions of the good life. Happiness is great. It’s the stuff that feels good, in the puppies and cuddles sort of way. And the good life involves finding meaning, be it through finding purpose, being a good person, or achieving something important. Meaning is how we experience fulfillment, make sense of our activities, and connect our lives to the world around us. Happiness and meaning are essential dimensions of the good life.
But look at how much gets squeezed out when we’re stuck in this dichotomy. If it doesn’t hit our feel-good channels or connect to something bigger and better than our present experience, then it’s got no role in the good life. What about rollercoaster rides and watching sad movies with your best friend? What about those random, chance encounters that leave you moved and occupy your mind for days? What about the simple thirst for experience? These things don’t fit neatly into the dichotomy of happiness and meaning, but they are important.
Psychologists have recently affirmed two important things: That people do think that these kinds of experiences are important to the good life, and that the state of psychological richness these experiences generate is its own category—not some kind of happiness or meaning in disguise. Psychological richness is a distinct dimension of the good life.
This is the most important advancement we’ve had in our understanding of the good life in our lifetimes. We have discovered a new dimension of the good life that has been overlooked for a very long time. Appreciating this will shake up how you think about the good life and might, finally, set you on the path you’ve been looking for.
2. Psychological richness is important because interesting experiences are valuable.
The secret to living a good life is you’ve got to know what you’re after. The good life doesn’t happen on its own, and all kinds of things stand in the way of living your best possible life. I don’t mean external stuff—what your life looks like on the outside, although it will be hard to live a good life if your basic needs are unmet. I’m talking about how our mind works—its limits, tendencies, and the tricks it plays that set us off track. We adapt to pleasure, which makes sustained happiness difficult to obtain. We get caught up in the pursuit of meaning, evaluating everything and faltering to connect with the objective good around us. We’re also just not that good at predicting what will deliver meaning. If we go about the good life by shooting in the dark, going after the things we think we’re supposed to without really understanding what we’re after, we’re bound to fail.
“It’s that feeling of discovering something new, letting curiosity run wild, and stepping outside our comfort zones.”
If you’re serious about living a good life, it’s important to know what’s at stake in happiness, meaning, and psychological richness—why each is part of the good life. When we’re armed with this knowledge, we can leverage the wealth of research to live better lives.
Psychological richness is an important part of the good life because of how it feels when experiencing it. You have felt it before. It’s that feeling of discovering something new, letting curiosity run wild, and stepping outside our comfort zones. It’s why we read books and listen to podcasts; it’s what makes for the best conversations; it’s why we travel. Psychological richness is part of the good life because it delivers the interesting—the feeling attached to a robust form of cognitive engagement that stimulates new thoughts and emotions and leaves us in a different place than where we started.
By tapping into the nature of the interesting, we learn to appreciate its sparks and let them carry us away. We can learn the kinds of things that stimulate the interesting and even how to create the interesting in any moment, at any time. Coming to know the interesting is to develop the capacity to enhance your own life.
3. Interesting experiences are up to you.
Take a second to pause on the most interesting experience you’ve had lately. Was it a chance encounter? Was it watching a film? Was it daydreaming on the subway? Call it to mind. Think about how it made you feel; think about how it made you think; how it struck a chord. Did you see what you just did? Simply by recalling an interesting experience, you created, for yourself, an interesting experience. If you try to do that with happiness or meaning, you can’t.
So much of the good life and our experience of happiness and meaning depends on stuff we can’t control. Happiness depends upon our basic physiological responses; finding meaning or fulfillment depends so much on other people’s validation or on the world being a certain way. We can certainly work toward having more happiness and meaning, but there’s a limit. Neither is completely up to us. But the interesting is. We can call upon the interesting whenever we want, but especially in those times when fulfillment eludes us and happiness passes in the blink of an eye. By harnessing your ability to create the interesting, you’ll fill in the gaps inevitably left behind by happiness and meaning. We create the interesting by stimulating our minds and letting them run. It doesn’t matter where our minds go, just that they run.
All kinds of things stimulate interesting experiences, and it really doesn’t take much to set our minds on fire. Research shows that psychological richness is correlated with novelty and challenge. Simply by noticing the little changes around us or moving out of our comfort zones, even a little bit, will force new thoughts and emotions to ripple. Sometimes, especially if we know what we’re after, we can create interesting experiences by getting curious or creative. There’s an art to this whole thing that each of us can learn.
4. Lighten up the pursuit and open your mind.
An open mind makes a great springboard for psychological richness, but too often we close our minds to all that might prompt the interesting. We rush from place to place, barely looking up at all we pass by. We see what needs to get done and do it, begrudging anything that throws us off track. We all do this; it’s natural. That part of our minds that screams “executive function” likes to take over. Our ability to plan and narrow our focus on end goals is crucial to survival.
But there’s more to life than survival, especially in a modern life where there’s time to think about living good lives. That planning, rational part of us doesn’t have to be in charge. Most of us will live better lives if we loosen its grip on us. Many aspects of the good life aren’t best obtained through making plans.
“If we lighten up on the pursuit, we give our minds the space to find the interesting and have psychologically rich experiences.”
It helps to structure your life in ways that help you live a good life: nourishing connections, avoiding lengthy commutes, spending time in nature, and so on. But on the day to day, we don’t make many gains by actively pursuing the good life. Planning day-to-day might help you find meaning, but happiness doesn’t work this way and neither does the interesting. In fact, the more you’re in the planning or pursuit mode, the more you cut yourself off from the interesting.
Think briefly about what happens when you’re caught up in a plan. Maybe it’s as little as trying to get through the grocery store as quickly as possible, or maybe it’s as big as training for an Ironman. When you’re in pursuit mode, you set up a yardstick from which everything that happens gets evaluated. If it helps the pursuit, good; if it hurts, bad. And if it doesn’t impact your pursuit, well, then it’s not worth your time. Pursuit mode closes our minds off to the interesting.
If we lighten up on the pursuit, we give our minds the space to find the interesting and have psychologically rich experiences. Do this often, and you’ll find yourself approaching the world more fully and expansively, ready to take in all its nuances and engage robustly with all it throws at us. You’ll find that life goes better.
5. You can call on the interesting in the darkest of times.
Here’s a little logic for you: Psychological richness is distinct from happiness and meaning. So, you can have psychological richness and not be happy. And you can have psychological richness and not find meaning in life. The upshot? Even when life sucks, you can still get something out of it. You can find the interesting even in the darkest of times.
When hard times crop up, it can feel like all our shots for a good life have been sunk. These feelings are often made worse when we’re encouraged to put a happy spin on the hard times or try to find meaning in them. Surely, you’ve felt the burn of toxic positivity searing into your sadness or found yourself staring blankly as someone tells you to find meaning in your tragedy.
“The art of the interesting involves taking a non-evaluative perspective on things and just being curious about them.”
The framework of the interesting won’t transform hard stuff into good stuff, but it will help get you through. The art of the interesting involves taking a non-evaluative perspective on things and just being curious about them. If you master it, you’ll be able to do this even in the face of the worst events possible. It’ll give you some distance from the pain and give you a way to engage with the hard stuff that won’t lead you straight to the rabbit hole of sadness and sorrow. It will shift your perspective on the hard stuff, even if ever so slightly.
When times are so hard that you just want to escape, the art of interesting can help make that happen too, in a heartbeat. One of my favorite stories is of Aaron Elster, who, as a young Jewish boy growing up during WWII, spent his childhood alone, hidden in an attic, while the Nazis roamed the streets of his hometown in Poland. Aaron survived to share his stories. When asked what got him through, he answered: “I had the ability to daydream. I used to write novels all day in my head. I was the hero all the time.” This kid’s got it. This is precisely what the art of the interesting can do, for all of us, wherever we are. By mastering the art, you’ll live a better life.
To listen to the audio version read by author Lorraine Besser, download the Next Big Idea App today:
