What makes a life psychologically rich, and which experiences add it

A psychologically rich life, in the definition Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate use, is “a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences.” Their 2022 paper in Psychological Review argues this is a third kind of good life, separate from the happy life and the meaningful life. The evidence behind it is strongest on one point: richness tracks novelty, difficulty and shifts in perspective, and it does not track pleasure. Whether experiences beat purchases for happiness is a separate, better-tested question.

That distinction matters if what you want is a more exciting life. The research suggests that comfort and enjoyment can pile up without producing the feeling of having lived richly, and that some of the things that produce that feeling cost you happiness along the way.

What did Oishi and Westgate actually claim?

Oishi and Westgate (2022, Psychological Review, 129(4), 790-811, doi:10.1037/rev0000317) pull together several years of work from the Oishi lab. I read the author-hosted manuscript of the paper, along with the 2019 and 2020 empirical papers it builds on, rather than relying on press coverage. The core proposal: psychology has treated the good life as hedonic (satisfaction, positive feeling) or eudaimonic (meaning, purpose), and has no place for people whose lives are interesting without being especially pleasant or purposeful.

The founding example, in Oishi et al. (2019, Journal of Research in Personality), is literary: Renée in The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Aaliya in An Unnecessary Woman. Neither is happy by the usual measures, and neither feels her life adds up to something larger. Both live on novels, poetry and moments of aesthetic attention. The authors take this as a sketch of a life that existing scales miss. It is an illustration, not data.

How the three kinds of good life differ

	Happy life	Meaningful life	Psychologically rich life
What it consists of	Stability, comfort, pleasantness	Purpose, coherence, significance	Variety of interesting, perspective-changing experiences
Personality predictors	Extraversion, low neuroticism; conscientiousness and social class also tied to satisfaction	Conscientiousness in some samples; extraversion; agreeableness	Openness to experience and extraversion, consistently across four samples
Situational predictors	Money, safety, long-term relationships	Repeated, ritual activities; seeing one’s life as part of something larger	Novelty, difficulty, perspective change
Link with system justification and politics	Positive; tilts conservative	Positive; tilts conservative	Negative; tilts liberal
Emotions	Positive felt more intensely, negative less	Same pattern as happiness	Both positive and negative felt more intensely
Share choosing it as the one ideal life	49.7% to 69.9% by country	14.2% to 38.5%	6.7% to 16.8%

Sources: the descriptions of happy and meaningful lives and the personality patterns come from the introduction and four studies in Oishi et al. (2019), the choice percentages from Oishi, Choi, Koo et al. (2020, Affective Science), and the political and emotion findings from the 2022 review’s account of Oishi et al. (2021). Personality entries for happiness and meaning are what that paper reports across its samples, which vary: conscientiousness predicted meaning in India but not in the two US samples.

Who reports a rich life?

The 2019 paper built a 17-item Psychologically Rich Life Questionnaire. Items include “I have had a lot of novel experiences,” “My life has been full of unique, unusual experiences” and “I have a lot of personal stories to tell others.” The authors began with 82 candidate items and kept the 17 that loaded at .40 or above in two rounds of testing.

Four studies followed. Study 1 used 203 US undergraduates; the scale’s two-week test-retest correlation was r = .80, and informants who knew the participants (160 participants had at least one) agreed with self-reports at r = .35. Study 3 was a nationally representative probability sample of Americans, with 2,021 completing the survey. Study 4 was 553 people in India.

Across all four, richness correlated with life satisfaction, positive affect and meaning, but only moderately: in Study 1 the correlations ran from .43 to .56. The sharper contrast is in what predicted each. Openness to experience predicted richness in every sample. Openness did not predict life satisfaction in Study 1, Study 3 or the Indian sample. Life satisfaction was predicted by extraversion, low neuroticism and social class.

Age told you nothing: the correlation between richness and age was near zero in the national sample (r = .02). Social class had a modest positive link in the national sample (r = .22), so rich lives are not purely a matter of means, but the effect is small.

One further detail from Study 2, a larger non-student sample: people who moved more often growing up reported somewhat richer lives (r = .125). That did not replicate in the national sample (r = .004) or the Indian sample, so I would not build anything on it.

What does the obituary data show?

Student surveys have an obvious limit: they ask 19-year-olds about lives that are barely started. So Oishi and Choi coded obituaries, reported in the 2022 paper as Oishi and Choi (2020). Three research assistants, blind to the hypotheses, rated every New York Times obituary from June 2016 on twelve adjectives, four each for the three kinds of life. The coders agreed reasonably well (intraclass correlations of .72 for richness, .68 for happiness and .64 for meaning).

In that set, the richer an obituary read, the less happy the life was rated (r = -.26) and the more meaningful (r = .37). The authors then repeated it on 116 ordinary lives from a Charlottesville, Virginia paper and 111 from a Singapore paper. Pooled in an internal meta-analysis, richness correlated -.17 with happiness and .28 with meaning; happiness and meaning correlated .21 with each other.

Obituaries that described more dramatic events, such as bereavement or divorce, were rated richer and less happy, and the events were unrelated to meaning. The paper’s own examples include a social worker with post-polio syndrome who wrote and starred in a one-person play, and a novelist who fled to Singapore after landing on an assassination list. Obituaries are written by others, and a coder deciding that a life sounds “dramatic” is making a judgement call.

Do people want a rich life?

Mostly not, when forced to pick. In the 9-nation study (Oishi et al., 2020, Affective Science), 3,728 people were recruited across 13 samples and asked to choose one ideal life. Most chose happy. Rich was the least chosen in every country, from 6.7% in Singapore to 16.8% in Germany.

Rich climbs when asked a different way. Oishi’s team asked 1,611 Americans for their biggest regret, then whether undoing it would have made life happier, more meaningful or psychologically richer. The split was 35.7%, 36.7% and 27.6%. Among 680 Koreans it was 27.6% happier, 37.4% more meaningful and 35% richer. The 2022 paper reads the third who regretted an event that made life less rich as a sign that richness is implicitly valued as part of a good life. A plainer alternative, my own and untested, is that regret questions pull toward “I missed out” answers, which would flatter any novelty-related option. I covered the wider regret literature in a separate post on regret and inaction.

The 2020 paper reports one more oddity: among Americans, those who chose a rich life reported less meaning in their current lives than those who chose happy or meaningful ones. It also found that the ideal people chose was largely unrelated to how satisfied they currently were, which counts against a simple “people want what they lack” story.

What raises richness?

This is the section most readers want, and the evidence is thinner than the framing suggests. The 2022 paper reports several lines of work, most credited to Oishi and colleagues’ papers that were still in press when the manuscript circulated. I could confirm them only through the 2022 manuscript’s description, not through the originals.

• Living somewhere unfamiliar. Students studying abroad and students who stayed on campus started the semester with similar richness, satisfaction and meaning. By the end, the study-abroad students were richer, with no change in happiness or meaning, and the effect held after controlling for the Big Five. Friends and family rated them richer too. Part of the increase was explained by weekly engagement in artistic activities. Students were not randomly assigned.
• Short excursions. In a 14-day diary study, people reported greater richness on days they took short excursions.
• Difficulty, not winning. In an escape-room study, how hard people found the room predicted richness (and lower happiness). Succeeding predicted happiness and meaning, and had no link to richness. People with more previous escape-room experience reported less richness after exiting, which fits novelty wearing off.
• A change in how you see something. In experiments, viewing figure-ground illusions (N = 299 in the first study, with d = 1.38 for richness and d = .13 for positive mood) raised richness without raising mood. Telling participants a pianist was born blind raised their rating of his performance as rich (N = 238, d = .26, p = .05) but not their enjoyment of it.
• Richness predicts doing more of the same. In a two-week follow-up, richness measured at the start predicted how often people later did novel rather than routine activities.

From the evidence to an actual week

None of the studies tested a self-help program for raising richness. What follows is my extrapolation from the mechanisms above, and the third item is the least supported.

1. Schedule a short trip out of your routine at least once a week. The diary result is about same-day richness, not lasting change, but it is the cheapest piece of evidence on offer. A different neighbourhood, a town you have not been to, a museum on the wrong side of the city.
2. Add one art or music activity weekly. The study-abroad finding named it as a partial explanation. Libraries make this close to free, as the 2019 paper notes.
3. Pick the harder version. If the escape-room result carries over, the experiences that feel difficult are the ones that register as rich, and winning or comfort is a separate payoff. Learn the piece slightly above your level. Take the longer route on a hike.
4. Look for the fact that changes the picture. The pianist and illusion experiments suggest richness can come from a reframe, which is cheap. Reading about the people behind something you are about to experience is one way.
5. Avoid repeating the same novelty. Novelty used up is not novelty. The escape-room result suggests rotating categories rather than repeating one. A post on micro-adventures covers low-cost formats for this.

Openness is the strongest predictor of a rich life, which means people low in it have the least internal pull toward any of the above, and a self-set plan is easy to skip. A fixed time, a specific friend, or a reason someone else will notice if you bail makes it likelier to happen. Kardas, Kumar and Epley’s work on deeper conversations is one example of a cheap perspective-shifting activity that works better with another person present.

What the research does not show

• Causation is mostly unsettled. The 2022 paper says its own correlational studies cannot establish direction and notes the reliance on self-reports. The study-abroad design and the escape-room studies are observational.
• Distinctness is contested. The correlations with life satisfaction and meaning in the questionnaire paper are in the .4 to .6 range, and the authors say the three are not wholly independent. A Psychology Today blog post argued that richness might be a facet of meaning; that is a blog critique, not a peer-reviewed rebuttal, though the obituary meta-analysis (richness with meaning at .28 against happiness at -.17) shows the overlap is real in some data.
• Positively framed scale. The strongest items concern interesting and intense moments, and the reverse-worded boredom items fit poorly outside the student sample.
• Narrow settings. The 2020 paper says its regret studies cover only the US and Korea, were not preregistered, and did not examine consequences of a rich life.
• No evidence it makes life better. The 2022 paper argues richness serves exploration and learning, in an exploration-versus-exploitation framing. That is a theory. Happiness and meaning, by contrast, have links to health, longevity and strong relationships.

The most defensible reading is modest. People differ in whether they want comfort, purpose or intensity, and the experiences that feel rich are the ones involving unfamiliarity, difficulty and a shifted viewpoint. Treat it as a menu of things to try, not a diagnosis of what your life lacks.

Anticipation is a cheaper route to the same end: vacationers in a Dutch panel study were happier before leaving, though that study measured holidays only.