Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life

by Shigehiro Oishi

It isn’t big wins that bring happiness, but rather the small joys in life, like having tea with your best friend.

meaning in life comes from dedication to a particular cause you care about dearly and making a difference in that chosen realm.

unexpected change in perspective made this experience much richer than a typical outing.

Overall, the two focus group sessions revealed that psychologically rich experiences involve not only novelty but also intensity, complexity, and a change in perspective.

associated with all three aspects of well-being. It turned out that doing something new, eating something new, or meeting someone new enhanced not only psychological richness but also happiness and meaning.

getting things done made the day happier and more meaningful, whereas doing something unusual made the day psychologically richer.

doing something that you don’t usually do is more interesting and psychologically rich than doing things you do every day.

world (perspective change, in other words). We found that compared to the participants who wrote about two positive events, those who wrote about both the best and the worst events reported a greater degree of perspective change. Writing about the worst event, in short, increased the likelihood of perspective change. Most important, the more perspective changes they reported, the psychologically richer they reported their lives to be.

Open people are imaginative, curious, and interested in intellectual and artistic pursuits.

Instead, you are thinking about the benefits: getting to know someone new, learning something new, sharing interesting stories. There is a positive spiral here, too. The more confident you are, the more likely you are to enter a new conversation.

The two strongest personality predictors of a happy life are emotional stability and extraversion.

So long as one’s neuroticism is not overwhelming, a meaningful life is possible.

That means that you can set a goal to be open to new experiences and conscientiously work on that goal and lead a psychologically rich life.

At the core of a psychologically rich personality are openness to experience and extraversion.

One might ask, though: How can those of us who don’t have those basic personality traits become more open and extraverted? One answer is to embrace playfulness.

playfulness, quirkiness, and lightheartedness may be central to both openness and psychological richness.

But what exactly is being playful? The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described it best: when you are playful, you are “on vacation from social and economic reality.” All of us adults have a lot of social and economic responsibilities. That is the reality. But Erikson encourages us to go somewhere between fantasy and actuality once in a while.

Single-minded dedication is surely admirable, even virtuous. But, too much single-mindedness could rob you of the simple joy of just being able to jump, run, or swim.

The researchers found that elite athletes who played multiple sports until later in life were less likely to burn out and more likely to succeed in national and international competitions in adulthood than elite athletes who started specializing early in their career.

That is, in adult elite competition, the athletes who started the sport later in their lives were more successful than those who started early.

that if you are an elite athlete, it is better to increase playful engagement in other sports and reduce coach-led practice time for your main sport.

playfulness might be an underrated contributor to long-term success.

“an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight.”

playful people do not take themselves too seriously, and they seem to know when to take it easy and when to be serious.

can all learn to foster psychological richness through playfulness and spontaneity.

Marx argued that the division of labor “mortifies the body and ruins the mind.”

you lose interest in other seemingly irrelevant matters. When you are assigned to be a generalist, you are more curious about other things.

Well, when you specialize in something, you are selectively attending to what is relevant to your specialty and trying to ignore irrelevant information.

those who spent money on time-saving services were less stressed about time, and the less stressed about time someone is, the more satisfied they are with their lives overall.

To foster psychological richness in our lives, we must lean into the unfamiliar, the risky, and the challenging.

In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant distinguished beautiful arts from pleasant arts.

“those that are directed merely to enjoyment.

Here, Kant defines an aesthetic experience as something greater than the enjoyment of mere sensation but rather the enjoyment of what he calls “reflective judgment,” which involves some gap between sensation and reality and a new mental representation and understanding of an object.

“Technology is no savior. We can eat, sleep, look at screens, make money—all aspects of our physical existence—but that doesn’t mean anything. Art is the exact opposite.

with a kind of childlike awe and reverence…artworks widen your emotional repertoire. When you read a poem or see a piece of sculpture, you haven’t learned a new fact, but you’ve had a new experience.”

simpler the paintings were, the more pleasant they were.

the more disturbing and unpleasant they were, the more interesting the paintings were.

For art to be appreciated, it must be at least minimally comprehensible.

reading literature needs to be tested in the future. Overall, reading literature is associated with more cognitive complexity and better perspective-taking skills

There is drama and beauty in high-level sports.

An underdog victory like this expands your view of what is possible.

So, yes, reading a poem or novel, watching a film, looking at a piece of artwork, or watching an awe-inspiring athletic performance increases psychological richness.

experiences gained through personal adventures. Nonetheless, we can still have very real, immediate experiences through arts and sports under the right circumstances.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists,

And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure.

By definition, a psychologically rich life leans toward “exploration” strategies rather than “exploitation” strategies.

For most people, the more exploration they do, the better choices they make.

the more exploration, the more marital stability.

He found that all twelve nonsense words were rated higher on goodness when presented more frequently than when presented less frequently.

a familiar person or store seems to be particularly attractive when you are away from familiar places and surrounded by strangers.