Questions Lead to the Good Life

Formally Introducing Psychological Richness | Castles in the Sky #47

A friendly reminder from our morning coffee station

For most of my life, I understood that the path to a good life was either to seek happiness or to find meaning. This always seemed incomplete to me and last year I figured out why. 

I have always been maniacally curious. One of my first memories of school is losing my mind when my third grade teacher asked if we had “any questions.” (Nobody had ever asked me that before and–in a story famous in my family–I asked if Elvis had a twin.) For my 35th birthday, my aunt gave me a birthday card about how much I loved asking questions. Building on this foundation of curiosity, you could argue that my current life–training entrepreneurs, writing on the internet, and selling used books–is maximized to be surrounded by interesting questions. 

And I’m not alone. I’m sure you know someone who is a little unpredictable, always a bit unsettled, but who laughs at life, continually chagrined or bemused at new riddles they are uncovering. It is almost as if, instead of seeking happiness or finding meaning, these people–like myself–are rather cultivating life’s questions. These people are not optimizing their life for happiness or meaning, but psychological richness. 

People who seek psychological richness aim to fill their life with novel, complex, perspective-changing experiences. This is not a new or uncommon phenomenon. Nietzche considered the pursuit of happiness and meaning “small” and superficial, and argued for a more profound, challenging manner of living akin to seeking psychological richness. James Joyce’s self-insert character Stephen Dedalus famously rejected his religious vocation to instead live the life of personal freedom and personal expression that came with being an artist. 

I’m surrounded by writers, entrepreneurs, and book people, and I’ve yet to explain this term to a group of people and not had one of them say, “you’ve given me better words to describe myself than I’ve ever had.” I felt similarly the first time I read about it, which begs the question: why isn’t this a more popular way of understanding the world? 

I think that there are two reasons that more people don’t explain their life’s goals in terms of psychological richness. The first is that it is a relatively new phenomenon. I first learned the term when I discovered the 2021 psychology paper that coined the term. The second reason, which is downstream of the first, is that “psychological richness” isn’t a great brand. This branding issue can cause some hesitancy in its wider acceptance. Whereas happiness and meaning are one-word nouns with associated adjectives, psychological richness doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. People crave belonging and legibility, and even with the term psychological richness, it takes a lot of explaining for someone to understand what’s important to you.

In the aforementioned paper, they noted that psychological richness, happiness, and meaning are correlated but distinct. The researchers asked people to rank what was most important to them: happiness, meaning, or psychological richness. Amazingly, across all the countries they surveyed, 7-17% of people said that psychological richness was most important to them.

 I think that this will only grow with time because the world is only getting more uncertain and complex. Although wanting to have a good life is universal, people who seek a psychologically rich life are more likely to find one, since they thrive in uncertain and complex environments. This adaptability in the face of change and complexity makes them especially equipped for the modern world.

For me, as I continue to embrace psychological richness, not only is that search is a worthy reward in itself, but the search for happiness and meaning actually gets easier. I think the same will happen for others, which is why I choose to write and talk about it as much as I do. While I don’t have a great, snappy way to encourage people to live more psychologically rich lives yet, I have found success returning to my old pastime: asking questions. Instead of seeking the comfort of happiness or the certainty of meaning, I try to do what poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to his young friend, and live the questions: 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” 

This embrace of uncertainty, of living the questions, can be a beacon for those of us seeking not just happiness or meaning, but a life rich in perspective and experience.

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