December 22, 2022: Christmas approaches. Houston (where I live) braces for another unseasonable freeze. The newsletter changes format again. Even Bob Dylan doesn’t like how the times are a-changin. But we press on, after all:
“If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.”
This week, I found a term in an academic journal article that unites many of my interests. The key idea in the article is that people have historically thought of a “good life,” as either happy or meaningful, but there is a third aspect of good lives, correlated with but distinct from happiness and meaning: Psychological Richness.
I plan to do a deep dive on the article in the coming weeks. I’ll explore what it means to have a psychologically rich life in general terms, and why that term appeals so much to me specifically. As a preview, here is one of my favorite parts of the article: a table outlining the key parts of a happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich life.
I’m having a lot of difficulty because Psychological Richness is the main animating force—the defining theme—of my life. And yet, I cannot think of a novel way to present an essay about it. I’ve got my summaries, my notes, my thoughts, and yet—I can’t find a way to write it down that’s compelling.
So I’ll turn to the audience, what do you want to know about Psychological Richness? Here are some angles I have considered and what format they might take in practice:
What is psychological richness, exactly? (Write a general explainer. )
Why is psychological richness relevant to me? (Write some cultural commentary on where psychological richness fits into modern life.)
How is it different from happiness and meaning? (Dive deep into what psychological richness means in our lives.)
How do I cultivate psychological richness? (Write a how-to guide.)
What does it look like in action? (Write a story where the theme is psychological richness.)
Feel free to comment or email if you want to read one of these or any other essays on psychological richness.
Me, for the last seven months, trying to come up with an angle. Also known as The Apostle Paul by Rembrandt van Rijn
Original Writing
Here I share original writing from me, both newly written and from the vault.
🍌To Go and Lay Down in the Sense of It
I’m re-sharing this essay in the context of psychological richness above. The writing is a little clumsy. The structure and wording could be improved, but despite this I think it is one of my favorite essays I’ve written, because it really gives a window into psychological richness improves my life. I heard a great quote in a documentary, sat on it for a bit and before I knew what had happened a web was strung between that quote, one of my favorite books, a song I like, and my family’s business. Because of this I gain a deeper understanding of art, myself, and my family. Click here to read the essay.
Thoughts and Threads
This is a smorgasbord of life updates and the things that I find interesting and inspiring. They will often but not always be on the theme of the issue.
🍌Thought Bananas gets a shout out from The Honest Broker
A few days ago I was sitting in my car, waiting to go into lunch, when I was notified that one of my favorite Substack writers, Ted Gioia of the Honest Broker, had a new article out. It was titled “The Best Online Essays & Articles of 2022.”
I was stoked because I am always looking for lists like this, not only because I enjoy reading them, but because I actively look for good writing so that I can deconstruct it and improve my craft.
Being already excited, I literally gasped and shouted when I saw my own article, Requiem for Sean in D Minor, halfway down the list. I have since read about a third of the other articles. After reading each one I grow more grateful and astonished that Thought Bananas made this list! I highly recommend you dig into these during the lull
My friend Melissa Menke wrote about writing and reflection, and how she uses two techniques she learned in my Write of Passage mentor sessions to improve her creative output. She had this great takeaway:
This process I’m recommending – flow, reflect, analyze, rest, and begin again – can help with more than essays.
This is a great lesson about how sometimes the best way to learn something is to teach it. I use reverse outlining all the time. (I’m even developing an online course for it—sign up here by clicking here.) However, as obtuse as this sounds, I had not thought about breaking this process down to its component parts and using it elsewhere creatively until reading Melissa’s essay.
🍌Something Happened to How I Think About Therapy
Last week I watched a documentary called Stutz, about Jonah Hill and his therapist. I am working on an essay about the profound realization one part of this documentary left me with. But in the meantime, I wanted to share an essay written by a friend and fellow Write of Passage graduate Silvio Castanetti called Something Happened to How I Think About Therapy.
Silvio does a great job of summarizing the main points of the documentary in his own context as a former therapy patient. I recommend reading the whole essay, but I excerpted parts of the essay below that reflect my biggest takeaways from the documentary:
“The first big idea that Stutz introduces is what he calls Life Force -- the inner energy that has the power to change our lives by making anything seem possible. When we lose our sense of direction and don’t know what to do (because our focus is on what we can’t do), we should work on our Life Force. If we think of it as a pyramid, our Life Force has three levels: the bottom layer is our relationship with our physical body, the second layer is our relationship with other people, and the top layer is our relationship with ourselves. Working on the bottom layer means that we get our body to function better through exercise, diet and sleep. And that’s a simple thing that always works: our life improves immediately.”
“Stutz says that there are three aspects of reality that we have to live with, no matter what: pain, uncertainty, and constant work.”
“Our aim is to always keep moving, to keep some form of forward motion going. This is arguably the most important motivational lesson that we can teach ourselves -- true confidence is living in uncertainty, and moving forward. ‘I’m the one who puts the next pearl on the string.’”
“What left me astounded is not as much the process through which Stutz helps you recognize certain situations and gives you practical tools to tackle them -- as mind blowing as this whole framework is -- as his view of what effective therapy should be about. Therapy should be practical. It shouldn’t limit itself to identify a problem and its root cause, but give guidance on what to do to solve it. I guess in many delicate cases there’s no time to wait for answers to surface spontaneously, like for people in the throes of severe depression, or even suicidal.”
Congrats, Charlie. How cool you were shouted out by someone you admire so much.
Very intrigued by the concept of Psychological Richness.
It would be helpful to understand how it’s different from happiness and meaning.
How much does conflict, trauma, and negative experiences & emotions play into it?