In his writings, Aristotle considered various aspects of a life led in accordance with virtue and excellence: a life of pleasure, honour, wealth, health and eminence. Of these, only two have survived the test of time: the pleasurable life (despite Aristotle’s admonitions) and the “eudaimonic” life (i.e. seeking meaning and purpose).

In the millennia since Greek philosophers debated the question, the strong dichotomy between these two prevailing models—hedonic versus eudaimonic well-being — continues to dominate psychological research on the good life. Yet this dichotomy limits psychology by overlooking many types of lives that don’t fit neatly within it.

In this article, we move beyond the eudaimonic–hedonic divide to suggest a third powerful contender for a good life: a psychologically rich life — a life characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences. Together with happiness and meaning, we believe psychological richness constitutes a key element of a life well lived.

Defining a good life

Psychologists have advanced many broad theories of subjective well-being, ranging from dispositional and genetic to motivational and need-fulfillment accounts. We define a good life as “a life well lived from the perspective of the person living it.” A psychologically rich life, we will show, is related to (but distinct from) a happy or meaningful life, with distinct causes and consequences. Let’s start by taking a look at the two prevailing characteristics of a good life as per Aristotle and many others.

A happy life

We define a happy life as one characterized by high life satisfaction and a high positive-to-negative affect ratio (i.e. frequent positive affect paired with relatively infrequent negative affect, such as anger or sadness). Several decades of research shows that a happy life (i.e. ‘hedonic well-being’) is characterized by pleasantness, comfort, safety, security and stability.

People leading happy lives tend to be blessed with material and relational wealth. Income is modestly but consistently associated with greater happiness and life satisfaction. People with higher socio-economic status (SES) report greater life satisfaction, as do those with greater job security. In particular, having cash on hand (or in savings), rather than money in stocks and investments, predicts perceived financial security, which in turn predicts higher life satisfaction. Finally, marital satisfaction consistently predicts happiness, as does regular interaction with friends and neighbours. In short, a happy life is attained via stable economic and interpersonal conditions.

However, even when objective conditions are not conducive to happiness, people are sometimes able to reconstrue them to be so. For instance, optimism protectively buffers against cancer, bereavement and even war. Pursuing gain, as opposed to trying to prevent loss, is associated with happiness, as is gratitude. Whereas unhappy people desire the unattainable, happy people come to terms with less-than-perfect options.

Happy people are not bothered when others do better than them, whereas unhappy people are. The smaller the gap between aspirations and reality, the higher people’s satisfaction. Accordingly, ‘satisficing,’ as opposed to maximizing, is associated with happiness. Prolonging pleasurable experiences (via savouring) offers another such strategy.

Not surprisingly, most people want a happy life. In empirical studies, 69 per cent of respondents across 42 countries rated happiness as ‘extremely important’ (7 on a 7-point scale)—even more so than health and money. However, a happy life does not fully capture what it means to live a good life. Happy people tend to be prosocial and make numerous contributions to society via, for instance, donating and volunteering. Yet happiness is sometimes associated with system justification, resistance to change and insensitivity to inequality and social injustice. In this sense, a happy life can be a complacent life. We contrast this, below, with a meaningful life.

A meaningful life

We define a meaningful life as ‘the subjective self-appraisal that one’s life and experiences have meaning.’ Three elements are common to many existing definitions: significance, or the subjective sense that one’s life matters; coherence, or the extent to which life roles and experiences fit together into a coherent whole; and purpose, the perception that one’s life has direction and contributes to something greater than the self.

As such, individuals leading meaningful lives tend to be actively engaged and committed to societally important causes. Indeed, Aristotle defined the eudaimonic person as “one who is active in accordance with complete virtue, not for some unspecified period but throughout a complete life.” Good deeds must be repeated to build lasting contributions; for instance, routines are positively associated with meaning in life, perhaps because they assist in doing so.

We should note that meaning in life, on its own, does not fully reflect all elements of eudaimonic well-being. For instance, some theorists emphasize self-realization, rather than meaning, as its defining characteristic. Others focus on personal expressiveness, which is closely related to authenticity. Likewise, self-determination theorists consider intrinsic motivation (and accompanying satisfaction of autonomy, competence and relatedness needs) to be critical. Eudaimonia can therefore be described as the confluence of all the above: self-acceptance, autonomy, environmental mastery, positive relationships with others, purpose and personal growth.

Although a happy life and a meaningful life represent ideals for many people, they overlook at least one important dimension and, in doing so, struggle to account for the full range of human experience. That dimension is psychological richness.

A psychologically rich life is best characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences. Both happy and meaningful lives can be monotonous and repetitive. Kierkegaard proposed the “aesthetic” life as an antithesis to the “ethical” life. The ethical life, he warns, can be monotonous, dreadful and boring, and lauds the value of the arbitrary as an antidote: “One should therefore always keep an eye open for the accidental, always be expeditus if anything should offer.”

In our research, we theorized that a psychologically rich life is characterized by variety, interestingness and perspective change. In contrast, a happy life is characterized by comfort, joy and stability, and a meaningful life by purpose, significance and coherence. Thus, we predicted that different resources differentially facilitate happiness, meaning and psychological richness. For instance, we hypothesized that curiosity, spontaneity and energy will facilitate a psychologically rich life; strong moral principles and religiosity will facilitate a meaningful life; and stable relationships, time, money and positive mindsets will facilitate a happy life.

Finally, we predicted that the three aspects of a good life ultimately contribute to different life outcomes: Whereas happiness leads to personal satisfaction, and meaning to societal contribution, psychological richness leads to wisdom.

We predicted that certain situational and individual characteristics are more likely to yield psychologically rich experiences, which in turn make up a psychologically rich life. These included:

Situational characteristics

Novelty, complexity and changes in perspective should give rise to psychologically rich experiences, which in turn form the building blocks of a psychologically rich life. As such, certain situations may be more likely to facilitate psychological richness than others.

We generated a preliminary list of such features via qualitative data outlining the contours of a psychologically rich experience. In two focus groups (12 undergraduates and 10 graduate student/postdoctoral researchers, respectively), members described a happy experience, a personally meaningful experience and a psychologically rich experience. These groups converged on a description of psychologically rich experiences as those involving novelty, variety/complexity and a change in perspective. For instance, one 19-year-old undergraduate from a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C, described attending a professional wrestling event as a particularly rich experience. Her first time at such an event, she did not know much about professional wrestling; she went in with stereotypic expectations of fake violence and cheesy drama. To her surprise, she discovered professional wrestlers to be inspiring role models for children because, unbeknownst to her, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is heavily devoted to children’s charities. She laughed, cheered, felt outraged and pained, and ultimately found herself deeply moved by the experience. She returned home with a changed perspective.

Unexpectedness (e.g. WWE’s charitable work), novelty (e.g. first time at a wrestling event), complexity (e.g. not simple choreographed violence/drama) and a change in perspective (e.g. “Now I see why so many kids adore WWE wrestlers”) made this experience much richer than a typical outing. In particular, this last feature — a personal change in perspective — appears integral to the experience of richness.

Emotion theorists have argued that cognitive restructuring intensifies emotional experiences; the greater the cognitive distance between one’s original and revised mental representations, the more intense the emotion. This kind of cognitive restructuring — abandoning old mental representations in response to new experiences — is very like the perspective change required of psychologically rich experiences.

This was particularly clear when we compared another student’s experience which, although novel and complex, was not rich. This second focus group member noticed a male student in her apartment complex’s lounge, studying shirtless. He was not conventionally handsome and she began to wonder why he was shirtless in a public space, as the lounge was not particularly warm. Although this experience was novel, certainly surprising, and somewhat complex (i.e. his behaviour was unusual and mystifying), it did not change her perspective in any way. Likewise, she did not experience diverse emotions; and thus, we theorized that her experience was not a psychologically rich one.

In short, a subjective sense of surprise, novelty, complexity and perspective change are critical to the experience of psychological richness. This is consistent with work on another construct quite similar to richness: interest. Novelty, complexity, conflict and uncertainty have been shown to be key determinants of both interest and curiosity. In one study, interest/excitement was shown to be a core feature of the human motivation that enables sustained attention to complex objects. Perception, thinking and behaviour all require sustained interest, without which human beings would not thrive, and such interest is activated by change and novelty.

More recently, researchers found that interest occurs when a person feels they have the capacity to make sense of novel and/ or complex stimuli. For instance, paintings, poems and polygons high in novelty and complexity (e.g. abstract art) are rated as “more interesting” (but less enjoyable) than simpler or familiar stimuli — but only if people have the capacity to understand them.Thus, things that are enjoyable are not necessarily interesting, and things that are interesting are not necessarily enjoyable. Likewise, we suggest that happy experiences are not necessarily interesting or psychologically rich, and conversely that psychologically rich experiences are not necessarily pleasant.

Individual characteristics

Psychological richness is a function of the person, as well as the situation; for instance, curious people open to experience who should be more likely to lead complex and psychologically rich lives. Thus, we predicted that openness to experience should foster psychological richness. Curiosity in particular, we predicted, should lead people to explore a broad range of interests, which may in turn trigger perspective shifts of the sort theorized to produce psychological richness.

Notably, people who experience intense emotions also tend to lead more complex lives. For instance, their social networks tend to be broader, shallower and more complex. Instead of hanging out with the same friends or pursuing goals in a single life domain, affectively intense people hang out with wider groups of individuals and pursue diverse goals — and view these diverse life events and goals as personally important.

We did not suggest that simply experiencing intense emotions and events is itself sufficient for a psychologically rich life. Rather, such events create a need for accommodation — how people subsequently make sense of and integrate these events is critical. For instance, people may explain similar life stories in many different ways.

In sum, we hypothesized that openness to experience, curiosity and affect intensity serve as fuel for the psychologically rich life. Because curiosity and openness encourage individuals to pursue and appreciate novel, complex and potentially perspective-changing experiences, they constitute dispositional factors that facilitate the psychologically rich life.

Across seven studies, a psychologically rich life was best predicted by openness to experience and extraversion. These effects held among American undergraduates, American and Indian MTurk workers, and a nationally representative sample of Americans, and were replicated among Korean adults and University of Florida and University of Virginia undergraduates.

Tendencies towards fantasy, artistic sensitivity and unconventional attitudes were associated with a psychologically rich life, but far from redundant with it. In contrast, a happy life was most strongly associated with extraversion, followed by conscientiousness and low neuroticism. A meaningful life was associated fairly evenly with all of the Big Five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and low neuroticism. Finally, although happiness was significantly associated with self-reported socio-economic status (SES), a psychologically rich life was only modestly associated with SES, income or education, and a meaningful life only weakly so.

Taken together, our studies suggest that openness and extraversion are associated with a psychologically rich life, whereas extraversion, conscientiousness and high SES appear to be the keys to a happy life.

Because a psychologically rich life is characterized by unexpectedness, novelty, complexity and perspective change, some life experiences should be particularly conducive to it. Studying abroad is a case in point. Study abroad places a student in unfamiliar environments for an extended period of time, forcing them to live differently than they did at home. Thus, we predicted and confirmed that studying abroad should increase psychological richness.

What about studying abroad would lead to psychologically richer lives? The increase in psychological richness was explained in part by study-abroad students’ weekly engagement in artistic activities. In another 14-day diary study assessing daily activities as well as psychological richness, participants reported greater psychological richness on days when they took short excursions. Like studying abroad, such short trips injected novel atypical experiences into everyday life. In sum, life experiences that are novel, challenging and perspective-changing seem to contribute to a psychologically rich life, whether they are ‘big’ experiences, like studying abroad or divorce, or ‘small’ everyday experiences, like short trips or an escape room.

We found that people leading psychologically rich lives may be more open to changing current political structures and systems. We simultaneously entered a happy life, a meaningful life, and a psychologically rich life as predictors of system justification among over 500 college students. Whereas a happy life and a meaningful life were positively associated with system justification, leading a psychologically rich life was negatively associated. That is, those leading happy and/or meaningful lives tend to prefer to maintain social order and the status quo, whereas those leading psychologically rich lives seem to embrace social change.

We argued that psychological richness should also result in wisdom, characterized in part by flexibility of thought. Consistent with this, we found evidence that a psychologically rich life is positively associated with holistic thinking styles.

In short, those leading psychologically rich lives tend to have more complex reasoning styles, consider multiple causes for others’ behaviour, and do not believe that a few discrete categories can explain individual differences. These findings remain significant, even after controlling for openness (and other Big Five traits), as well as a happy life, a meaningful life and demographics. Finally, while people leading happy and/or meaningful lives experience positive emotions more intensely and negative emotions less intensely, individuals with psychologically rich lives experience both positive and negative emotions more intensely, consistent with the theory regarding affect intensity. In other words, the psychologically rich life appears to be emotionally intense.

We obtained preliminary evidence that psychological richness predicts important outcomes related to exploration and motivation for systemic change, and that people whose lives are psychologically rich tend to seek out challenges and value learning, and are less interested in maintaining the status quo. Perhaps as a result, they experience both positive and negative emotions more intensely than those whose lives are not particularly rich.

Finally, psychological richness uniquely predicts a behavioural measure of risk taking, as well as everyday engagement in novel and routine activities. Equally important, these associations remained significant even after controlling for many possible third variables.

A psychologically rich life, filled with a wide variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences, is distinct from a happy life and a meaningful life. A three-factor model in which happiness, meaning and psychological richness each constitute discrete constructs, fits the data significantly better than one-or two-factor models that conflate richness with happiness or meaning.

Likewise, people with psychologically rich lives differ in personality from people leading happy or meaningful lives. Openness to experience, in particular, as well as extraversion strongly predicts psychological richness. Finally, leading a psychologically rich life predicts important outcomes above and beyond a happy and/or meaningful life, including system justification, political orientation, attributional complexity and challenge-seeking.

In sum, the building blocks of a psychologically rich life are different. Particular life experiences and situational factors uniquely contribute to psychological richness, without increasing happiness or meaning. For instance, students’ lives were psychologically richer after a semester studying abroad, but not happier or more meaningful.

The Clash’s famous song “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” poses a fundamental evolutionary challenge. All organisms face the trade-off between exploiting the resources available to them and expending time and energy pursuing new resources that may (or may not) materialize. Other species such as birds are known to optimally mix these two different strategies, either by switching strategies as their environment changes or via individual differences, such that certain individuals in a population are drawn to exploitation whereas others are drawn to exploration.

We suggest that a happy and/or meaningful life relies on an exploitation strategy, in which people take advantage of familiar environments and deep social ties more heavily than an exploration strategy. In contrast, a psychologically rich life relies more heavily on an exploration strategy that expands horizons and broadens social ties.

In rapidly changing environments, a psychologically rich life might be most adaptive for learning and accumulating resources, whereas happy and/or meaningful lives might be more advantageous in stable, benign environments. Ideally, people might combine all three, balancing exploitation and exploration strategies as needed.

A life of curiosity-driven learning helps individuals acquire skills in the perspective-taking, empathy and creativity needed to solve recurrent adaptation problems encountered in navigating complex, shifting physical and social environments. These skills in turn accrue social and cognitive advantages that benefit not only the individual but also the group.

The kind of rich varied experiences needed to live a psychologically rich life require venturing beyond what is known and certain in order to grapple with (often uncomfortable) new ideas and perspectives. As indicated herein, the rewards are not only significant, they also lead to a good life.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of the Rotman Management magazine. Subscribe now for the latest thinking on leadership and innovation. The paper on which this piece is based was originally published in the Psychological Review journal.