Chapter One
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
If I go there will be trouble
And if I stay it will be double.
—The Clash
1. A Cozy Life
Yoshi was born in a small mountain town on the island of Kyushu, Japan, known for its green tea and clementines. Like his father, grandfather, and every male ancestor before him, Yoshi has lived his entire life there, cultivating rice and tea. He chose this path after just a year of agricultural high school, when he dropped out to become a farmer. At the age of twenty-seven, Yoshi married a woman from a neighboring town and had three children. He played in a neighborhood softball league into his fifties and enjoyed annual neighborhood association trips to various hot springs. He still lives in the same town; he still has the same wife; and he still has the same close friends he has known since elementary school. In making these choices, Yoshi followed the path laid out by his ancestors, connecting with them through common threads of not just blood, but occupation, place, expectations, and way of life.
Yoshi is my father, and I am his son a world away. After my eighteenth birthday, it took me exactly eighteen days to leave our small town for college in Tokyo. In my fourth year of college, I got a scholarship from Rotary International to study abroad in Maine. Before I started the program in Maine, I attended a summer English program on Staten Island in New York City. I had just broken up with my girlfriend in Tokyo and was tired of being in a relationship. I simply wanted to improve my English. Yet, I met a student from Korea and fell in love. She was about to start graduate school in Boston. I was about to start a year in Lewiston, Maine. During the 1991–1992 academic year, I took a Greyhound bus to Boston to see her every weekend. In May, I had to go back to Tokyo. Though my career plan before studying abroad was to work for the Ministry of Education in Japan, and I hadn’t had any intention of attending graduate school in the U.S., by then I was determined to come back. In June 1993, after graduation, I left Japan for good. Next were stops of varying lengths in New York City; Champaign, Illinois; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Charlottesville, Virginia, before moving onward to Chicago. Along the way, I married the Korean woman I met on Staten Island and we had two children, born in two different cities. I have not seen any of my elementary school friends in years.
Three decades after leaving my hometown, as I get older and try to maintain what remains of our family connection, I often find myself wondering how my life could have diverged from my father’s to such an extraordinary extent. I wonder why he didn’t move away when he had the chance, and why, in contrast, I have moved so many times.
My father’s life has been stable, familiar, and comfortable. An annual cherry blossom party in spring, the Obon dance festival in summer, a foliage tour in fall, and hot springs in winter. It’s a cozy life, a good life. My life, on the other hand, has been far less stable, far less familiar, and far more stressful with constant deadlines for lecturing, grading, and writing mixed with countless rejections (e.g., grants, papers, book proposals, job applications). Though I love my job most days, I do envy my father’s simple, convivial life sometimes; I wish I could spend an evening drinking sake with my old friends every week, reminiscing about our school days and talking about life on the farm. But in my most honest moments, I know that I could not have lived like this: I had an intense yearning to see the outside world, too intense to follow the well-trodden life path of my ancestors.
2. Happiness, Meaning, and Something Else
I think back to when I was graduating high school, when I was faced with the question framed in the immortal words of The Clash: “Should I stay or should I go?” It was easy, then. Just go. As I get older, though, it has become more and more difficult. This question has been at the center of both my personal life and my academic research for decades. I imagine most of you have also asked yourselves that very same question, not just once or twice, but many times over. Some of you might be like my father: loyal, prudent, and nostalgic, prioritizing a stable life. Others may be more like me: impressionable, whimsical, and risk-taking, embracing an adventurous life. There are, of course, trade-offs between a stable life and a mobile life, a simple life and a dramatic life, a comfortable life and a challenging life, a conventional life and an unconventional life. But which one gets us closer to a good life?
To answer this question, I will draw from decades of research in psychological science, supplementing the available data with examples from literature, film, and philosophy. But first we need to start with the question: What is a good life?
When author Donna Tartt was asked what questions she was grappling with in her novel The Goldfinch, she said, “What is a good life? . . . To be happy oneself? Is it personal happiness? Or is it to make other people happy even at the expense of one’s own happiness?” Tartt’s question is profound. Should we strive to be happy? Or should we work for others’ happiness before thinking of our own?
First, what is personal happiness? What makes you happy? Freedom to do whatever you want to do? Pursuing and accomplishing your career goals? A trip to the beach or the spa? I have made many selfish decisions in life, including moving to New York City to take a job at a prestigious university while my sons were still in middle and high school. Though my sons did not want to move away from their friends and their hometown, I chose to maximize my own personal happiness. In the end, I did not find myself any happier. My father, on the other hand, decided to stay in his hometown, perhaps to make my mother and others happy at the expense of his own happiness. He could have made far more money if he had moved to a booming city in the same prefecture. Ironically, years later, he seems to be happier with his decision than I. This may sound like the makings of a Chinese proverb, but it illustrates a larger truth: psychological research shows that trying to make others happy will make you happy, while trying to make yourself happy sometimes fails to do so. Indeed, psychologists have found that prosocial spending, writing gratitude letters, and having a satisficer (i.e., happy with good enough) mindset all promote happiness. It is possible that the main reason my father has been so happy is that he adjusted his expectations so that he came to cherish everyday life on the farm, enjoying smaller pleasures alongside his longtime spouse.
Perhaps the key to my father’s good life has been his decision to put the needs of others—my mother and family tradition—above his own. But is a life of self-sacrifice and virtue—which we might call a “meaningful life”—a life without regrets? In the short term, people regret action, like saying or doing something stupid. In the long run, however, people regret inaction, like not saying “I love you” or not going back to school. Some people may lead a life of self-sacrifice and virtue but forgo opportunities that ultimately lead to more regrets and “what ifs.” Self-sacrifice is admirable, to be sure, but prioritizing it can lead people to lose sight of their own desires and ideals until their lives no longer feel authentic. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would have called this a life of “bad faith.” An example is found in Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, where Nel Wright puts aside her childhood dreams of adventure to seek perfection in her role as a wife and mother, just as her family expects of her.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, who was an enthusiastic Hells Angels motorcyclist, bodybuilder, and LSD user before launching his writing career. He struggled with depression in his college days; his own mother told him that she wished he had never been born when she learned that he was gay; and he spent thirty-five years of his adult life celibate. Yet, even though he had some tough years, his life was full of adventure and curiosity, challenged professional boundaries, and was deeply experientially and emotionally rich—it was an authentic life, the kind that Sartre would have approved of.
3. What Is a Psychologically Rich Life?
Oliver Sacks’s story presents a quandary. He had depression and a long period of inner struggle, yet he kept exploring new frontiers. His 2015 autobiography was fittingly entitled On the Move: A Life. Neither personal happiness and contentment nor self-sacrifice and virtue fully capture what was so admirable about Sacks’s life. We need a new term, one my students and I have decided to call a psychologically rich life. A psychologically rich life is a life filled with diverse, unusual, interesting experiences that change your perspective; a life with twists and turns; a dramatic, eventful life instead of a simple and straightforward one; a life with multiplicity and complexity; a life with lots of stops, detours, and turning points; a life that feels like a long, winding hike rather than many laps of the same racing circuit.
A good analogy is dark vs. sweet chocolate. When you eat a fine, dark chocolate, you immediately notice that it is different from a typical, sugary chocolate. It is sweet but also bitter, or even salty. It keeps you surprised, and it has heightened intensity, complexity, and depth. In other words, it’s rich. Likewise, a psychologically rich experience is different from a typical experience; there is something unexpected and powerful. It has a variety of qualities, not just good or bad. Over time, the accumulation of psychologically rich experiences makes for a psychologically rich life, one with a distinct multitude of flavors. A psychologically rich life is, well, rich in terms of life experiences.
But why do we need this new term? To explain why, let’s take a slight detour into the history of psychological research on the good life, which I think of as having three phases.
Phase 1: The Rise of Happiness Research
Ed Diener, my graduate school advisor, was one of the first researchers to study happiness. He published a paper entitled “Subjective Well-Being” in 1984. Ed and his students, such as Randy Larsen and Bob Emmons, went on to publish a series of papers on subjective well-being throughout the 1980s, legitimizing the scientific study of happiness within psychology. Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi then built and popularized positive psychology based on the study of happiness as well as other related topics like hope, optimism, and flow.
Phase 2: The Eudaimonic Challenge
Then, in 1989, Carol Ryff published a paper entitled “Happiness Is Everything, or Is It?,” presenting an alternative model of a good life that focused on autonomy, self-acceptance, purpose, positive relations, environmental mastery, and personal growth. Along with Ed Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination theory, Ryff’s approach to the good life has come to be called the “eudaimonic approach”—a meaningful life, in short—in contrast to Ed Diener, Daniel Kahneman, Dan Gilbert, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and others’ approach to the good life, which has come to be called the “hedonic approach”—a happy life.
Phase 3: Battles
Over the last two decades, well-being researchers have debated the relative importance of hedonic vs. eudaimonic well-being. For example, people who say their lives are easy tend also to say they are happy, but don’t necessarily say their lives are meaningful. Workers are happier during a break than during work. However, they feel more engaged during the work than during the break. Some researchers even claimed to have found different epigenetic patterns between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, suggesting that our very genes are expressed differently. However, other researchers found that almost all people who say they are happy tend to also say that their lives are meaningful, and vice versa. The overlap between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being is so great that some researchers argue that they are virtually the same thing. Others argue that both happiness and meaning in life are so important that there is no point debating which is more important.
4. The Utility of a Third Dimension
Well-being researchers have debated the relative importance of happiness vs. meaning, arguing that one is more important than the other. My own take is that happiness and meaning are both important. But they do not capture an adventurous, unconventional, and dramatic life like Sacks’s. So psychologists have never had the adequate vocabulary to describe such a life. In a way, the happiness vs. meaning debates parallel debates in psychology over the most important factor in predicting intelligence: nature (genetics) or nurture (environment). In the end, both nature and nurture are important. Then Carol Dweck proposed and popularized a third idea: the growth mindset. How we think about our intelligence—specifically, whether we believe that intelligence can be improved—is also important in predicting intelligence and human performance, she showed.
Over dinner one day, my wife asked me if I could fix the broken window sash cords in our living room (our late-nineteenth-century Victorian house had original double-hung windows that still operated with sash cords). I answered, “We should just hire someone. I’m not handy.” Our second son, who was in middle school, immediately responded, “Dad, that’s a fixed mindset! You can get better!” It turned out he had just learned about Dweck’s growth mindset in school. My son’s suggestion motivated me to fix the window and become a better handyman, a small example of how concepts like growth mindsets broaden the way we think about the self, others, and the world. Just as the growth mindset revealed a new dimension of human intelligence and ability, I hope that psychological richness can reveal a new dimension of a good life.
How, then, is psychological richness different from happiness and meaning? The main body of my book answers this question in detail (see Table 1 for a brief summary). But, very briefly, happiness is a subjective feeling that rises and falls to indicate where one’s life stands. It is a bit like a balloon. With the right wind and air pressure, it floats high. Smooth sailing. Life is going well. But when the weather is bad, it deflates. Grounded and stuck. Life is not going well. In another sense, happiness is like your batting average in baseball. It goes up and down, but what matters most is the frequency of your hits. An infield hit is as worthy as a huge home run when it comes to the batting average. You should aim for as many hits as possible. In other words, frequent small, pleasant social interactions add up to long-term happiness more quickly than occasional big promotions.
Copyright © 2025 by Shigehiro Oishi. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
