If you ask most people what makes a good life, you’ll hear two answers: be happy and find your purpose.
And for a long time, that’s where the conversation stopped. You were either doing well because you felt good, or because you were doing something that mattered. Those were the options.
But some people have both of those things and still feel like something is off. They’re content. Their work means something. Yet, when they describe the life they want, it doesn’t sound like more happiness or more meaning.
It sounds like more. More range, more texture, more of the kind of experience that changes how they see things.
Two psychologists gave that feeling a name. They called it a psychologically rich life, and for anyone who’s ever been told they’re restless or unfocused or bad at picking a lane, it might be the thing that explains why.
A surprising number of people chose it over happiness and meaning
Shigehiro Oishi at the University of Chicago and Erin Westgate at the University of Florida spent years studying exactly this. They published their findings in 2022 and defined a psychologically rich life as one full of diverse, interesting, perspective-changing experiences.
Not necessarily enjoyable ones. Not necessarily purposeful ones. Just ones that change how you see the world.
When they tested the idea across nine countries and asked people to choose just one version of a good life, happiness won every time. Meaning came second.
But 7 to 17 percent of people chose psychological richness instead, even knowing it meant giving up the other two.
And when they asked about regret, about a third of people said undoing their biggest one would have made their life richer, not happier or more meaningful.
You’ve probably felt this and assumed something was wrong with you
You took the stable job, and it was fine. You had the relationship, and it was good. Your friends said you had it figured out, and on paper, they were right.
But something in you kept pulling toward things that didn’t fit the plan. A book that made you rethink a belief you’d held for years. A conversation with someone so different from you that you went home and sat with it for days.
A stretch of your life that was objectively hard, a move that didn’t work out, a friendship that fell apart, but that left you seeing yourself in a way you wouldn’t give back.
You couldn’t explain why those experiences mattered more to you than the comfortable ones. You just knew that a life without them would feel like watching the same episode on repeat, even if it was a good episode.
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The experiences that do this aren’t the ones you’d put on a highlight reel
That’s the part most people get wrong.
You hear “psychologically rich” and picture someone backpacking through four countries. But the experiences that change how you see things are rarely the dramatic ones. They’re the Tuesday ones. The class you almost didn’t take that rewired how you think about something you’d never questioned.
The year everything fell apart, and you came out of it with a completely different understanding of what you could survive.
Westgate uses college as an example. It’s not always fun, and you might not feel a deep sense of purpose while you’re in it, but you graduate thinking differently than you did when you started.
Her team tracked students through hurricane season and found the same thing: many described the experience as psychologically rich.
Not enjoyable. Not meaningful. But something that shifted how they understood their own resilience, their neighbors, the way ordinary life can come apart and go back together differently.
None of this requires money. The research found no connection between income and living a psychologically rich life. What it connects to is openness: being the kind of person who’d rather be changed by something uncomfortable than protected from it.
A happy life can be monotonous. A meaningful life can be repetitive. A psychologically rich life, by definition, cannot be boring. And the people living one tend to look, from the outside, like they can’t sit still.
The people living this way often get misread by everyone around them
They change jobs more than their friends do. They move to a city and leave it. They pick up interests that don’t connect to each other in any obvious way.
They have stories from places they didn’t stay long and opinions that have shifted enough times that the people who’ve known them longest say I never know what you’re going to do next.
From the outside, this looks scattered. It looks like someone who can’t commit, who doesn’t know what they want, who keeps reaching for the next thing without finishing the last one.
But what’s happening underneath is the opposite of aimless. These are people oriented toward a specific kind of experience: the kind that changes their perspective.
They’re not avoiding stability. They’re choosing something their brain values more than stability, which is the feeling of being rearranged by something they didn’t see coming.
On their deathbed, the researchers suggest, these people wouldn’t say I had fun or I made a difference. They’d say What a journey.
The good life was never supposed to be just one thing
Oishi and Westgate aren’t saying happiness and meaning don’t matter. They’re saying the picture was incomplete. For a long time, if you didn’t fit neatly into “happy” or “purposeful,” there wasn’t a name for the kind of life you were building. Now there is.
If you’ve been chasing happiness and finding it temporary, or building meaning and finding it heavy, or bouncing between experiences and wondering why you can’t just pick a direction, it might be that you were never supposed to pick one.
The richest version of a good life probably has room for all three: feeling good, doing good, and being changed by what you live through.
The people who look like they’re doing it wrong might just be living by a measure that nobody gave them until now.
