Adventure Year: You Can’t Be an Interesting Person If You Don’t Do Interesting Things

In this episode of Get a Life, Jackie Oña Cascarano introduces Adventure Year: her personal experiment in building a more interesting life through hobbies, curiosity, and everyday adventures.

After realizing that her life had become highly productive but not particularly interesting, Jackie began exploring a concept from positive psychology called psychological richness, a dimension of well-being characterized by novel and perspective-changing experiences.

Many high-achieving women have lives rich in meaning and responsibility, but low in novelty and exploration. Adventure Year is Jackie’s commitment to intentionally bringing curiosity, creativity, and new experiences back into everyday life—from watercolor classes to learning Mahjong.

This episode explores why hobbies and everyday adventures matter for well-being, how intrinsic motivation reconnects us to who we are, and why creating an interesting life might be one of the most powerful ways to flourish.

Show Notes

After years spent in a season defined by productivity, caregiving, and responsibility, she realized that while her life was meaningful, it had become highly efficient but not very interesting.

Drawing on research from positive psychology, Jackie introduces the concept of psychological richness—a dimension of well-being characterized by novel, surprising, and perspective-changing experiences. Many high-achieving women are rich in meaning through work, caregiving, and contribution, but may lack the novelty and curiosity that make life feel textured and memorable.

Jackie shares how this realization led to her personal experiment called Adventure Year, an intentional commitment to pursue hobbies, creative pursuits, learning experiences, and everyday adventures. From watercolor classes to learning Mahjong, she explores how even small experiences outside our routines can reconnect us with curiosity, identity, and growth.

References

Holmes, C. (2022). Happier hour: How to beat distraction, expand your time, and focus on what matters most. Gallery Books.

Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 129(2), 263–281. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000317

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999.1020

Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Free Press.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Get a Life. This is a podcast for women who feel the pull towards something more. Women ready to become the main characters of their own stories and build lives filled with interesting experiences, passionate pursuits, and adventures big and small. I'm Jackie Cascarano, former lawyer, turned women's wellness coach, and I'm a practitioner of positive psychology, the science of well-being. I help high-achieving women reconnect with themselves and create lives rich with authenticity, alignment, and agency. Welcome back to Get A Life. Last episode, we talked about why women sometimes feel like they need to get a life. Not because their lives are empty, but because they are too full. They've become almost entirely organized around responsibility, productivity, and caregiving. Facts. So today I want to talk about something I'm doing personally that's become a bit of a living experiment in well-being and life-getting. And I'm calling it adventure year. And before you picture something super dramatic, like quitting my job and backpacking through Europe, this is not an eat pray-love situation. Adventure year is actually something far more simple. It's about intentionally adding novelty, curiosity, and interesting experiences back into everyday life through hobbies and what I am calling everyday adventures. So I'm going to start with two metaphors that I use to describe the moment when I realized I needed to get a life. So a few years ago, I was in a frenetic overextended season of my life. I like to call it my era of super uber productivity. I was working full-time. I have three kids. So my three kids were younger then. And I basically had no bandwidth for anything. So any free time I had, I was using it for something that was deemed useful and purposeful and productive in society. So making lunches, prepping for work projects, going to the gym. And the metaphors, I'm going to mix metaphors, people. So just, you know, gird your loins here. So the first metaphor is imagine a bowl full of strawberries on the kitchen counter. I felt like an empty bowl that used to have strawberries in it. And now the bowl just has like strawberry juice dripping down the sides. And people continued to put their hands in the strawberry bowl to get more strawberries, but there were no more strawberries left, people, but they kept on just getting in there to see if there were any left. That's that's what I felt like. I was so exhausted. I had nothing left for anyone else, let alone me. And okay, the the next metaphor, totally different, but I really felt this way. I felt like a houseplant. Okay. So I told my therapist this. I felt, I said, I effectively feel like a houseplant. Very dramatic. Not just any houseplant, a sad fern in the corner that needs to be watered. So I was like technically alive, but not blooming or flourishing in any capacity. And I felt really numb, like I had no personality. Does this sound familiar at all for my friends who are in the middle of their frenetic pace era, high productivity era? Um, at cocktail parties or like school events, I remember having like nothing to say to people besides talking about my kids' lives or work. I felt like I had no spark. And I was in such a state of people pleasing that I hardly even knew who I was at that point, what like my actual opinions were, uh, what I believed. And if you have struggled with people pleasing, this may resonate with you. I was desperately seeking to reconnect with myself after so much time in an outward-facing posture. I was very others focused for a very, very long time. And I hear this from a lot of women. We focus so much on caring for others because of, you know, patriarchal societal pressures to be the caretaker that we are so outward focused. We, you know, we don't look inward. And my life had become incredibly efficient. Like I was a master at accomplishing all of the things, getting everybody ready for family photos for Christmas, excelling at work, planning the vacation to a tea, ordering the groceries, right? Remembering all the preferences for the kids and what they like and don't like and all of it, all of the invisible labor, you know? I recently came across a quote that stopped me in my tracks because it described how I was feeling at that time of my life so perfectly. It was in a book called Happier Hour by Professor Cassie Holmes out of UCLA. And it's the book is all about how people use time and how that use of their time impacts their well-being. Holmes is brilliant. And in the book, she wrote this we don't take time for ourselves to rest, to think, to create. We neglect our interests and what makes us interesting. Woof. I added woof. She didn't have woof in the book, but that's how I feel. This quote changed the direction of my current graduate work, to be sure. And I think it maybe even changed the course of my professional life. I became incredibly curious at that moment about how to create an interesting life. You know, like what actions do you take to do such a thing? And the quote makes sense, doesn't it? Think about it. If we don't do interesting things, we simply cannot be or become interesting people. But I had a really meaningful life, as I mentioned. Like I love my kids. And I was exhausted, yes, but but fulfilled in that area of my life. My life wasn't always exciting, but there were certainly lots of little moments of joy. But there was something missing I just could not put my finger on. And that is when I started learning about positive psychology, the idea of flourishing, and something called psychological richness. And we talked briefly about this in the last episode. Positive psychology is the science of human well-being, the study of flourishing, resilience, post-traumatic growth, and basically how we can measure well-being globally. From this field have come ideas that many people now recognize, like in normal lexicon of pop culture, like grit, growth mindset, flow, the science of gratitude. And the question that positive psychology practitioners like myself are trying to answer is how can we live a good life? And what makes a good life? In the early years of positive psychology, researchers proposed basically two main constructs. There was a happy life, which is a life filled with pleasure, comfort, positive emotions. And the second is a meaningful life, right? Like a life centered around purpose, contribution, feeling like your life matters. And both of these are incredibly important. But researchers Shigahiro Oishi and Aaron Westgate proposed that there is a third dimension that had been largely overlooked. And that is called a psychologically rich life. And a psychologically rich life is filled with interesting, novel, and perspective shifting experiences. Basically, things that make life feel textured, memorable, eventful, and things that shift how you see the world, things that make you feel like you are the main character in an interesting story instead of a background character in someone else's narrative. Experiences like art and music, culturally distinct travel, conversations with individuals who are different from you, ideas that challenge you, learning a new skill, exposure to beauty, moments that surprise you and stretch you. And those are the kinds of experiences that make life feel interesting. So when I heard of this concept, something really clicked for me. And I'm always thinking about women, high-achieving women specifically, and their well-being, I realized that a lot of women are doing very well on meaning, especially in midlife, motherhood, caregiving. And if you're in that sandwiched generation like I am, maybe you're caring for parents and caring for children. Careers are meaningful. We're supporting our communities. Those are deeply meaningful roles. And I would say during some periods of my life, probably the most boring ones, honestly, I was pretty happy. I was pretty content, right? Like, no news is good news. Things were pretty calm. But a lot of women are running extremely low on psychological richness. When I read Cassie Holmes's words on doing things that make us interesting, I began to think, okay, like what am I interested in? Seriously, I don't have any hobbies and I don't even know where to start. Is there is there a list somewhere that I could look at? And I think I actually Googled that. I grew up in New York City in the 1980s, which is very different, by the way, from what it is like today, which is much more family-oriented for sure. And I think, I think maybe I did a ballet class in elementary school, but that was it. My parents did not have hobbies. That is not the kind of family I grew up in. They worked, I love them. They came, they worked really hard and came home and drank martinis while we watched television. We didn't play board games or cards or anything like that. And it is dawning on me as I reflected on all of this that I might be the least interesting person alive. So that's great. When we got to the suburbs in middle school, I just started studying hard, right? Because I'm a high-achieving woman. And I was just really academically focused. I wasn't athletic, but in high school, I started to work out, not as a hobby, as a way to stay fit. Does that count? So these are all the thoughts that were going through my mind. What I did at that moment was I doubled down on the reflection. And this is what I'm inviting you to do right now as well. So thinking about my childhood, my adolescence, my teenage years. Try to imagine your 12-year-old self. What did she like to do? Think hard. What activities lit you up? And you can think about your high school self, your 12-year-old self, whatever it is. What piqued your interest? And not because your parents made you do it or you wanted to put it on your college application, because that's a lot of the stuff that I did. But what would you have pursued for no other reason but for the enjoyment of it? And what I just described, by the way, is called intrinsic motivation. So doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable. The activity itself is the reward. And the opposite of that is extrinsic motivation, which is doing something because of an external outcome or reward, like money or grades or praise or even avoiding punishment. So I looked back and I actually remembered that I loved theater. And I had not thought about this in maybe like 20 years. I was in the drama club and I loved it. I was not just doing that for college apps. And to this day, I love musical theater. And when I was really young, I wanted to be an actor for a time. I remember dancing in my room to Madonna and singing. I loved singing and dancing and acting. So all of this was jogging my memory. This was a really good exercise for thinking about what interests to pursue. I was beginning to remember what it felt like to be me, you know, young me before any of the roles I had assumed as a woman in her mid-40s, mom, wife, boss, colleague, coach, all of them. And it felt really good to connect with that girl, that young woman. And this is where my adventure year began. So adventure year is really my personal commitment to intentionally bringing new experiences into my life over the course of a year or more. These experiences are lighting me up. I am interested in them in and of themselves, you know, for no other reason than just to do them and enjoy them. As a side note, whether working out counts as a hobby or an everyday adventure is a lengthier discussion that we don't have time for today, but I would love to dig into in a later episode. And I'm also pursuing things that are pushing me out of my comfort zone. So some of the adventures are big, like doing things I've always wanted to do. For example, I pulled the trigger on pursuing a master's degree in positive psychology at 45, turning 46 this summer, with three kids and a husband and lots of responsibilities at home and a business or two. But many of the adventures are smaller. And I really want to emphasize that. They can be everyday adventures, like, for example, learning how to play mahjong and taking watercolor classes. These are two things I've done and they've been so fun. And later in the season, we'll devote entire episodes to these experiences. Adventure doesn't have to mean climbing Mount Everest. For me, a big adventure is I'm planning to take an improv class later this year. And let me tell you, I think I would actually be less nervous to climb Everest than I am to take an improv class. I will report back for sure. But adventures are relative to you and what you want and how far out of your comfort zone you're going. Could mean learning something new, like a new language or all about wine, right? Becoming a Somalier is actually on my bucket list. Trying a hobby you've always been curious about. My cousin, Johanna, just started tennis at 40 and she's loving it and learning so much, so many lessons along the way about grit, believing in herself and what she's actually capable of. It's it's a really cool experience to watch. A friend here in Nashville is taking ballroom dancing classes, and another friend has taken up paint by number in her downtime, and she's like transformed. So you could take an educational or recreational class, sewing, needlepoint. Yes, ma'am, all of them. You could create a museum visiting habit and learn about the artists and the artwork, travel somewhere unfamiliar, or even just exploring something intellectually that fascinates you. So before I forget, let's talk about the elephant in the room. This is important. I'm a high achieving woman, very busy. You're a high achieving, busy woman. This is insane. There is no time. Yes, I know. And that kind of is the point. We have to make time because this is our well-being. Our well-being is at stake here. And making time often means structuring it deliberately, the same way we structure work. It might mean putting one hour a week on the calendar that is a non-negotiable, put it in the calendar like a meeting. It might mean trading childcare with a friend. So each of you gets an evening off twice a week. It might mean asking your partner to fully take over bedtime certain nights of the week. However, it works for you where you can actually commit to it and actually get it done. It also might mean saying no to commitments, which is hard for us high-achieving ladies, uh, delegating, which is also hard, and protecting an hour whenever during the week that it works. The point isn't that the time magically appears, it's that we claim it and schedule it and protect it. And I also want to talk about privilege. There is privilege in having the opportunity, the choice to pursue our interests and make them into hobbies. But I don't think it should be a privilege, really. This is gendered. Men have poker night, eight-hour days of golf. And we encourage our brothers and sons to do like bro stuff, right? Like ride dirt bikes and pound their chests and whatnot. I don't know what they do when they're doing bro stuff. But men don't see pastimes and hobbies as privilege or indulgence. This is a vital component of every human's well-being. Spanning gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, everyone should be pursuing activities that light them up and connect them with who they really are at their core. One of the things that has surprised me so far about Adventure Year is that novelty can feel uncomfortable. Mahjong, for example, was really hard at first. And I'm still a terrible painter at watercolor. I really am. When you've lived inside a routine for so long, sometimes doing something new can feel awkward and you feel like a beginner again, there's uncertainty. I remember walking into the Mahjong lesson. I didn't know a soul and I felt very vulnerable. And that's actually part of the magic because those are the moments you're you're growing. So if you're listening and something inside you is stirring, I want to offer you a small invitation. You don't have to start an adventure year. You might just start with a question. What is something you've always wanted to do? What is something that has always made you curious? Is there something that you once loved that you quietly abandoned? Is there anything that you're thinking, I wish I could try that someday? Because maybe someday is now. Next week, we're going to zoom out and talk about something foundational and positive psychology. What is a life of flourishing? We'll talk about the five dimensions of well-being and why high-achieving women sometimes build lives that look successful, but still feel strangely incomplete. Until then, thank you for being here and keep building a life that's interesting. If this episode resonated with you, subscribe so you can join me for the next one. And if you have a friend who might enjoy these conversations about building a richer, more interesting life, send it her way. Thank you for joining me on Get a Life, and I'll see you next time.