What Makes a Life Rich? Shige Oishi on Life in Three Dimensions

You're not unhappy. You're not unfulfilled. But something is missing — and you can't quite name it. 

In this episode of Get a Life, Jackie Oña Cascarano chats with Dr. Shigehiro Oishi, Marshall Field Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and author of Life in Three Dimensions. For decades, psychology has answered, "what makes a life good?" in two ways: a happy life or a meaningful one. But Professor Oishi has introduced a groundbreaking third dimension: psychological richness.

A psychologically rich life is filled with variety, novelty, perspective-shifting experiences, and a full spectrum of emotions, from thrill and delight all the way to grief and fear. It's the dimension that captures adventure, curiosity, and openness — and it might be exactly what's missing for women in mid-life. THIS is the science behind Adventure Year.

This episode is at the heart of everything Get a Life is about. Jackie and Shige cover what psychological richness actually is (and what happiness and meaning miss), the dark chocolate metaphor (so bitter, so sweet, so complex!), why you don't have to be naturally adventurous to cultivate it, what reading New York Times obituaries revealed about how people really live, and small everyday ways to start living more richly today. 

References:

Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 129(4), 790–811. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000317

Oishi, S., Choi, H., Liu, A., & Kurtz, J. (2021). Experiences associated with psychological richness. European Journal of Personality, 35(5), 754–770. https://doi.org/10.1177/0890207020962334

Oishi, S., Choi, H., Koo, M., Galinha, I., Ishii, K., Komiya, A., Luhmann, M., Scollon, C., Shin, J., Lee, H., Suh, E. M., Vittersø, J., Heintzelman, S. J., Kushlev, K., Westgate, E. C., Buttrick, N., Tucker, J., Ebersole, C. R., Axt, J., Besser, L. L. (2020). Happiness, meaning, and psychological richness. Affective Science, 1(2), 107–115. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-020-00011-z

Transcript

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 Alife. Today's guest is Dr. Shigehiro Oishi, the pioneering researcher behind the concept of psychological richness, an emerging dimension of well-being that emphasizes a life filled with interesting, perspective-changing, and diverse experiences. The construct is profoundly relevant to women in midlife. We've talked about this a lot. We are sorely lacking in these kinds of experiences. And I just wanted to note that early in our conversation, Shigei connects a rich life to the big five personality traits. And these are the five major dimensions that psychologists use to describe personality. They are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Psychological richness is associated with four out of those five traits. We also talk about my favorite metaphor for psychological richness, which is dark chocolate versus regular chocolate. Simple steps you can take to be more open to those kinds of experiences. And also why one of Shige's favorite hobbies is reading the New York Times obituaries. A quick note also, Shige joined us from his office at the University of Chicago. So you might hear an occasional siren or city noise in the background. Let's jump into the conversation. Well, hello. Welcome to Get a Life, Professor Shige Oishi. I am so thrilled to have you here with me today. For listeners who are not familiar yet with your work, you are the Marshall Field Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and one of the leading voices in the science of well-being. You studied under the late Ed Deaner, who is a pioneer in the science of happiness and subjective well-being. And your work wrestles with a question that I find endlessly fascinating. What actually makes a life good? So for decades, psychology has largely answered that question in two ways: basically a happy life or a meaningful life. And your research has introduced a groundbreaking third dimension, and that's a psychologically rich life. And it basically is, and I'm going to let you, of course, tell us all the details about what a psychologically rich life is. But basically, it's a life filled with variety, novelty, exploration, curiosity, and perspective shifting experiences. Yeah, you explore all of this in your research and in your wonderful book, Life in Three Dimensions, which I have read and you can see all the little tabs I have in it because I love it so much. And obviously, this construct is a major contribution to the field of psychology, of course. But I think that it's also it can be very paradigm shifting, especially for women specifically. And that, of course, is the demographic of this podcast, get a Life. It's women in midlife who are really in seasons that are frenetic and routine and focused on caregiving. So what I posit kind of always when I'm talking about this demographic is that they're really lacking in psychologically rich experiences. So thank you for being here. I want to jump right in. So you thank you so much for having me, by the way. Yeah. Thank you for taking time. This is just such an honor. So you've introduced psychological richness as a third dimension of a good life. So it's alongside, not instead of necessarily alongside happiness and meaning. So if you could share, what does a psychologically rich life or what does psychological richness capture that those two happiness and meaning miss? Yeah. So I think when we think about good life, I think a lot of people, you know, immediately think about happiness and happy life, a life filled with contentment, pleasure, comfort, sense of securities. So that often comes from sort of having really stable, you know, life, the foundations. So like good relationships, of course, comes up as a number one thing. But also, you know, usually jobs, stable financial situations, and you know, living in a safe, you know, comfortable environment overall. On the other hand, the meaningful life is a little bit different in terms of the focus, right? The happiness could be very self-focused, like personal happiness, but sometimes people wonder whether that's a good life. Rather, maybe making other people happy, uh, which probably is more like a meaningful life, making a societal contribution. So I think the psychologists as well as philosophers talked about happiness and the meaning quite a bit. What is interesting is that both of them really captures these kinds of stable components of life, stable foundation of life. Because in order to have meaningful life, you want to see that you make some difference. Right. And some extraordinary people, like job, you know, Steve Jobs and people like Gandhi, of course, they can see that they made a huge difference in the world. Whereas ordinary people like us, you know, usually we focus on our family or communities or you know, job, and try to make a difference in our relatively small world. And what's interesting was that when you look at the personality chords of happy life and meaningful life, essentially that captures four out of the five big five personality traits. So, of course, being associable, being extrovert, you know, tend to be associated with a happy life as well as meaningful life, because meaning often comes from relationship as well. Of course, not worrying so much about the future, not being neurotic is good for both. Uh, it's obvious. Conscientiousness is a particularly strong predictor of meaningful life, because in order to make a difference in the world, you have to be dedicated, you have to be hardworking and persistent. Otherwise, you cannot make a difference by just volunteering once, right? Or twice. You have to be there every week. So conscientiousness matters. And to the extent that conscientiousness matters in terms of goal attainment and things like that, so of course it's correlated with happiness. Agreeableness is very important in terms of maintaining warm, positive relationship with others. So both happiness and meaning benefit from being agreeable. So four out of five, which is pretty good. Interesting thing is that these are the big five personality. Big five personality traits, right? So out of five thousand, four thousand personality traits and personality words, we can categorize into five things. And then interestingly, happiness and meaning capture four out of five. But one thing that doesn't really they don't capture is the openness to experiences. And openness to experiences is the type of personality who love to do different things, loved ideas and novelties and things like that. So when you think about openness to experience in the context of the good life, then you can think about the life that is full of adventure, for instance, right? And full of literally and artistic, you know, aesthetic appreciations, some you know, poetries and you know, films and so forth, and open to and experiencing a lot of different things and learning a lot of different things. So immediately when I when I looked at, you know, what are the chorets, what what predict happy life and meaning, I realized that one huge hole, which was the openness to experiences, and what kind of good life captures that? And then we decided that, well, yeah, we admire people who lead artistic life, life of adventure, explorations, and so forth. So we came up with a terminology called psychologically rich life. And initially we called this experientially rich life, right? So you have a lot of interesting experiences, but not just the first hand experiences of you know living abroad or you know, doing a lot of different things. But I wanted to capture some of the secondhand sort of experiences like reading literatures, you know, going to the museums and what you know, appreciating arts. So we switched to psychological to make it a little more you know comprehensive. So that was the sort of the motivations and why we thought, you know, you know, there's something missing from the happiness and and the meaning, and maybe this third dimension will finally capture that aspect of good life. Yeah, I I think that's incredible because when I'm thinking about the demographic of women with whom I interact daily, it really is, you know, they are at this, um they're at this point in their lives where they're very busy, you know, they're it's a frenetic pace. They are caregiving. There's meaning, of course, when it comes to being a parent. There's happiness, you know, in in terms of the stability, like like it's just sort of pleasant in the fact that like you're doing the same thing every day. And it's kind of boring, but no complaints, you know. What I hear a lot of women say is there's something missing, but I can't quite put my finger on it. And and that's what I love. An assistant instructor in the MAP program, Julia Poole, once said something so cool. She said, What I love about psychology that is that there's a name for everything. And I love that you named this thing that I I I believe women are are lacking and don't, they don't, they don't know how to articulate it quite easily. And it's that there's something missing. They're they're experiencing a period of life where there's not a lot of excitement. They don't have the ability to explore, they're not really pursuing any curiosity, you know, and they're not having a lot of experiences that are diverse or or perspective changing. What I love that you said in in your book was the difference between regular chocolate and dark chocolate. I mean, it's fun. Yeah, I mean, you know, like sweet chocolates are fine, right? That's that's tasty, that's that's great. But at the same time, I mean, uh of course, dark chocolate, even sometimes salty or you know, whatever, is flavorful and deep. And you know, you make me think a little bit more, right? So that so it's it's not the sweetness per se, but just the conventionality of it. You you know exactly what to expect, and you eat exactly, you know, oh yeah, this is great. But something different, right? Then that makes you think, wait, what's in here? Like what's what is the percentage? Like, is it like 85% cocoa? Like, what is this? You know? So I think those are the things. It's just a chocolate, it's a metaphor. I think when we are so busy and then just every day going through to do the list, then we just forget, right? Really the simple joy of life. And uh sometimes I think that's that's what we feel often the middle-aged professionals feel you know, something is missing. We're just too obsessed with uh uh productivities and efficiencies. And of course, we have to be responsible adults to do a job, but at the same time, when the list is so long that we forget that we could be playful, we could be like kids sometimes, right? And then that's what we miss as a professional adult, especially in the US. There's some confusion sometimes with toxic posity. If you don't know what positive psychology is, you think it's like, oh, we we're forcing happiness down everyone's throat and it's toxic posity, which of course it's not. Psychologically rich experiences and people who have psychologically rich lives don't necessarily have pleasant feelings all the time. No, no, no. They're having uh hard hard experiences in their lives. Can you talk a little bit about that? Mm-hmm. So, what is interesting is that emotional tone of the good life in terms of happy life and meaningful life is predominantly positive, actually. So positive affect like joy, enjoyment, and contentment are a strong predictor of who is leading a happy life or meaningful life. But what's interesting is that of course the psychological rich life, the people who say they lead psychological rich life report a lot of positive emotions, but they also report a lot of negative emotions as well. And negative emotions, additionally, in addition to the positive emotion, sometimes positively correlate with psychological richness, where you know, for happiness and meaning, of course, the more negative emotions you have, the lower level of meaning, lower level of happiness you have. And in the recent studies, we ask participants hundred emotion words, how often do you feel these huge list of emotions? Okay, and then of course we measure happy life, meaningful life, and psychological rich life. Of course, happy life is characterized by happiness, satisfaction, lack of regret, suffering, things like that. Meaning was interesting. Meaning was about hope and passion, and which kind of makes sense because in order for you to have meaningful life, you have to have a strong sense of purpose. Purpose is obviously the future-oriented construct. So hope, which is the very much positive, future-directed emotion, being the signature emotion of uh meaningful life makes sense. And you have to be passionate about what you're doing, obviously, because that requires a lot of perseverance and so forth. And when we look at the psychological rich life, it's kind of different. Like delight, thrill, right? So thrill is definitely sort of the emotion that you experience when you are doing some kind of adventure or something, you know, unusual. I mean, you know, everyday life, thrill is a little bit hard to you know experience. So that was interesting. Out of hundred, you know, emotional words, thrill came out and delight came out as a really signature. But at the same time, grief was the positive predictor of whether somebody is leading a psychologically rich life. And that's where, again, the psychological richness is about the depth and the diversity of emotions, because the grief comes from the loss of important others, and which makes us think about a lot of shared histories and experiences and the change in the future relationships, etc. etc. So I think that happy life is relatively simple, right? Happy feeling, satisfaction, contentment, and things like that. And the meaning is very much future and a passion. And psychological fitness is like a lot of different kinds of things, like ranging from thrill and delight to the grief. So I think that's that's the very much of the difference. And then if you live certain kinds of life, then you expose yourself to those kinds of diverse emotional experiences. Whereas when you do daily routines, then you're not gonna experience thrills. I love that you talked, well, you talk about Louis Cha, who is a Chinese fantasy writer, very famous, and how his life was so hard in so many ways, right? He fled to Singapore, I think you said, to avoid persecution for yeah, assassination. He he was on the assassination list of Communist Party, right? Because he criticized communist China. Yeah. Incredible. So, like a very exciting, interesting, at times very hard life, right? When I read about this, these studies you did on the obituaries in I think it was the New York Times and perhaps in a Virginia paper, this really blew my mind, where you were able you and your your students were able to look at obituaries and really you were able to code what kind of lives these individuals led. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so you know, I mean, most of the studies we do are self-reports, right? The scale one to seven, which is kind of, you know, artificials. So we wanted to see the real life stories and especially, you know, we still live life, right? If you ask 40 years old, 50 years old, that they're still living. So we thought maybe if we want to understand whether somebody led truly happy life, meaningful life, and a rich life, then we should have the end so that we have whole life stories. And I love reading New York Times obituaries, so that's my hobbies, really. Like every day I read. So I thought, okay, this is great. You know, the the it has enough detail, but we can it's short enough that we can read a lot of them. Uh unlike uh you know, biography, it's a little bit hard to read whole like hundreds of biographies. So obitually is much easier. So in 2016, I just hired some uh uh RAs, three of them, and then their task was read New York Times obitually every day and rate each obitually on these 12 items, which you know, four four items for happiness, four items for meanings, and four items for psychological rich life. And you know, they they there was an intra rater uh reliabilities and so forth. So that was wonderful, and we were able to show sort of the correlations and distinctions. So Luis Cha it was the follow-up study. So the first study was New York Times, but of course, New York Times obviously people were super famous people. Yes, Mohammed Ali actually was one of them in that summer. So we wanted to see whether we can replicate in less famous polls. So we we looked at the daily progress, which is the local Charlottesville, Virginia newspaper. And then the third sample was the Luis Char, which came from the Straits Times, the Singaporean newspapers. So then it's it's beyond usually Americans. So to see if we can replicate some uh same three-factor structures. So that's what we did, and then we found a lot of interesting things that two out of 101 New York Times obituaries, they were rated as having happy life, meaningful life, and psychologically rich life. That was my question. How often how often do you find that people have all three? Yeah, so so only two out of 101, so that's two two percent in New York Times. But in Straight Times, I believe there were eight or even ten uh out of hundred, ten, or hundred and twenty. So the the percentage was much, much higher. And of course, this percentage depends on where you uh draw the cutoff. So yes, right, right. In reality, anyone can have you know all three. Right. But any given moment or given day, your time is limited, so it's a little bit hard to have all three in one moment or one day, but you know, life is long, so we can focus on happiness sometimes, we can focus on meaning some some stage of life, and then we can focus on richness. And we when we looked at the college student, it's interesting. We asked, what is your ideal college life? Is it the happy college life, meaningful college life, or psychologically rich college life? And if you ask freshmen, then the majority say psychologically rich life, which is which makes sense, right? You just arrived to campus, so you want to explore the world. But then it's interesting, the second year, it's already the psych richness goes down. And uh by the the third year, it's like even you know, like 33% happy, 33% meaning, 33%, you know, richness. And then the the senior, they want to have a meaningful life because they know the time you know they're graduating, so they want to have like a legacy, what was my point point of my college life? So these things change, right, depending on your time horizon. Yeah, yeah. And I imagine that it though I wonder if it's similar, um, you know, outside of college, of course. So as we age, like throughout the lifespan, do we see differences in how people value novelty or variety specifically? Interesting thing is that when you just look at the age, then you don't see very clear trajectory. Partially because, you know, we like a retirement, for instance, is very different, right? Some people work until 70, some people retire at age 55, and so forth. So, but I think that what's nice about college is that we we really know they they will graduate. So end is clear. Yeah. Whereas in our life, end is sometimes unclear. So I think that's why, and then the life stage, right? The children's age, like parents' age, and whether you took a new job or whatever. So I think it's harder to clearly translate to into the chronological age, but I think essentially depending on your stage. If you just study at a new job or move to a new city, then probably your mindset is more like a richness. You want to explore the world. And if you feel like, okay, this is my last year of this job or city, then maybe you're thinking about meaning or something like that more. Yes, time that time scarcity, that temporal scarcity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's wonderful. You know, you had mentioned before that openness to experience is one personality trait that correlates to psychological, psychologically rich experiences. I wonder about so many things, honestly. I wonder about people that have anxiety, right? That's that's more neurotic. I wonder about world, like outlook primal world beliefs, which are basically like your outlook on whether or not the world is safe or or unsafe. If if we are people that naturally are prone to fear or anxiety, do you think we can optimize our lives in such a way that we could become more open to psychologically rich experiences? Or is that it? Like that's just no, no, no. So definitely if you're already predisposed to be open to you know experiences, that's great. But even if you're not, then still you can have new experiences. For instance, I'm not really super open to experiences. I like I like tradition, I like certain things. But I think one thing you can expand your horizon is being agreeable. Okay, so when your friends or your spouse says, Hey Jackie, let's do this, then even if you you wouldn't do it yourself, but when somebody suggests, oh, let's go somewhere, let's do something. And if you are agreeable, you end up with doing things. Even if you're afraid of doing, you have anxiety or openness, you know, you're not so open. But if somebody else you trust is doing with you, then that's much easier. So I think there are many ways to do it, and then one easiest way is just find somebody who is open to new experiences and then just hug along and then do do that. Or whenever somebody suggests something, just you say internally, yes, let's do it. And I think when you're talking about perspective shifts, which is a large component of psychologically rich experiences, I love the the notion that they could be sort of smaller perspective shifts or larger ones. So, like you mentioned something about a student who had a preconceived notion in her mind about professional wrestling. And then she went to a professional wrestling match, and it her mind was blown on a number of a number of aspects of it. And she walked away thinking, like, wow, that was actually like a great experience. And then you also talk about studying abroad. So, like those are two things, two activities that could really shift your perspective. And one is one night out doing something that you wouldn't normally do, and maybe you have a preconceived notion about it, and another is going abroad and living in a different culture. Sure. Pretty cool. Sure. So I I think obviously if you have opportunity to do study abroad or take a job in somewhere, you know, foreign country, then that's wonderful. And you know, even you trying, right, you're exposed and forced to do certain things that you're not familiar with or comfortable with. So obviously that's that's really brings you a lot of perspective changes. But you know, in day-to-day, you can you can actually learn a lot or shatter your preconceptions or stereotypes by actually doing right and exposing yourself and then reading. And sometimes, you know, I I don't have TV at home, so I don't watch news at all. But when I stay in hotel, I try to watch like Fox News because that's total, totally the world that I'm not familiar with. So it I often find it very entertaining and interesting that wow, that's how they think about the the world events, right? So sometimes I think those are the that even small things that that like you learn something new and new perspective, and then you know, from little things, and that's that's why openness to experiences is good. You even if you you know you hate it, like sometimes you know you you watch it or you see it, then actually it's not as bad as you think. And it's like they sometimes have a point, and it's like, oh wow, yeah, okay. I love that. I have a I have an anecdote. I was on a plane a week ago flying to Philadelphia, and I had they they nearly bumped my seat. I was I was grumpy. So I was getting onto this plane and I was kind of grumpy and I was all the way in the back. And I'm not a talker on planes, like I don't, I don't I usually don't chit-chat with people on planes, even though I'm I'm actually extroverted and usually chat, but on planes, for whatever reason, I like to tune out and watch a show or something. So I was walking into this very grumpy and kind of introverted, and I sat down next to this gentleman who began to talk to me. And he was from Italy, he was from Rome, and he happened to be in Nashville. I live in Nashville for a conference. He was there for a cybersecurity conference. We chit-chatted for literally probably two hours, which again I never do. And we talked about our lives and like his perspective on things. And it was, I walked away from that conversation so happy that I just was agreeable, right? That I said yes, that I engaged in the conversation. My perspective was shifted on like so many things. I mean, it was a different culture. We were, we were talking about our cultures and and how they differ. And I remember thinking like that was a very psychologically rich experience. Oh, I just had. I expected it was a small small conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So something different than you know what you usually do. And then the little things you you can do, just even your your neighborhood, you know, if you take a different route, you'll see completely different scenes, even on the campus. You know, when I when I try to go different, you know, area, there are a lot of different things and beautiful trees and benches and things like that that you notice. So one way is like at the small level, you can you can do a lot of noticing, you know, just try to pay attention to what you haven't noticed before, and then you learn, you know, quite a bit. So it doesn't have to be a huge trip uh of your life to to enrich your life psychologically. Actually, there are lots of opportunities in our everyday life. We talk on this podcast, and and when I'm speaking to women, generally, I'm always encouraging them to find an activity that lights them up outside of work or family obligations. And I and I'm I'm always I'm always very quick to say it's wonderful if you love your work. And it's wonderful, it's wonderful that you love your family. But there, you know, there is so much routine that goes along with that. And I'm always encouraging them, you know, hobbies, adventures, big and small. And I love that just by doing, again, it's it's the it's the minute activity, the minute different, you know, path you can take just to really add depth and diversity, honestly, to your day. And what about doing activities that are it internally motivating? So sort of intrinsically motivating, meaning that, you know, and for the for the listeners, meaning that you're doing it because you just delight in it, you just want to do it because you love it, versus extrinsically motivated activities that are either you're getting an a reward or you're avoiding negative consequences. I imagine both of those would increase psychological richness because if if they're novel. But is there any difference in those two things? I think the intrinsic, you know, activities, of course, are much more likely to bring joy and then the happiness and satisfactions. And, you know, you just you just keep going because you just love it. But if it's the same thing again and again, then maybe it's not so much richness. But at the same time, if in the activities that you are so involved with, so my wife started doing ceramics and she loves it. Sometimes she just forgets lunch and then just keep going. That kind of activities, I think, like you know, you're making different cups, different dishes, different techniques and so forth. So even though it's the same pottery, you know, like there's so much depth and width, diversity within it. So I think that's wonderful. On the other hand, a lot of work-related things or family-related things we're doing because we have to do it. And of course, it's not fun to do a lot of things that we have to do, but at the same time, sometimes surprising things happen and you find yourself enjoying, or you know, occasionally you really learned something new that oh, I didn't know I was pretty good at sort of brick edging, for instance. I I mean I didn't know that do it, you know, we did it, DIY project, and then like for the first time, I was like, oh, I'm not good at like fixing anything. But I was so surprised, oh I can really do do this fairly easily. So so you know, you never know. As you said, I think if you discover some new things, and then it doesn't matter whether you start it intrinsically or extrinsically at the same time. I think intrinsic ones probably are much more likely to bring something new just because you're just gonna do it in many different ways and you know continuously. I love that. Shige, what are ways that you intentionally pursue psychologically rich activities? Because I know that you are also busy. Like I I like I love the concept of people that are busy and have have a lot to do, but are also you know intentionally, deliberately pursuing psychologically rich activities and experiences. Yeah. So my case, I I'm really lucky that uh being college professor, that I can essentially sort of schedule my teaching and meetings at the time that I like, right? I don't want to teach first thing in the morning, for instance, so um all my teaching is in the afternoons and so forth. So if you have a flexibility in the schedule, I think the key is to having sort of the block of time that you can do anything. So I try not to put a lot of like at least one hour a day, I have flexible time. And that really allows me to be very spontaneous. If I want to go grab coffee, then grab coffee. If I want to go down the hall and talk to my colleague, then I can do that. If I want to work, then I can work. But having some flex time, you know, every day or at least you know, once a week, I think that would definitely encourage you to do something different, spontaneous, and and playful. And and those are really the key to psychological richness, right? Because richness usually comes from unexpectedness and unusual sort of activities. So we just we we're too serious, right? We try to accomplish so much that we're like you know, machine, but we just have to remember five years old, you know, the mindset, right? Just just you use every tool to be like just a toy and like think uh how I can play with this, right? So so I I I think I think that's uh that's really difficult because time is the the most precious things. But if you have a chance to sort of block up 30 minutes, one hour, even 20 minutes a day, I think I think that gives you really the breathing rooms for you to be able to flexible and spontaneous. I'm gonna close with one quote from the book. Here's what you write. A psychologically rich life is a life with twists and turns, stops, detours, and turning points. A dramatic and eventful life instead of a familiar and cozy one. A life with complexity and multiplicity, then I'll just say, you know, I work with women who've had a very who have very winding career paths. So professionally, there are a lot of starts and stops. I know me in my personal life, I was a lawyer and I decided to leave that. And I always felt regret or shame kind of for having left that and really, really to to pursue whatever lighted me up. I knew that wasn't right. And I think a lot of women feel kind of similar regret in some way, having left something to pursue something different. And it took year years, honestly, to give myself the grace to accept that those twists and turns were more of a pursuit of what lights me up and were were kind of adventurous in their own way. Any new projects you're working on? Yeah, like what what is a what are you curious about? What are you wanting to explore uh next? And then and we'll close with that. There are many, many of them, but one of them, uh as I talked to you a little bit earlier, the emotional signature or signature emotions of the good life. You know, these are two small studies that I did, so I really want to investigate that the emotional experiences that really capture psychological rich life and uh meaningful life and then the happy life. I think that is that is really interesting. Another project I'm really excited about is uh memorable life. So my colleague at the University of Chicago has a new concept called memorability. And some artworks are more memorable than others, some faiths are more memorable than others, and so forth, many things. But I just wonder what kind of life is more memorable, and what kind of life is not so memorable. So we used the obituaries and then did the essentially the memory test. So we now have the new data about what what what constitutes somebody's life being memorable and not so memorable? And once we identify the predictors of those, and hopefully psychologically rich one is the memorable one, but but if we identify, then we can really just ask people do you want to lead a memorable life or not so memorable one, right? And whether that change the way they live, they make decisions and things like that. Thank you. This has been such a privilege to speak with you and to go deeper into this topic that I'm just I'm enamored with. So thank you. Thank you, Chige. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jeff Key. Thanks for listening today. If you enjoyed the episode, do me a favor and follow the show, drop a rating or a review, and take a moment, seriously, just one second right now to think of a friend who would appreciate it and share it with them. That's how we keep the conversation going. See you next time.