Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life - Hardcover

Oishi, Shigehiro

 
9780385550390: Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385550391 ISBN 13: 9780385550390
Verlag: Doubleday Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

From one of our foremost psychologists, a trailblazing book that turns the idea of a good life on its head and urges us to embrace the transformative power of variety and experience.

For many people, a good life is a stable life, a comfortable life that follows a well-trodden path. This is the case for Shigehiro Oishi's father, who has lived in a small mountain town in Japan for his entire life, putting his family's needs above his own, like his father and grandfather before him. But is a happy life, or even a meaningful life, also a good life?

In Life in Three Dimensions, Shige Oishi enters into a debate that has animated psychology since 1984, when Ed Diener (Oishi's mentor) published a paper that launched happiness studies. A rival followed in 1989 with a model of a good life that focused on purpose and meaning instead. In recent years, Shige Oishi's award-winning work has proposed a third dimension to a good life: psychological richness, a concept that prioritizes curiosity, exploration, and a variety of experiences that help us grow as people.

Life in Three Dimensions explores the shortcomings of happiness and meaning as guides to a good life, pointing to complacency and regret as a "happiness trap" and narrowness and misplaced loyalty as a “meaning trap.” Psychological richness, Oishi proposes, balances the other two, offering insight and growth spurred by embracing uncertainty and challenges. 

In a lively style, drawing on a generation of psychological studies and on examples from life and literature, Oishi shows how anyone can use the three core dimensions—happiness, meaning, and psychological richness—to build a fuller, more authentic life.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SHIGEHIRO OISHI is the Marshall Field IV professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. He is one of the foremost authorities on happiness, meaning, and culture. He is the author of The Psychological Wealth of Nations, and his research has been featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Doubleday Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385550391
ISBN 13 
9780385550390
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Doubleday
https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781911709527: Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1911709526 ISBN 13:  9781911709527
Verlag: Torva, 2025
Softcover