Happiness
Happy, Meaningful, and Psychologically Rich Lives
I am often asked how a happy life differs from a meaningful one. My usual answer: happiness is more self-centered — it is about feeling good — while meaning is more about self-transcendence and purpose, contributing to something greater than yourself. And the reason the two often go together? We tend to strike a balance between what makes our life happy and meaningful (and sources like having a community contribute to both). A very recent paper, "Individual differences in lay conceptions of a happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich life," solidifies this claim and the existing literature on the topic, and adds a twist I really like: it brings in the idea of a psychologically rich life. A fascinating idea I first encountered through the work of Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues, who showed it to be distinct from both happiness and meaningfulness.
In a recent paper, Meikel Neumann investigates whether people evaluate lives described as happy, meaningful, or psychologically rich differently, and how each relates to the broader idea of a good life. Here is what he found:
A happy life is seen as emotionally comfortable and relationally grounded — feeling good, valuing close relationships, preferring stability and security. A meaningful life is seen as future-oriented and purpose-driven, marked by striving, societal contribution, and long-term goals. A psychologically rich life is seen as emphasizing novelty, exploration, and creativity, aligned with openness to experience and extraversion.
Finally, happy and meaningful lives are both seen as more prototypical of a good life than a psychologically rich one, suggesting that richness, while genuinely valued, remains somewhat at the margins of how we collectively imagine the good life — which, to me, does not undermine the fact that it is an integral part of what constitutes our psychological well-being and should be deemed just as important.
— Joffrey Fuhrer