Pleasure versus Meaning? You’re Participating in the Wrong Debate

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thecontextmag

5 min readMar 7, 2023

I’m only 19 years old, but I can safely say that most of my life has essentially revolved around two primary goals: chasing happiness, and then trying to keep it from slipping away. Sound familiar?

“ But I don’t even know what happiness is, or what it means to me,” I said to myself as I walked across the seashore one fine evening, watching the sparkly waves envelop my toes for a brief moment and then be pulled back by the current. That’s kind of the way happiness had always worked for me. It never overstayed its welcome, never dared to make itself available for too long. Plus, I thought to myself, how can you chase something you can’t even define? In order to combat this fruitless pursuit of something I couldn’t even begin to fathom, something that seemed like it was almost always out of reach, something that was controlled heavily by external circumstances and driven by luck and chance……. I set out to explore various alternatives to it.

And I’m really glad I did.

During my search for a so-called ‘alternative’ to happiness, I came across a concept called ‘psychological richness’. And just like that, it became my new favourite word, something I keep throwing around here and there, with friends and family, classmates and acquaintances.

I read The Nicomachean Ethics during my western philosophy course, wherein Aristotle spoke about hedonia (a form of happiness characterized solely by pleasure) and eudaimonia (a form of happiness characterized by a sense of purpose/meaning attached to it).

A psychologically rich life, on the other hand, is one that seeks to explore the chasms of both positive and negative emotions, the light and the dark, the good and the bad. It embraces depth, variety, and breadth. In a psychologically rich life, negative emotions are given the credit they deserve. They are not minimized, suppressed, or fought against. Instead, they are welcomed with open arms, encouraged to stay for a night, and then leave whenever they feel like it.

Psychological richness essentially refers to an entire spectrum of emotional experiences- experiences which will ultimately leave you with something interesting to say.

This concept was first coined by Shigehiro Oishi and his colleagues at the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. In their article, A Psychologically Rich Life: Beyond Happiness and Meaning, they make a clear distinction between a pleasurable life, a meaningful life, and a psychologically rich one. They go on and talk about certain personality as well as character traits that people leading the latter possess. The question they are essentially asking with their work is ‘What really makes for a good life?’.

What’s interesting is that these researchers are not only severing the automatic connection human beings tend to make between happy and good lives, but are also adding a third dimension to the ‘pleasure versus meaningfulness’ debate that has been taking over contemporary humanistic psychology for the last few decades.

“Recent research on psychological richness has found that it is related to, but partially distinct from, both happy and meaningful lives,” writes humanistic psychologist Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman. “Psychological richness is much more strongly correlated with curiosity, openness to experience and experiencing both positive and negative emotions more intensely.”

Living a psychologically rich life requires you to feel everything as it comes- be it anger, sadness, envy, lust, greed, jealousy, shock, delight, surprise, amazement, or fear. It requires you to not shut out or label emotions, but instead, to approach them with a gentle curiosity. It requires you to cultivate different interests and seek continuous changes in perspective. The human condition is such that, more often than not, it presents you with the building ground, or the foundation, to live a psychologically rich life. Most of us are neither euphoric nor devastated all the time- we operate within gray areas, we sway back and forth between a dizzying array of emotional experiences. The environments we live in are often turbulent and unpredictable.

What often comes to mind when I think of psychological richness is a cheese board- I imagine a cheese board which consists of different kinds of cheese, olives, slices of cured meat, big, juicy grapes, and a variety of interesting dipping sauces. The cheese board is an assortment of flavors- ranging from bitterness to acidity to spice to sweetness. But it’s all of those items combined that make it so special- the defining characteristics of a cheese board are harmony and diversity.

Instead of bending over backwards for the never-ending pursuit of a ‘happy’ life, it might make more sense to choose a psychologically rich one. This will not only take the pressure off- it could allow one to experience reality in its fullest, and be a lot more comfortable with the set of cards one’s been dealt.

It could allow you to cut yourself some slack and be less scared of unpleasant emotions. Being creative with the pain you feel is the next step- but in order to do that, pain must first be felt.

Psychologists often say that there are two components to experiencing an event- the actual emotions felt as the aftermath of the event, and your responses to these emotions or your perception of these emotions. Exercising psychological richness would involve tweaking our responses to these emotions, and refraining from pathologizing them.

You could argue that wanting to live this kind of life isn’t natural for human beings- the Freudian pleasure principle operates on the belief that the human mind is wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This also means that the natural response we have to our own painful emotions is bound to be negative. That’s a valid argument, but I argue that it’s also possible for us to teach ourselves to be more accommodative of every aspect of our own existence without judgment. We don’t have to be held back by our own wiring.

This is still quite an idealistic concept, because it’s definitely not easy for any of us to embrace our circumstantial pressures and our genetic limitations, or fight our natural human tendency to chase pleasure and avoid pain. But it’s a concept worth giving a second thought to, one that has the potential to fundamentally alter the quality of our lives for the better.

References

Cherry, Kendra. “How Freud’s Pleasure Principle Works.” VeryWellMind, 7th May 2020, https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-pleasure-principle-2795472. Accessed 1 Sep 2022.

Depaulo, Bella. “Beyond Happiness: Why A Psychologically Rich Life Is A Good Life.” PsychologyToday, 28 Aug 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/living-single/202108/beyond-happiness-why-psychologically-rich-life-is-good-life. Accessed 1 Sep 2022.

Kaufman, Scott B. “In Defense Of The Psychologically Rich Life.” Scientific American, Aug 18, 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-defense-of-the-psychologically-rich-life/. Accessed 25 Jul 2022.

Oishi, Shigehiro, and Erin C. Westgate. “A Psychologically Rich Life: Beyond Happiness and Meaning.” American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/rev-rev0000317.pdf. Accessed 28 Aug 2022.

Oishi, Choi, et al. “The Psychologically Rich Life Questionnaire.” Journal Of Research in Personality, vol. 81, 2019, pp. 257–270. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2019.06.010. Accessed 25 Aug 2022.

Tredennick, Hugh and Jonathan Barnes, editors. The Nicomachean Ethics. Penguin Books, 2004.

Pleasure versus Meaning? You’re Participating in the Wrong Debate

Written by Kimaya Natekar