Nuts and Bolts Review - Life in Three Dimensions, Shigehiro Oishi
Beyond happiness and meaning: the forgotten dimension of a life well lived.
⏱️ Reading Time ≈ 20 min
The Book
In Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life, psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, offers a refreshing third path in the debate over what makes life “good”. Oishi draws on decades of research to unveil psychological richness as a distinct pillar of well-being. This concept emphasizes variety, complexity, and moments that jolt our perspectives—qualities often overlooked by happiness surveys or purpose-driven frameworks.
This book speaks to intellectually curious readers—psychology enthusiasts, lifelong learners, seekers of deeper meaning—who sense that neither comfort nor purpose alone can fully satisfy. Blending rigorous studies with vivid anecdotes, cultural analysis, and personal narrative, Oishi explores how a life rich in novelty, challenge, and reflection complements —and completes—what happiness and meaning together cannot.
Set against the backdrop of a century-long psychological journey—from hedonic pleasure to eudaimonic purpose—this timely work invites us to broaden our inner landscapes. It shows how an embrace of complexity, surprise, and transformation can enrich a life far beyond the familiar track. Read it to discover the third dimension that turns a “good” life into one worth remembering.
My Two Cents
I have to confess: shortly after cracking open the book, I almost walked away. It struck me as something overly familiar—recycled, unremarkable. And yet, I’m grateful I stuck with it. What began as a slow read quickly turned into something captivating. Not for its originality, but for the author’s remarkable ability to articulate a truth so mundane, so quietly obvious, that it’s usually invisible.
But let’s start from the beginning. The premise of this book lies in the historical evolution of how we define a “good life”—a life worth living. Over the past few decades, two dominant answers have taken turns at center stage: happiness and meaning. The essence of this book lies precisely in the tension between these two forces. Its aim is not to choose one over the other, nor to throw a third contender into the ring. Rather, it seeks integration.
After all, you can’t sit on a stool with just two legs, can you? Add a third, and suddenly balance becomes imaginable—fragile, shifting, but within reach. There’s a kind of dance to it: shifting weight from one leg to another, constantly leaning, adjusting and readjusting. This is the core intuition behind the idea of a life lived in three dimensions.
Before diving into the third dimension—the heart of the book—let’s take a moment to define the first two and understand why, on their own, they fall short.
In Oishi’s framework, happiness is stripped of its metaphysical aura. It is a measurable psychological state—a hedonic dimension where positive emotions dominate and people report feeling satisfied with their lives. Far from being elusive or grand, happiness lives in the ordinary: the reassuring rhythm of rituals, the gentle repetition of a stable routine, the unnoticed but steady presence of emotional ease.
A happy life is, above all, a stable one. Few surprises. Needs met. Close, caring relationships. A life that follows a fairly predictable course. Oishi points out that people who report high happiness levels usually live in environments marked by safety, order, and a reliable sense of control. And for many, that kind of groundedness is gold.
Happiness isn’t about chasing highs. It’s about fit—when what you want and what you have line up. That’s probably why it became the go-to measure of a good life: it’s visible, trackable, reproducible. And yet, its strength lies in its humility. It doesn’t promise drama, just quiet coherence. A life that’s good enough not to want a different one. Happiness, in this light, isn’t the exception—it’s a stable, working normal. A match between your inner world and the world around you. Not intensity, but balance. Not fireworks, but continuity. It is, as Oishi suggests, comfort—emotionally understood.
If happiness is about feeling good, meaning is about knowing where you’re headed. In Oishi’s view, a meaningful life isn’t necessarily a pleasant one—it’s a life that feels worth living. This is the eudaimonic dimension of a good life: where daily actions are connected to a deeper sense of purpose, belonging, and narrative coherence.
Meaning stems from three things: feeling that life has a purpose, that it makes sense (coherence), and that it holds value (which is: it matters). We don’t need to solve life’s mysteries—we just need to feel anchored to something bigger. Sometimes that’s family, sometimes faith, or a community, a cause, a quiet but personal calling.
Meaning surfaces when we shift from asking “How am I feeling?” to “Why am I here?” A meaningful life isn’t necessarily a pleasant one. Often, it’s marked by struggle, sacrifice, and doubt. But those challenges live within a different frame. Pain is placed in a storyline. Hardship has a why. Life is no longer a loose chain of episodes, but a cohesive narrative stretching across time. It is not just a timeline, but a tale that links who we were, who we are, and who we’re becoming.
Oishi suggests that meaning is what transforms mere experience into a sense of direction. It’s the silent compass that guides our steps, even when the path is foggy. Not everything must be clear—as long as something feels truly meaningful.
Within the very definitions of happiness and meaning lies the tension we mentioned earlier: a deep-seated, almost structural impossibility of coexistence. Over time, these two visions of the “good life” emerged in succession. At a certain point, happiness seemed too self-contained, and the historical context—marked by rising productivity—steered us toward a more goal-oriented model: that of meaning.
Each of these dimensions has its shortcomings—chief among them, the absence of openness, exploration, and a readiness to experiment.
The way happiness is framed exposes us to two critical vulnerabilities. First, treating happiness as a goal in itself—something that, being unattainable by design, inevitably breeds frustration. The other is more insidious: the fact that happiness favors simplicity and low ambition. Factually, indeed, happiness is more accessible if you ask less of life (we’ll be back on this in a while). But therein lies the danger: trading potential for predictability, ambition for equilibrium, just to avoid emotional turbulence.
The pursuit of meaning, meanwhile, suffers from a different kind of overreach. It’s defined so broadly, so aspirationally, that falling short feels almost inevitable. The danger here is frustration once again. On top of that, its definition is so vast abnd demanding, that most ordinary days don’t stand a chance. And here comes the trap: if a day lacks some grand sense of purpose, it feels wasted. Add to that our tendency to magnify our strongest emotions, and suddenly one “meaningless” day—of which there would be plenty, let’s be honest—colors the whole canvas grey. The quiet beauty of small moments? Lost in the noise. And with it, the chance for happiness.
The ground has been prepared, the scene is set. Enter the third dimension—the one this entire book revolves around: psychological richness.
The third leg of the stool—the one Oishi builds his entire thesis upon—is perhaps the most counterintuitive: psychological richness. Neither comfort nor clarity, it offers something more fluid, more volatile, more open-ended.
A psychologically rich life is one filled with experiences—especially the ones that jolt, stretch, or shift the lens through which we see the world. Oishi defines it as a life marked by variety, complexity, and deviation from routine. It's made of unexpected moments, unfamiliar places, uncharted ideas. It doesn’t seek coherence, but surprise. Not tranquility, but transformation.
Living a psychologically rich life means being curious, open to novelty, and willing to reshape your identity—sometimes radically—throughout the course of your life. It doesn’t offer the comfort of happiness or the cohesion of meaning. In fact, it often emerges in the cracks of broken narratives: a sudden upheaval, a crisis of belief, a book that forever alters the lens through which you read the world.
This is a dimension that makes space for contradiction, ambiguity, and liminal states. As Oishi points out, psychological richness has long been overlooked in academic literature, and yet it holds profound significance for people who find themselves unrepresented by the standard scripts of happiness or meaning.
It’s a quiet provocation: perhaps a life doesn’t need to be coherent, or even contented, to be worth living. Perhaps it just needs to be interesting. Psychological richness is a kind of existential depth—an openness to living several lifetimes within the bounds of just one.
Psychological richness is shaped by a range of enabling factors:
Emotional breadth is the ability to embrace the whole range of emotions, even those we’d rather avoid. It’s what allows complex, meaningful experiences to take hold. It’s the ground where layered, transformative experiences can grow. Think of it as the willingness to let the emotional pendulum (more on that here) complete its full swing, not just hover on one side.
Novelty means venturing—by choice—into the unknown: new places, new people, new ideas, new ways of being. Not to chase novelty for its own sake, but because each detour from routine opens the door to fresh interpretations of ourselves and the world.
Multiple perspectives mean learning to live inside views that aren’t your own. It’s pausing your instincts to judge, and instead listening across difference—cultures, values, worldviews. When the mind stretches to hold contradictions, it grows richer, more complex, more alive.
Challenge isn’t just struggle—it’s that sharp edge where your current self meets your potential. The moments that push you hardest are often the ones that let new layers of complexity break through.
Diversity cracks open the shell of familiarity. It’s the choice to step into lives unlike your own—different faces, values, rhythms. Through that contrast, your imagination stretches, and the map of possible experiences grows wider and richer. Every encounter with otherness expands the boundaries of what life can look and feel like.
Learning is what remains when an experience doesn’t just pass through you, but reshapes you. It’s not accumulation, it’s metamorphosis. In a psychologically rich life, learning is the current that keeps the mind awake and the world new. For more on learning check this out.
Complexity is not confusion—it’s the art of staying with tension. It multiplies meanings, braids opposites, and keeps the mind fertile. A psychologically rich life doesn’t seek tidy answers, but learns to live in layered truths.
Play is freedom without a finish line, curiosity without a plan. It suspends stakes, unlocks imagination, and makes room for alternate selves. In a psychologically rich life, play is where transformation begins—light, risky, and real.
Exploration is what pulls us past the edge of the familiar—across geographies, thoughts, and emotions—with no promise of reward. It’s curiosity untethered, the courage to not know, the readiness to be reshaped by what surprises us.
There are infinite ways to live a rich life. And even if we’ve never called it “psychological richness,” we’ve touched it many times—when we grow, when a book carries us away, when we meet someone new, when we change, learn, explore. The book adds more to the list. But really, sky’s the limits—or maybe… not even that.
While reading the book and writing this piece, I couldn’t shake a lingering thought about happiness. The kind of “happiness” described in the book—the one I’ve tried to distill here—feels like something else entirely. Or perhaps more precisely: my idea of happiness and the one presented in the book seem to operate on two very different wavelengths.
What Oishi calls happiness, I’d call contentment—a gentle acceptance of a stable, positive, somewhat predictable life, one that feels “good enough”. It’s modest, it’s measurable, and it works for many. But the kind of happiness I believe in is something far more elusive—and far more powerful. It’s the ability to bear fruit. The Latin root of the word says it plainly: felix means fertile. To be happy, in this sense, is to bloom into who you are. It’s the power to generate, to create, to unfold, to live in full alignment with one’s uniqueness. Happiness is emergence, not execution.
Seen this way, contentment can lead to a life that’s just positive enough—stable, sufficient, but rarely overflowing. Meaning may chart a direction, but without being anchored in the self, it can turn hollow. You can chase a mission, but if it doesn’t rise from something singular and deeply personal, it’s just someone else’s story playing out in your life.
The truth is, you can't find true meaning without first losing your way—without wandering, stumbling, and breaking your own rules. That’s the gift of psychological richness: it’s the open field where the seeds of selfhood are sown. A rich life gives space to stumble and recover, to explore with no clear destination. It invites you into the honest, playful work of becoming, where the self is not a goal but a process.
And so, we’ve turned full circle: a rich life is one that finds expression. And a life that expresses—one that blossoms—is, by its very nature, a happy life. Not because it is painless or certain, but because it is full. Full of texture, motion, and soul. Psychology has taught us how to quantify happiness and meaning. Maybe now, it's time we learn how to envision richness.
Because a good life isn’t only one that functions, nor merely one that fulfills a mission. It is, more than anything, a life worth remembering. Sometimes, you just have to go on an adventure.
In Author’s Words
Quote n.° 1:
A psychologically rich life is a life filled with diverse, unusual, interesting experiences that change your perspective; a life with twists and turns; a dramatic, eventful life instead of a simple and straightforward one; a life with multiplicity and complexity; a life with lots of stops, detours, and turning points; a life that feels like a long, winding hike rather than many laps of the same racing circuit. […] Over time, the accumulation of psychologically rich experiences makes for a psychologically rich life, one with a distinct multitude of flavors. A psychologically rich life is, well, rich in terms of life experiences.
Quote n.° 2:
The comfort and security of a happy or meaningful life provide a safety net that a psychologically rich life, with all its unknowns, often lacks. Yet the paradox of happiness and meaning is that the complacency they foster can make for an incomplete life with major regrets, doubts, and unanswered questions.
Quote n.° 3:
Humans do have a natural ability to heal and recover from negative mood states. This is what Dan Gilbert, Tim Wilson, and their colleagues call the “psychological immune system.” Just as the biological immune system kicks in when a virus enters the body, the psychological immune system automatically kicks in when an undesirable event happens.
Quote n.° 4:
If you feel pressure to feel happy all the time, remember that it is OK to be sad, angry, or fearful every now and then. These emotions add complexity and richness to your inner life. And if you’re already happy with your life, you’re doing great. But take a moment to reflect on your satisficer mindset. Perhaps there could be more to life than coziness and small joys, at least once in a while. Happiness is not the only way to lead a good life.
Quote n.° 5:
A psychologically rich day is a day when you experience something unfamiliar, feel a wide range of emotions, and gain a new perspective on life.
Quote n.° 6:
A playful mindset can help people who are psychologically stuck move past their low points and enjoy the journey, not just the outcome. A spontaneous action could help us experience life without prior planning. Some of the most interesting experiences we have are often things we do on a whim.
Quote n.° 7:
Personality traits alone do not determine our capacity for psychological richness: we can all learn to foster psychological richness through playfulness and spontaneity.
Quote n.° 8:
It is possible to achieve psychological richness indirectly through books, movies, and art. But not all reading or watching experiences are rich. So what is the key to a psychologically rich aesthetic experience? First, while reading or watching, one gets so immersed in the narrative world described in the story that they don’t notice minor changes in the physical world around them (e.g., someone entering the room): a complete melding of attention, imagery, and feeling that psychologists call “transportation.” They have to be transported to the narrative world and experience the events in the story as if they were in them themselves. Second, just as in a physical experience, not every immersive experience is psychologically rich. It also has to be memorable.
Quote n.° 9:
The more interesting stories you have, the more psychologically rich your life is. […] The bottom line is not how you tell a story per se, but what kinds of experiences you actually have, whether you reflect on them, and whether you can keep them in your psychological memorabilia box.
Quote n.° 10:
Some of the richest experiences in life involve finding something new in a familiar person, object, or place.
👋🏼 Make the most of it! Until next time, S.
