There is a particular kind of year that people describe in a lowered voice. The year the marriage ended, or the move to a city that never quite worked, or the job that fell apart and took a version of the future with it. Ask whether they were happy in it and the answer is usually no. Ask whether they would give it back — hand it over in exchange for a calmer stretch of the same length — and something more complicated crosses their face. Often the answer is still no.
We tend to file that away as a contradiction, or as the mind quietly making peace with what it couldn’t change. A pair of psychologists has spent years arguing it might be something else: a sign that we measure a good life along a dimension most of our language leaves out.
A third kind of good life
For most of its history, the psychology of well-being has offered two answers to the question of what makes a life good. One is the happy life — comfort, security, frequent pleasant feeling, few hard days. The other is the meaningful life — a sense of purpose and significance, of the parts cohering into something that matters. Almost all of the field’s research sorts into one camp or the other.
In a 2022 paper in Psychological Review, Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate proposed a third: the psychologically rich life. Whether or not it is happy, and whether or not it feels meaningful, such a life is thick with variety, interest, and experiences that shift a perspective. A rich life, in their framing, is one with novelty and complexity in it — the trip that unsettled you, the conversation that rearranged a belief, the difficult stretch you came out of seeing differently. Happiness, they suggest, tends to yield personal satisfaction; meaning tends to yield a sense of contribution; richness tends toward something closer to wisdom.
They are careful about what they are and aren’t claiming. The three overlap — happy lives are often meaningful, rich lives are sometimes happy — and they do not argue that a rich life is the better one. Their claim is narrower and stranger: that richness is real, distinct from the other two, and something a fair number of people actually want.
What the numbers actually say
The wanting is where the evidence begins. When the researchers asked people across nine countries to choose just one — a happy life, a meaningful life, or a psychologically rich one — the happy life won everywhere. That part surprises no one. What is notable is the minority who didn’t choose it. Between 7 and 17 percent picked the rich life over the other two, around 13 percent in the United States, and the figure held with unusual steadiness across very different cultures. A small but real share of people, offered the trade, would take interesting over comfortable.
A second study came at the same question sideways. Instead of asking what people wanted, it asked about the single event each person most wished they could undo, and then whether undoing it would have made life happier, more meaningful, or psychologically richer. In a national sample of 1,611 Americans, 28 percent said richer. Among 680 Korean adults, 35 percent said the same. In both countries, then, roughly a third of people’s deepest regrets were, in effect, regrets about a life made less rich — a road not taken, an experience refused.
Other threads point the same way. Students tracked across a semester abroad grew measurably richer in this sense by the end, while their happiness and their sense of meaning barely moved; people who knew them well noticed the change too. When the researchers coded obituaries, the lives marked by more dramatic and difficult events — bereavements and divorces among them — were rated as psychologically richer, and as less happy.
It would be easy to hear all this as a case for hardship, so it is worth saying that richness is not only made of catastrophe. In the same body of work, people reported richer days simply when they took a short excursion, and found an escape room richer the harder it was to solve. Novelty and a shift of view can arrive in small, ordinary doses. The through-line is not suffering; it is experience that moves you off your usual footing.
The part worth doubting
It would still be easy to read all of this as permission to romanticize pain, and that reading would be a mistake — the authors’ own included. A few cautions are worth holding onto.
The first is that this is a young idea. The framework is only a few years old, and calling psychological richness a third dimension of the good life is a proposal other researchers are still testing, not a settled finding. The second is that most of the evidence is correlational. That obituaries of harder lives read as richer does not mean hardship builds richness; the difficult and the rich may simply travel together, or people drawn to rich lives may court difficulty. The studies mostly cannot say which way the arrow points. The third, easiest to forget, is that the happy life still wins nearly every vote. Richness is a minority preference, not a hidden mandate, and “less happy” is a real cost the research names plainly rather than waving away.
There is a quieter risk in the framing itself: that it can be used to tidy up suffering that doesn’t want tidying. Not every hard year gets redeemed into richness. Some are just hard.
What this can and cannot do
So this is not an argument for seeking out pain, and it is not a technique for feeling better about the pain you’re in. What follows is a reading of one research program from the outside — not counsel, not diagnosis, not therapy. What the work can offer is a slightly wider vocabulary: a way of noticing that the worth of an experience and its pleasantness are not the same measure, and that a life can be going badly by the standard of comfort while still adding something you would not choose to erase.
If you are sitting inside fresh grief, or a loss that has not loosened its grip, that recognition is no substitute for support, and a good therapist or counselor is worth far more than any reframe. The point of a third measure is not to talk anyone out of wanting to be happy. It is to explain why, looking back, so many people find they wanted more than that.
The years we would never call happy are not always the years we would erase — and it may be that some part of us has been keeping a different ledger all along.
