In her new book, The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It, philosophy professor Lorraine Besser looks at how novel and challenging experiences are critical in bringing the elusive “good life” within reach. Jessie Raymond ’90 talked with Besser this past fall.
What prompted you to write about the idea of the “good life”?
Five or six years ago, I started working on this research project in collaboration with a psychologist. And we thought that there was something kind of missing from all the discussions of the good life, something beyond being happy and finding meaning in what you do. We set out to explore this area of psychologically rich experiences—those that tend to be novel, complex, challenging. They hit our minds in a certain way and allow us to have unstructured thoughts and emotions that aren’t typically accessed when we’re in our day-to-day. The “interesting” in The Art of the Interestingdescribes how these psychologically rich experiences feel.
So, are interesting experiences the secret to the good life?
They’re part of it. Think of the good life in terms of a three-legged stool, where the legs are happiness (derived from pleasurable experiences, having fun), meaning (derived from things that give us purpose, like pursuing a career or raising a family), and psychological richness, which grows out of interesting experiences. These are important parts of all our lives, no matter who we are. We’re very tapped into happiness and meaning, but I don’t think we’re getting to the goal, because for a lot of people, something’s missing.
Do you think it’s common for people to feel that way?
I think a lot of people get stuck in this kind of scene of working during the weekdays and then just recovering on the weekends. I think there are many people who are in this cycle. Whether or not they come to the realization that there might be more, or that this is not a fully robust way of living, is something else.
Have you been guilty of this?
I’m a professor, I’m in this industry, I can go very single-mindedly into writing a book, focusing on my teaching, doing something. I’m trying to learn to break out of that and tell myself, This is going to leave you really impoverished at the end of the day. But sometimes it’s like, No, I’ve just got to get there. This is where I’m working on the skill of learning and recognizing that I can do more and that I need more, that there are three legs to the good life stool, not just the meaningpart. Which leg is most important is different for everyone, but we still need the other two.
“Doing interesting things” sounds easy enough, when you have the time and things are going well. But what about when everything is going wrong?
The challenges are the moments of panic where it just feels like things are too heavy, too much pressure. One of the lessons that we can learn is how to approach these situations differently. You can train your mind, even through little difficulties, to notice things outside of you without bringing in all that evaluation and doom and just give yourself the moment. You’re not denying anything of what is happening, but you’re giving yourself the space to recognize that there’s a different way of approaching these challenges other than seeing them as bad.
One of the important and affirming aspects of our research is that it shows that these complicated situations and painful feelings can be part of a good life. We don’t have to hide our traumatic experiences or run from complex feelings.
Are some people, just by nature, more inclined to sort of roll with punches than others?
We’re all coming from different points. One of the things you want to do is learn who you are, how reactive you are, and how you approach challenges and the ways in which they negatively affect you—and especially to know what you do in the face of challenge, in the face of stress. What do you do in the face of something new? These are just pieces of information that we need in order to figure out how to have more interesting experiences.
Has your view of the good life been affected by your own experience?
Yes. This goes back to when I was first thinking about this research, and I had gone through a period of my life where it had been very much defined by this “work hard, rest hard” mentality. Coming out of this period, I had tenure, I had a new book, I had a failed marriage. The impact of going through a divorce and having one stage of your life clearly ending is that that forces you to reflect on how that stage had been going for you, and how you want your life in the future to be going for you. With the combination of work and all the adulting and having kids, your sense of self can get kind of buried, and you can forget what makes you passionate about what you care about.
I’m very passionate about my job and I love what I do. I love my students. I love my research. But there’s a lot of other things I like to do, too. During a divorce, a lot of people think, What did I used to do? I was like, I just love water; I used to love sailing. And then I started prioritizing more of that time in my life. I was like, All right, why can’t I sail now? I’m close to water, I can do these things. Just sparking into your passions, that’s the way to do it, to really think about what you’re passionate about and give space to those things.
I met my new husband and started dating him around the same time I was figuring this stuff out, and he was just such an interesting person for me. He was so spontaneous. The way he approaches life really taught me a lot about how to have interesting experiences. And it also taught me the importance of really bringing yourself and what you’re passionate about to your life.
In the book, you talk about how we wouldn’t want life to be an endless pleasure machine—
So boring.
—which suggests that to have a good life is not to have a constantly enjoyable life, right?
Right. I worry about the messages being sent that everything’s about happiness; life is just not like that. We can’t always feel happy. We will not always be able to successfully find meaning. And we need to recognize that challenges and painful emotions are simply part of life; they don’t prevent you from having a good life. Otherwise, you’ll feel so doomed when these bad things happen, like your chances for living a good life are sunk. It’s just not true.
You say not everyone is open to new experiences, but they should try to be. Why?
More openness to novel experiences is going to lead to more psychological richness. So, it’s worthwhile to try to see where you can move on this spectrum. And you do that simply by trying challenging things.
Like jumping out of a plane?
Not necessarily. Everyone’s idea of “challenging” is different. I knew someone who, as an adult, was eating grilled cheese all the time, and still had very narrow eating habits, so for them it was simply forcing themselves to eat something different. It’s these little things. Don’t feel like if you are a person with relatively low openness to having novel experiences that they aren’t available to you. Simply by doing very small things that help you develop more openness, you give yourself the opportunity for more experiences, more psychological richness.
The book’s subtitle uses the word “cultivate” in relation to the “good life.” Why “cultivate” rather than “attain” or “achieve”?
It’s an ongoing skill. I’m thinking about ways that we can bring our minds to experiences that will help them become more interesting, something as simple as actively observing what’s around you when taking your commutes or your walks. The research shows that these are little moments that are easy to get, and that over time they have an important cumulative effect. And what they lead toward is a more expanded sense of self.
You discuss how you can find psychological richness through friendships, but also through solitude.
Relationships and connections are important to so many aspects of life. But being able to develop some comfort being in solitude can also be very important. Interesting experiences happen in your mind, and they happen most freely when you’re just following your instincts about where to go and where to explore. While it can be helpful to have somebody else along for the ride, you don’t need it. And the more that you can develop a comfort with solitude, the more you can practice the art of the interesting within solitude.
You devote a whole chapter to the importance of friends, but not just any friends—interesting friends.
Yes, because you can learn through them. More interesting people generate interesting experiences for you. You can also learn a lot from how they live and how they go about their experiences. You can take that skill from them and learn from them to adopt it for yourself.
I keep finding that when I meet people who I don’t expect to find a connection with, we always seem to find a common interest or a bit of personal history. I love that.
The thing about people is that they’re never just what they present. Interesting experiences arise from complexity and novelty, and people are complex. So when you sit down to talk with somebody, especially somebody new, you’ll be learning new things, and that’s a source of interest.
How do you meet interesting people?
Could be your coworkers. Even if you think you’ve known them because you’ve worked beside them in casual office spaces, you can, by sitting down and having a conversation outside of that space, uncover the layers of this person. I also affirm this idea of having more interesting social events. One of my favorite sections in the book is how to have better parties. When we make an effort to be more creative and bring people together and have a theme or play games, it’s really helps enrich our lives.
What is it that keeps some people from pursuing the things they love? Do they feel like they’re too busy, that they don’t deserve it, or maybe that society expects something different from them?
I think it’s just so easy to get anchored to your circumstances, and to say, OK, this is where I am, this is what I’m doing. It’s tempting to think we don’t have time for things, that we don’t have time to improve our lives, that we have to make big changes or have resources. None of these things are as true as we think. There is room for challenging, novel, engaging thoughts and activities, and you can have them all and live a better life.
What do you tell someone who is feeling like they’re stuck in their current situation? They’ve read the books and listened to the podcasts on how to find happiness and meaning in their lives, but they feel like they’re just plodding along and never getting closer to the good life, whatever they might imagine that to look like.
Don’t forget that you’re the one who’s living out this life. We’re really good at executive functioning; we can plan and set goals and all of that great stuff, but that’s really only one aspect of our mind. Instead of only thinking about what we want and how to get it, I want to encourage folks to think about who they want to be.
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