Psychological Richness Part 2: Biases, Blind Spots, and the Postmodern Trap

Introduction

When we left off, we’d mapped out the three dimensions of a good life—happiness, meaning, and psychological richness—and how each complements the others. Happiness comforts. Meaning guides. Richness changes. But now it’s time to ask a harder question: what happens when we turn the microscope back on the model itself?

Psychological richness is a compelling idea, but like all models it is useful despite being incomplete. Rather than become a blind cheerleader for this novel aspect of “the good life”, I’d like to dive in deep with my healthy skepticism and really challenge where the issues are with the model. And my goal is not to kill Caesar, but to place the model in context – knowing the limitations and most appropriate applications of a tool makes it much more useful. Spoiler alert: Richness holds up as a valuable framework. And that’s why I’m taking the effort of a critique so seriously.

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The Science and Its Limits (and Growth)

Oishi and Westgate’s original 2021 paper laid a fascinating foundation. Using linguistic analysis, retrospective life stories, and even obituary coding, they demonstrated support for their hypothesis that a rich life is distinct from a happy or meaningful one. The initial work was elegant, but used small samples and methods that relied more on creative inference than robust measurement. That’s the downside of being first. The upside is that they laid a solid foundation which others have since built upon.

The Psychologically Rich Life Questionnaire (PRLQ) has now been translated and tested in multiple countries—Japan, Germany, Turkey, Korea, and the United States, among others—with encouraging cross-cultural consistency. To be fair to the field, it’s worth noting explicitly that the PRLQ has undergone increasing psychometric refinement since the original paper. Its reliability and validity metrics have strengthened across studies, and its translation into multiple languages has been followed by cultural calibration rather than simple linguistic copying. This strengthens confidence that the construct is measuring something real rather than merely reflecting Western academic preferences. In other words, what started as a speculative framework is evolving into a legitimate psychological construct.

Still, even as the model gains empirical traction, its theoretical blind spots will require more time and testing to be completely mitigated. Early iterations of the research were narrow and culturally homogenous. To aspire to universality, the research must broaden past the  WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) academic bubble from whence it spawned. Early work to do that provides hope. The fact that the idea of richness resonates globally suggests it taps into something deeply human.

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Political and Cultural Biases

Full disclosure: I am always on guard for political biases—others’ and my own. Here’s where my antennae go up: Oishi himself notes that psychological richness correlates with wisdom and progressive political attitudes. That phrasing raised my eyebrow the first time I read it—not because I’m allergic to “progressive,” but because it risks collapsing moral flexibility into moral virtue.

Wisdom, by any serious definition, is not ideology. It’s discernment—the ability to hold conflicting truths and know which applies when. Linking wisdom to political identity may make for a catchy conference slide depending on your audience, but for someone who began his education in a Jesuit institution, it reads as sloppy philosophy.

Politics and personality correlate as tendencies, not destinies. Research does show that people higher in openness to experience tend to lean liberal, while those higher in conscientiousness lean conservative—but that doesn’t mean liberals live richer lives or conservatives live more meaningful ones. It simply means personality shapes how we pursue the good life. The same curiosity that pulls a liberal toward cultural novelty might pull a conservative toward historical depth. Both can lead to psychological richness if paired with humility and reflection.

And this is where richness shows real promise: it values perspective-taking without requiring moral surrender. The ability to step outside one’s worldview and learn from it doesn’t require abandoning conviction—it requires conviction tempered by curiosity. (More on this in the final installment.)

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The Postmodern Drift

One of Oishi’s underlying assumptions is that a good life is whatever an individual feels it to be. He calls it a “subjectively good life.” That’s a distinctly postmodern stance—and it’s where the philosophical trouble begins.

If everyone defines “good” for themselves, the word loses its shape. Aristotle didn’t ask what people wanted from a good life; he asked what life is for. He argued that virtue—acting in accordance with reason and moral purpose—was the universal path to flourishing. Oishi, intentionally or not, replaces that with relativism: if your life feels rich, it is rich.

There’s a contradiction between science (the pursuit of fact and the characterization of an objective reality) and postmodernism (there is no objective reality, merely different subjectivity seen thru a single factor – power). Strange that experiments to demonstrate a hypothesis would be interpreted through this lens. Anchoring science in objective reality provides a good analogy for why we need to anchor richness in the same. 

When relativism meets affluence, it tends to collapse into nihilism—the sense that nothing is true or valuable beyond one’s own experience. And that one’s own experience, even if expressed confidently, can’t be expressed as a recommendation of the good or the right. This is that winking-at-humility false modesty we see everywhere: podcasters proclaim, “This isn’t the right way, but it worked for me,” as if abdicating responsibility for their own ideas somehow makes the idea more profound. Sigh…

But psychological richness need not fall into this trap. The beauty of the concept lies in its potential to reconnect openness to novelty with meaning. As I wrote in my notes: “Moral relativism has crept toward nihilism; richness can fill that vacuum by making the search for truth experiential rather than abandoned.” In that sense, richness can be a corrective to the lazy relativism that masquerades as wisdom.

And this is the philosophical pivot point: richness only works when it is anchored. Untethered novelty leads to nihilism; anchored novelty leads to growth. This is why psychological richness must remain connected to humility, curiosity, and meaning—otherwise it risks becoming just another aesthetic of self-indulgence.

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Integration: Positive Psychology’s Overlaps and Allies

For all its growing pains, psychological richness fits neatly within the ecosystem of established positive psychology theories. This is where I like to live as a Positive Psychology coach. All of these models, theories and frameworks are true and incomplete. As a practitioner (rather than a researcher) of Positive Psychology I tend to gravitate toward the practical application of these concepts. When they overlap and start to show consistent themes among many of them, I’m reassured that the strategies I work with my clients on are grounded, real and likely to be helpful!

• Broaden-and-Build Theory (Barbara Fredrickson) Fredrickson’s model shows that positive emotions broaden our thought–action repertoires, actually cause a physiologic expansion in our vision and perception, leading to exploration, creativity, and social connection. Over time, those broadened behaviors build psychological and social resources. Richness is what happens when that expansion becomes a way of life—when we deliberately seek variety and complexity as fuel for growth.
• Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci) SDT argues that well-being depends on three needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Richness feeds all three. Novel experiences affirm autonomy (“I can choose differently”), challenge competence (“I can learn/experience something new”), and deepen relatedness (“I can connect with people unlike me”).
• PRISM Framework (Seligman & Kellerman). As discussed in Tomorrowmind, Seligman’s model names innovation and creativity as core workplace resilience skills. Their advice to pursue novelty, embrace ambiguity, and tolerate uncertainty is psychological richness by another name. Where Oishi talks about lived variety, Seligman operationalizes it as a future-facing survival skill.
• PERMA and Character Strengths. If PERMA captures the components of flourishing—Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment—then richness threads through all five. It enhances engagement through curiosity, strengthens relationships through empathy, and deepens meaning through perspective. In VIA terms, richness depends on curiosity, love of learning, bravery, and humility—a formidable cocktail of growth strengths.

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Where the Model Still Shines

Despite its vulnerabilities, the idea of a psychologically rich life adds something essential to the human conversation. It reminds us that variety isn’t chaos—it’s the medium through which we refine who we are, and the mechanism through which we become wiser. It gives permission to value experience not despite being messy, uncomfortable, or unresolved, but because of these factors. And it acknowledges that suffering, properly processed, can yield not only meaning but also imagination and depth.

Psychological richness may never replace happiness or meaning, and it doesn’t need to. Its job isn’t to compete—it’s to develop and nuance. To add color, friction, and movement to a life that might otherwise flatten into comfort or self-importance.

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Conclusion: It’s a keeper

Every theory of the good life eventually reflects its author’s worldview. Aristotle gave us virtue. Seligman gave us flourishing. Oishi gave us richness. Each is partly true, and despite the flaws all are useful.

If the first wave of positive psychology asked how to be happy, and the second asked how to be meaningful, the third may well ask how to be interesting. The danger is taking any of these good life aspects to the extreme, and at the exclusion of the others. If we only chase novelty, we forget why it matters. If we only pursue meaning, we chase it right to misery.  Chasing pure hedonism with reckless abandon bears no further comment.  The promise is that, if done with humility and reflection, we rediscover curiosity as both moral and psychological virtue. Richness can be a third leg to balance what is truly the good life.

Next time, we’ll take that promise out of the lab and take it for a spin. Can variety and novelty actually shift our perspective? I’ll tackle that in Part 3: Living Richly…Music, Travel, Discomfort, and Growth, where I recount a recent adventure through the lens of psychological richness.