“The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It” is a book about living the good life. Or what the book calls an interesting life. Beyond happiness and meaning. It immediately reminded me of “The Not So Secret Rules to the Game of Life“
The good life versus a rich life
It’s downright unreasonable to expect that our current passions and values provide the foundation for our best possible lives. The good life versus a rich life. Psychological richness as the focus.Thinking about the kinds of experiences that challenge you, that force you to feel different emotions, that leave a dent in your mind. There’s no sense in, nor reason for, settling into a mediocre life. All it takes is to start paying attention to what lights you up.
Are you leading your best possible life?
Happy lives are full of pleasant experiences, the stuff that feels good. In contrast, meaningful lives are full of fulfilling experiences. Happiness and meaning, experiencing pleasure and fulfilment, are important aspects of the Good Life. However, a RICH LIFE describes a life full of engaging experiences, which may not be pleasant and may not deliver fulfilment but are nonetheless among the most exciting, rewarding, and impactful experiences many of us have. They are the interesting ones.
Happiness is limited
There is a limit to happiness and pleasure. We aren’t just talking about the visceral, physical sense of feeling good—the massages and the orgasms. There are the pleasures of enjoying company, laughing, reading, and taking in art. Scratching. Food. Wine. Sunshine. Hugging. Catnapping. Happiness is always just a fleeting moment.
Pleasure is limited
Pleasure is designed to be a reward and has a natural shelf life. You can’t experience pleasure just because you value it or because you want it. Most of the time, we have to step back, value other things, and just let it happen to feel pleasure. For example, once we start to see our friends as sources of pleasure, our relationships turn transactional.
The tips and questions
- What is your happy place?
- When was the last time you experienced passion in your life? Has it been too long?
- What are my pursuits doing for me? How are they making my life better?
- Call up the most interesting experience you’ve had.
- Pick out a memorable experience, maybe a “first time.” The first time you rode the subway.
- Try to remember what it was like to be a kid in the world. Tap into your inner child.
- Open the news feed or type a random word into Wikipedia. See what you are drawn to. See what sparks your attention. Go ahead and click that link. Notice if you start to feel any emotions rising—anger, shock, intrigue, whatever.
- Stop planning everything.
It is not purpose
“Purpose” involves the contributions one makes to the world as part of the Good Life. However, trying to discover one’s unique purpose is a crapshoot, a pursuit largely available only to those with privilege and without dependents who can get away with quitting their jobs on a whim, picking up and moving to another country, or surviving for years without a paycheck while they strive to discover their purpose.
It is not fulfilment
“If only I get this, I’ll be fulfilled” mentality. Psychologists describe this as the arrival fallacy. The irony of fulfilment. We focus so much on fulfilling one part of ourselves, that one little part wrapped up in purpose, achievement, and meaning, that we forget about the rest, like being moved to tears by a book.
It is not mindfulness
Mindfulness is the ability to be present in the world. Its most basic contrast is distraction. Mindfulness describes a form of attention to what’s happening in your mind. The technical term for this is metacognitive awareness of your mental state. Too often, we think of mindfulness as a tool to detach from our thoughts and emotions. The danger of mindfulness lies in its suggestiveness that being present means being detached from one’s emotions.
It is awe and passion
Awe is different. Awe is awesome. It’s one of the emotions we feel when connected to a greater thing. So is passion. Both are barometers of resonance. “Resonance” describes the feeling we get when doing something that clicks with us, connects to and sparks our passions. It’s the gut feeling that arises when something meshes with us on a deep level. Feelings of ease and wholeness indicate that what you’re doing resonates with your own passions. Flow.
A more interesting way to use our minds
Crossword puzzlers and Wordlers know something about the joys of using reason without getting caught up in plans and purposes. To simply engage, to wander in thoughts without structure or aim. Read “The end of absence” https://www.ronimmink.com/being-old-is-good/. Embracing the unique promise of the interesting. The interestingdescribes the value attached to our experiences of psychological richness. It is correlated with novelty, challenge, and complexity, which suggests that these are the conditions that stimulate the interesting. That included boredom, counting blades of grass, solitude,
Cognitive engagement
The interesting is the quality of our experiences. That means that the interesting describes how certain experiences feel. Test it out: Reading a book can be interesting or boring—it’s the same activity, but one that feels very different to experience. The interesting arises from cognitive engagement. The interesting arises from our minds. That means that experiencing the interesting is entirely within our control. Build on this and see what happens when your mind starts to engage without purpose and structure. You’ll find yourself thinking new thoughts, which is the mark of engagement. The interesting is prolific in more interesting experiences. One of the distinctive aspects of psychological richness is the experience of a variety of emotions, emotions that the other dimensions of the Good Life simply don’t include.
Interesting vs pleasure
In this respect, the interesting functions in exactly the opposite way of pleasure. It doesn’t fade away or disappear like pleasure, leaving you there, wanting more, to no avail. And that makes it so much better than pleasure. Because the interesting immediately and concurrently arises along with the cognitive engagement it’s attached to—it’s that qualitative feature of our experience of cognitive engagement—the interesting pays off immediately and reliably. Interesting experiences capture and stimulate our minds. Have you ever walked away from an experience so moving, so complex, that something in you has shifted forever? Then you know the interesting.
Unpredictable
Wanting or desiring an interesting experience won’t make whatever we go on to do interesting. Also, notice how hard it is to predict what we’ll find interesting. Since it’s hard to predict what we’ll find interesting, it is hard to plan for it. Obviously. How can we plan what we can’t predict? Trying things out will help us learn what we’re passionate about and will put us on a path toward living better lives. Fundamentally, to experience and create an interesting experience on your own, you’ve got to be open to it.
Mindfulness 2.0
We should go beyond the mind and develop mindfulness in our environments. We often forget the magic of such small moments. Mindfulness 2.0 is all about bringing fresh eyes to your day-to-day. Try to notice these two things about your routine: what you see (and don’t) and how you evaluate it.
Curiosity
Curiosity can make us alive. Curiosity can fuel our adventures. Curiosity can stimulate the ripples of the interesting. Curiosity arises only when we think there is something to learn. We’ll never be curious if we don’t think there is something to learn. There is always something more to learn. Curiosity arises in conditions of uncertainty, and uncertainty forces the mind to engage. Part of the reason curiosity is such a powerful fire starter for the interesting is that it represents what psychologists call a state of “optimal arousal.”
Optimal arousal
In contrast, a state of optimal arousal describes the place where our minds are stimulated to a degree that doesn’t overwhelm us. It is an individual thing, but really, we know it when we’ve got it. We’re at optimal arousal when we feel the engagement clicking in, when the wonder and the whys start to fuel that engagement, taking our minds to places unknown but welcome. So, let’s open up our curiosity and allow it to encompass our minds and drive us. We just don’t want to forget that puzzle pieces are not meant to be eaten, even if they look like candy, and that if we are light enough, helium balloons can take us far, far away.
Creativity
Interesting experiences are expressions of creativity: The ripples of new thoughts and emotions they beget move us away from our starting points and leave us in new positions, begetting more ripples. That’s creativity, and it is within us all. Creativity comes in all forms, but what unites forms of creativity is that they push the boundaries of the status quo.
Comfort zones
To experience the interesting, we’ve got to be open to pushing our comfort zone. By understanding the boundaries of our individual comfort zones and danger zones, we learn how to find our zones of the interesting. When you’re in the interesting zone, you can embrace fully and engage with a challenge, feel the thoughts ripple, and your emotions arise over and over again. You’re becoming the master of this whole enterprise.
Novelty
Novelty is a mark of psychological richness; novel experiences force us to engage and think. Novelty generates the interesting through stimulating cognitive engagement, which begets new emotions. What makes something novel for any one person depends entirely on their past experiences. There are all sorts of ways to embrace novelty. One way, as we’ve seen, is simply noticing it. Noticing novelty enriches our everyday lives.
Break your routine
One of the best things about novelty is how accessible it is. And how easy it is to find the interesting. Use chopsticks instead of a fork. Change up your handwriting and make note-taking more interesting. Take the back roads to work. Engage with the convenience store clerk you see every day. Start hitting a new coffee shop, or start hitting your favourite coffee shop at a different time of day. Create some serendipity.
Relationships
Friends make everything better. Relationships bring together people with different experiences, responsiveness, and interests. They also impact our experiences, stimulating individual growth, shaping our perspectives, and helping us feel.
“A Good Life doesn’t mean an easy one.”
Living on easy street is a recipe for boredom and a truly impoverished life. If you’re on easy street, start opening your eyes for the exits that will challenge you and take you on the road to the Good Life. Tuning into our guts, following our instincts, and embracing challenges help us find the interesting. The Good Life involves a diverse range of experiences, many of which test our minds and generate complex emotions. Complexity enriches our lives. Rather than shrinking away from it, we ought to embrace it.
