As a guest on the Jim Rutt Show, philosopher Lorraine Besser recently talked about her book The Art of Interesting. One concept she mentioned has been going around in mind since.
There are those that argue that a good life is a pleasurable life, or at least a life without suffering, and those that argue that a good life is a meaningful life.
Besser argues that for a good life both pleasure and meaning are necessary, but that a good life also has a third requirement, which is psychological richness or variety. A good life needs all three: Pleasure, meaning and variety. One source of endless variety that I like to think about is nature.
Pleasure, meaning and variety are orthogonal, which means that it’s possible to experience only one but not the others. Below I tried to think (with some help from ChatGPT) of examples of all seven possible combinations:
| Example | Pleasurable | Meaningful | Interesting (variety) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A warm bath | Yes | No | No |
| Voting | No | Yes | No |
| Solving a Rubik’s cube | No | No | Yes |
| Celebrating a friend’s success | Yes | Yes | No |
| Tourism | Yes | No | Yes |
| A good scientific discussion | No | Yes | Yes |
| Falling in love | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Nehaveigur 