The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Lorraine Besser. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Before we get started, I’d like to ask our listeners to consider giving us a five star rating on their podcast app. Ratings help us raise our visibility on the apps which help us build our audience, which lets us continue to attract the great guests that we run on the show. And if you’re feeling extra motivated, consider writing a review. Thanks. Today’s guest is Lorraine Besser. Lorraine is a professor of philosophy at Middlebury College, and her primary areas of research is moral psychology. She’s particularly interested in the topics of happiness and well-being, and her work frequently draws on psychological and neuroscientific research on these themes. Welcome Lorraine.
Lorraine: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
Jim: I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I really enjoyed the book, it really landed for me. I was on almost couldn’t put it down, but not quite. I think I read it in about two and a half days, something like that. In addition to the book we’re going to talk about today, she’s written a couple other books, Eudaemonic Ethics: the Philosophy and Psychology of Living Well. We’ll talk about Eudaemonic ethics as we get in line, The Philosophy of Happiness: Interdisciplinary introduction. But today we’re going to discuss her very recent book, I think it came out in September, The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate it. As my listeners know, I don’t do self-help books very often. When her agent approached me and I looked at it, “Is this goddamn self-help book?” And I go, “Maybe a little bit,” but there’s far more to it than that.
So even though it has a little bit of self-help stuff in it, don’t be afraid it’s a book well worth reading. In addition to the book, I also read two of her relatively recent papers, one called Reimagining the Quality of Life, and The Interesting and the Pleasant. As always we’ll have links to everything we talk about on the episode page at jimruttshow.com. And one final note before we hop in, some of my fans refer to me as Salty Jim for letting fly with the F-bombs and such. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have eight fucks and six shits in the book, and definitely livens things up with them. Impressed that your publisher lets you do that.
Lorraine: Thank you. Badge of honor, I guess.
Jim: Absolutely. So if you’re a sensitive soul and you might be triggered by such, please tune out now. You start out by saying in the introduction, “I’ve dedicated my career to thinking about the very same problems that plague my personal life, namely what makes life good.” You tell a fair bit of your personal tale in this book, which I found both engaging and brave. Maybe tell us a bit about the big turn in your personal life that led you personally to experience the exploration of the good life.
Lorraine: Thank you. So when I was right about 40, my husband at the time and I broke up. And he moved pretty far away from myself and our children, and I was really left in quite a place there. I had been tenure track at Middlebury College, which we know is a very stressful, challenging time. And I had two young children, they were five and seven, and I was pretty much on my own. And I knew what I had to do at that point was really to make a decision. I could either bear through it, suffer, push, push, push, or I could make some choices and start living well.
And that was really the first time I thought about all of these issues so much. But that was really the first time I realized I really needed to start taking it home, and thinking really honestly about the questions of what really makes life go well. I’d been really focused on my job and achieving things, and two focused on that I think. And I realized I could take a step back, I could still be very successful, but I could open up my life to other things.
Jim: Very nice. And she talks throughout the book, the sprinkled little personal stories and talks about her new husband and all these sorts of things. Very charming actually. I want to meet your husband sometime. He sounds like a great guy.
Lorraine: He’s very interesting.
Jim: Anyway, let’s start out with the history of the idea. I think we could say that this book is about the good life. And at least since the Greeks and no doubt long before that people have been thinking about the good life. But let’s at least start with the Greeks, and tell us a little bit about the history of the idea of the good life.
Lorraine: Thank you. So Aristotle was one of our first philosophers to really press the question, what does it mean to live well? And the way that he approached it was thinking about what the highest end for human beings is. And at that point, as part of his argument, he considered two different ways of living. And these two different ways of living have gone on to really been influential in how we’ve been thinking about the good life. The first is a life full of pleasure, this is a life of happiness. And he calls this hedonia, we’re familiar with that in terms of hedonism, and he introduces this life. But he doesn’t think it’s a great one for human beings, because he thought that human beings had way more potential to experience things than just pleasure. So the second thing he introduces is this concept of eudaimonia.
And eudaimonia he framed in terms of a human happiness. So it’s a happiness where we are thriving as a human being, and exercising our distinctive capacities as a human being, which he thought was reason. So basically Aristotle sets up this framework where we can either think about happiness in terms of pleasure, or we can think about a more robust form of happiness, I tend to call it more well-being that he frames in term of eudaimonia, which for him really meant exercising our rational capacities. And for him that was wrapped up in being virtuous. So this is the ultimate goal for Aristotle to exercise reason in accordance with virtue, and that is how we thought we thrived.
Jim: I particularly have always found his approach to virtue to actually be a pretty interesting one and a good one for people who haven’t read their Aristotle, which I highly recommend by the way, pretty good writer. Not as good as Plato, but much better ideas. He mostly says that virtue is in the middle of extremes. For instance, courage is between cowardice and recklessness as an example. He takes his virtues seriously. I’d say he was the first really strong and clear virtue ethicist, which I suspect as you say is related to reason, but certainly not really the same thing.
Lorraine: Yeah, it’s a particular way of using reason. And so he described it as using reason to regulate our emotions, and that’s how he comes up with this idea of the in-between mean states being virtuous. So for the courageous example, we use reason to take that emotional sphere of wrapped around bravery, and to try to hit the right mean in between, and it’s reason that’s doing that work. So it’s reason telling us kind what we should shoot for, that we should shoot for being courageous as opposed to foolhardy or cowardice.
Jim: Now two other schools of thinking about the good life came from the Greeks, or the Ionians, or basically the Greeks, and those are Stoicism and Epicureanism. And Stoicism still to this day has some followers. In fact a fair number of the listeners to the Jim Rutt Show follow Stoicism, at least modern versions of us. Why don’t you tell the audience about what’s first Stoicism is and then Epicureanism?
Lorraine: Yeah, thank you. So Stoicism is really about trying to live in a way that you are in control of your emotions. And that you are really able to regulate how you react to things, and the extent to which our emotions really take us over. So Stoicism, I feel it originated by thinking about things about what can we control and what can we not control? And Epictetus is one of these early Stoics and he famously is thinking about, well, we can’t control when we die. We can’t control how people think about us. We can’t control a lot of things, but we can control our emotions and how it is that we interact and deal with life.
On the other side you have Epicurus and Epicurus is a hedonist, so he’s fundamentally about pleasure, but he has this really unique definition of pleasure that makes it very different than how we ordinarily think about hedonism. So Epicurus thinks that pleasure is the absence of pain. So if there’s no pain, there’s pleasure. It’s different than how we ordinarily think about pleasure as being some extra good feeling, but for Epicurus it was just a life without pain was the goal. And so his hedonism was actually very much a theory of prudence, it was about not going to excess and finding just this way to satisfy our basic needs. So we were no longer in pain, but he wasn’t really after the hedonistic lifestyle that we think of now, which is all about excess.
Jim: Indeed, what is your takeaway on the Greek influence on thinking about the good life? Where did they fall short?
Lorraine: I think that they really harness on these two aspects of human nature. Our capacity to use our reason in ways to thrive, to find meaning, to achieve. And then our capacity to feel pleasure, which is both of these are great capacities, but I don’t think they fully define who we are. And there’s part of us, particularly part of our minds that these analysis really leave out. Our minds are capable of so much more than just engaging in this very rationally orientated, structured reasoning. Our minds can have this unstructured reasoning where we allow our minds to be taken away by curiosity, and we allow it just to ripple out and stimulate new thoughts without having to get anywhere, go anywhere. And it’s in this kind of experience of an unstructured cognitive engagement that I think we find a dimension of the good life that really enhances our life. And this is where this wraps into this idea of psychological richness and experiences that are interesting.
Jim: So this is really the innovation that you guys came up with. Why don’t you talk just a little bit about your collaboration that led to this work and then define, and I will say in the book one thing, if I would’ve been your copy editor, I would’ve been a little bit more careful about cleanly distinguishing psychological richness from interesting, so maybe you can do that for our audience.
Lorraine: Oh, I’m so glad you asked that. It’s a tricky one to get, so let me start with the research. So a number of years ago, right around the same time I was having my own personal challenges, and trying to start fresh on life, and to start living better. Right about this time a psychologist, his name is Dr. Shegae Oshi reached out to me and he had this idea that he was interested in pursuing, which is that the ways in which both philosophers and psychologists had been thinking about the good life is really missing an important part of the good life.
And so philosophers and psychologists have been thinking about this since Aristotle really in terms of this concept of meaning or in terms of pleasure, but we hadn’t really quite noticed all this stuff that happens in between that really does enhance our life. And Dr. Oshi really had this concept and thought that there were this whole range of experiences that we’d overlooked.
And those experiences are experiences typically involved in novel events, experiences that challenge us, introduce complexity. And what they do is they have a particular effect on our minds that stimulates them in a way that allows us to develop new thoughts, new emotions, and they often change our perspective. So psychological richness describes these set of experiences that has this particular impact on our mind. And the interesting is how these experiences feel. So in philosophy we call this the phenomenology of it. It’s like what does it feel like to have these different kinds of thoughts and engagement?
And my argument and my central contribution to this research is to really show that there is this distinctive quality attached to them, which is that they’re interesting and that that’s why we like them, that’s why it’s a good life.
So the psychological research helped us to carve out the set of experiences and show how they were different, and distinct from happiness or meaning, but we needed to go a step further to show that they were good. That’s where I come into play and identified this concept of the interesting, which is again, it’s how these experiences are about unstructured complex cognitive engagement feel on the inside.
Jim: Very interesting. Now, let’s go back a little bit. And as you point out in the book, ever since the Greeks, and maybe before that, people have thought about this distinction between happiness and meaningfulness. Maybe you could lay out some of your case on how those can perhaps be not as entirely contributory to the good life as one might hope. What are their limits, and what are their side effects and drawbacks?
Lorraine: When we look at what it takes to pursue and to get these different aspects of the good life, what we realize is that they can’t play the role that we want them to be. And so let’s take for example, pleasure, which we’ve seen to be this hedonistic view of happiness, that really is a large part of the happiness that gets researched today in terms of psychological research.
And when we look at what it means to experience pleasure and what it means to pursue pleasure, what we realize is that pleasure is something that we experience, but we can only experience it in these carved out brief moments. Pleasure actually derives from our reward system. Evolutionary speaking, pleasure is attached to certain kinds of experiences that we need, and it’s the reward to get us to keep doing what we need.
Jim: You better fuck if you’re going to have kids and continue the species, for instance.
Lorraine: Exactly, right.
Jim: You better eat if you’re going to survive, right?
Lorraine: Yes, yes. And you can’t do it once. It’s not a one-off thing, and then you just get the pleasure for the rest of life because you did one thing. That’s not how it works. It’s got to come into play in these crucial moments where we need them and then drop out, so that we’ll go back, and we’ll do the things that are conducive to our species to living. Of course, at this point, what arises as an evolutionary function has really been modified. Obviously we feel pleasure in so many different sources, but it hasn’t changed the nature of pleasure. Pleasure comes and goes, and so given the kind of thing it is, when we start to pursue it or attach too much meaning on it, we end up in a vicious cycle. So think about what happens when we pursue pleasure, it comes and then it goes, and we want it back, and feels good, and so we want more. And so we’re constantly thinking about how to get more pleasure.
And in our current society, we think a lot about how we can out smart pleasure, and develop ways of trying to get around the actual physiological limits of pleasure. But we can’t, we’re really bounded by our physiology in this way. And so the more it is that we see pleasure as a goal and try to chase it, we’re just going down a path that’s going to be really frustrating, and isn’t going to lead to more pleasure. So my approach to thinking about pleasure then is that we really have to… It’s wonderful in this kind of happiness.
This is a happiness that just feels good, it’s great, it’s wonderful. We should take it when we have it. But we shouldn’t be that stressed when it goes away and we should let it go away. I think way too often, we think we’re supposed to be happy all the time, and that there’s something wrong with us when we’re not, and we just need to stop thinking about that.
Jim: You gave a great example from Seinfeld, not necessarily what you think is a bunch of hedonists, but I really liked it. So why don’t you tell us your tale and observation about Seinfeld, and its relationship to happiness?
Lorraine: I love this, they’re not out there pursuing happiness. That’s not what we think of when we think of the Seinfeld gang. But if you pay attention to how it is that they experience happiness, it’s pretty amazing. What they do is they come together in these moments of joy, and they just share them, and they share it in the form of doing a happy dance.
There’s really, if you look through the episodes, there are many scenes. Always when Elaine enters the room after something, after being away or something, they’re jumping up and down, they’re sharing it, and there’s this one, I think it’s a classic scene really, of a scene where most of the gang is in Los Angeles and Kramer gets in trouble for something, anyways, and then he gets off. And then they go out on the courtroom steps, and they’re celebrating the fact that Kramer has gone off of whatever he was in trouble for.
And they sit there and they just dance, they take literally a moment to just dance, and to really take in that kind of pleasure. And I think that’s the exact model of what we should be doing, that we should take it when we get it, and let it sink into us. Share it, do the happy dance. Yet when it goes away, let it go away and really not freak out about it. And I think that’s what the Seinfeld gang secret is, that they appreciate when they have it, and they let it go when they’re not, and it works. And I think that’s how it can all work for a lot of us.
Jim: Yeah, that was I thought a really good rich example. You usually think about them sitting around complaining, kvetching about this and that, but they do have a good time, and that’s what life is actually about. Now the philosophers long ago, most of them figured out that hedonistic life only dedicated to happiness was shallow, even if it did work and probably wouldn’t work.
And instead, many of them pointed to things like what we might call today meaningfulness or fulfillment. And in fact, if you ask your average dry ethicist or something, they might tell you that, all right, a life dedicated to meaningfulness or fulfillment might well be the right road. Tell us what the downsides of that are, or at least the limitations and downsides, is a better way to put it.
Lorraine: There’s a couple of downsides, and I think it starts with recognizing where this is coming from. As you say, it arises from this idea within Aristotle that really points us towards using our reason in this great way.
And it’s an idea that society has really picked up on and prioritized and told us that this is the most important thing, achieving things, finding a purpose, something like that, that this deserves priority in our lives. And that mentality is complicated and doesn’t really pay off the way we think it does. So when we do seek out something for fulfillment or seek out meaning, a large part of what we’re doing is focusing on an end goal. So we’re trying to achieve something, we’re trying to find our purpose, we’re trying to get somewhere and we think when we get there, we’ll finally experience this fulfillment that is a reward for pursuing these things.
Yet we have lots of research telling us that these moments of fulfillment just do not arise. If they arise, it’s very briefly, but it fades away very quickly. And one explanation of why this is, and I think really a key feature of what’s going on when we’re striving for meaning, is that we’re going after something that really depends a lot on other people in order to experience it.
So it’s not just going to be enough that we attain our goals or that we get our promotion, it’s going to depend on a large part about how others respond to that, and how others are reacting. And that’s just very contingent. I don’t think it’s a great idea to set your goals on something that depends so much on others’ reaction. And the second kind of concern I have about this pursuit of meaning is that it really only fulfills one part of us.
At the outset I was talking about how there is this whole other part of how we can use our minds that is really important and valuable, and we can use it to enhance our lives. But if we’re going down the track of meaningfulness, if we’re going pursuing fulfillment, then we’re blocking that out and we get into this mode that really narrows our experiences. We think what’s most important is getting to our end goal. And so if something detracts from that or somehow holds us back from that end goal, then we think it’s bad. If something comes and helps us to that goal, then we think it’s good. And all of the other stuff out there that doesn’t relate to our goal, we just we’re told not to care about it because our goal is most important. And I think this narrowness is, well, let’s think about what narrowness is, it’s not fulfilling.
So when we do achieve things or we do find a purpose or meaning, it doesn’t fulfill the whole part of us. It really only fulfills one aspect of us, one area in which we’re capable of experiencing something of value, but it doesn’t hit the rest. And so I think it’s a real challenge that we have within our society, because it does hold up this aspect of meaningfulness and achievement and fulfillment, to be the most important part that we should sacrifice things for. And that’s a mistake, it’s just one part of us. It’s important of course, but it just can’t fill out our lives in the way that we’re told that it should.
Jim: You also mentioned, and I think this is huge, I know it was huge for me in my younger days, the arrival fallacy. You thought you had done X and, “Oh, everything has been solved, all will be wonderful henceforth.” Tell us about the arrival fallacy.
Lorraine: This is a big one really Keith, there’s some of these psychological conclusions that are so helpful just to seize onto, and this is absolutely one of them. So the arrival fallacy describes the mistakes that we make when we think about what it’s going to be like to get to a certain point. So we think that once we achieve something or get to that goal, that we’re going to just feel different, transformed, that it’s going to really enhance our lives, but it’s actually really difficult to predict the effect that things will have on our emotional experience. And often, more often than not, I think we’re wrong about what we think the impact of things will be. One really classic example to this that I’ve been aware of for a very long time is research surrounding the arrival fallacy that happens with respect to receiving tenure.
So if you think about receiving tenure, this is a lifelong permanent job, it’s huge. It’s a very tangible way of achieving something, and yet the phenomenon of post-tenure depression is very real. And what it does is this phenomenon is just about what happens when people get tenure, that it actually doesn’t impact their lives the way that they think it does.
And even when those who get rejected from tenure. So if you don’t get tenure we think it’s going to be like the worst thing ever, but it turns out really not to be. People can bounce back, and it’s challenging for us to predict how something’s going to make us feel. And more often than not, I think we’re pretty wrong about how this is going to happen.
Jim: And even if we’re right, the decay rate is very rapid. Wow. I got the big house, and the fancy summer, and the Porsche. Three months later this motherfucker has got a bigger house and he’s got a Bentley, I’m not happy. There’s something about the hedonistic treadmill, particularly late stage financialized capitalism seems to love to put us on. And so even when you think you got it made, you don’t. I made a fair bit of money in my business career, and I got some great advice from somebody after I made my first score when I was quite young. And he said one of the big risks of having money is that you can easily become the janitor to your possessions. And I’ve taken that to heart.
And I think that’s just another part of the arrival fallacy that the good might come with a whole bunch… I never thought of that when I was a working class kid in a neighborhood mostly of high school dropouts. That if you made some serious bank, you could easily be sucked into just managing all the shit that you’d bought. Well, that’s true. Well, I also love the fact that you had the nerve to dunk on Gandhi who’s often held out as a secular saint, and you quoted George Orwell as saying, “He gave up being a human being.”
Lorraine: This gets to this dichotomy we can think about in terms of being saints versus human beings. So Gandhi was a saint, or he was striving for so much goodness that in order to get there he had to sacrifice all of the other stuff that could enhance a life. And I think we’ve got to be very careful about the ways in which we commit to things. Clearly we should commit to being a good person. We should commit to achieving things, but they don’t have to take over our lives the way many of us think, and the more they take over the less human we are. Being a human is about having so much more than just one thing.
Jim: I will say that our audience knows my view on human nature and social organization I call coherent pluralism, and the pluralism is important too. Well, I wouldn’t want to be Gandhi or Jesus. It’s probably good for the world that there are Gandhis and Jesuses, just as it’s good for the world that there are autistic researchers who spend their whole career going through medieval manuscripts writing down genealogies. I wouldn’t want to be that person, but there are some people that is the right thing for them to be. So while we can dunk on the overly focused on meaning for probably most people, it’s worth noting that as an ensemble of humans trying to create a intersubjective on the inter-objective, having a variety of people including Gandhis and Jesuses, not necessarily a bad thing.
Lorraine: Yeah, absolutely. And we’re talking about what makes our lives go well, and I think it’s a legitimate decision. I’m sure it’s one that Gandhi made that said, “This cause is most important, and more important than my life going well for me.” And so yes, absolutely there can be some cases where it’s worth a sacrifice, but we need to know what we’re sacrificing when we go into it.
Jim: All right, so let’s get now to the psychologically rich slash interesting, a little bit more detail. Here’s a quote, “Essentially, a psychologically rich life describes a life full of engaging experiences, which may not be pleasant, which may not deliver fulfillment, but are nonetheless among the most exciting, rewarding and impactful experiences many of us have. They are the interesting ones.”
Lorraine: Yeah, that quote nails it. A couple of things just to pick up on that. So what we’ve done with our research is show that this psychological richness is really distinct from happiness and meaning. And one way we can wrap our heads around what that means is that we can have one without the other. So we can experience psychological richness when we’re not happy. And in fact, when we’re experiencing complex painful feelings, we can often experience psychological richness when we’re there and we can experience psychological richness in a number of things independently of whether or not they’re going to deliver meaning. So where these two areas… And I think they’re important areas of the good life, I think the good life is a three-legged stool, it includes meaning, happiness, and includes psychological richness. So it’s a three-legged thing, they’re all important, but we need the three legs.
It’s out there, it is really an important part of our lives that we can begin to take control over. And as we’ve seen the other two legs really just don’t fill it out for us. So there’s space in our lives for psychological richness, and I think this is something that many of us already know and experience. And what we’re doing as part of this research is to confirm the value of that, and the distinctness of that. And really either open people up to this new kind of way of existing or affirming people who are already really doing this.
Jim: As I mentioned in the pre-game chatter, when I read the book, I go, “Oh, this is me.” And it’s particularly that sentence because I went through and put a list of things that I had done in my life which were interesting. How some people say, “That’s interesting.” And some of them thought I was nuts at the time. I’m going to give a few examples. One, when I was quite young, when I just turned 18, I started doing long-distance hitchhiking trips, and I ended up hitchhiking 50,000 miles around the United States in the early and mid-70s. And I can tell you standing in the rain by the side of the road in January in Northern Mississippi was not particularly pleasant, but it was rewarding in its own way. You think things through your head goes. In those days, my music would play in my head. And I still remember a specific time standing on the side of a US highway north of Jackson, in the rain, probably 45 degrees. Miserable fucking weather.
But the Beatles song Yesterday was playing in my head, and here I am. I remember this almost 50 years, actually more than 50 years later. I was 18 at the time, so it was 52 years ago. And it’s still something I remember, how curious. Another one, and this drove people nuts. I was always quitting jobs and even selling my companies, because I built companies as part of my thing, and then I later became an executive.
Whenever the novel problem had been solved. And when we had proven that there was market acceptance and the thing was going to work. And people, “You got it made, what the hell are you doing?” I go, “This is boring as shit, I’m out of here.” On to the next thing. I’ve left plenty of money on the table from doing that, but I didn’t particularly care. On a more minor level when I lived in New Mexico, and that was at the Santa Fe Institute.
I used to love to get on my ATV and go sometimes 25 miles into a totally desolate public lands of which New Mexico has a bunch. Dangerous as hell actually, I could have broken down out there, and being an old fat man probably wouldn’t have been good, but oh well, did it anyway. And there were banditos out there, people making drugs, people breaking bad. Set in New Mexico, those people were out there. And I always carried a gun, big one.
But it was interesting, really interesting. And sometimes it wasn’t too pleasant, but I still have some great memorable things. This was more pleasurable, wasn’t too much downside about this. But when I retired from business, I reinvented myself as a scientist in evolutionary computing and evolutionary AI. And didn’t do it to make money, I didn’t do it to start a company, I just did it because I was interested.
And I’d retired twice before, and the third time I retired… The first time it lasted two days. The second time two months, I said, “This time I’m going to pick an interest that’ll last at least two years.” And it ended up lasting 20 years. So it turned out it was a good choice, but a peculiar one. A lot of people said, “Wait a minute, you’re at the top of your game. You’re now ready to go for the route to be a really big business guy.”
I was a big business guy, public company, CEO, all that shit, but of a medium-sized company, but done so well was actually asked to apply for jobs as head of Yahoo or Autodesk and stuff. Might’ve got it, but I said, “Nah, I’m done with that. Not interesting anymore. Been there, done that.” In fact, I was quoting the New York Times as saying, “The life of a public company, CEO is a mile wide and an inch deep, and I’m ready to be an inch wide and a mile deep for a while.”
And that was basically pursuit of interesting. And then I still to this day do my own software projects. The last couple of years have been absolutely fascinated with the application of these large language models to real world tasks. In 2023, I wrote a very powerful and complicated program called Script Helper that lets people with humans in the loop in 40 different places write a full feature movie script, equivalent to a journeyman or lower journeyman professional in about 20 hours instead of the usual six months to a year, three years that it might take. And that was fun. I’m working on another one now. And again, these are just rabbit holes I go down to. And I just start out with an idea, and I just automate one little piece. And then when I get there, I see the next thing, and then I see the next thing. And at night I wake up and go, “Wait, oh my gosh, I can do that.” And I just find these things entirely interesting.
Lorraine: It’s so nice to hear this, and you are completely capturing what the interesting is. And all of these examples are essential. And where you left off with is this idea of learning just for the sake of exploring an interest. I often find that as adults, as someone who have a career or maybe left their career or whatever. When we go on to this kind of stage and just think about what are we interested in, what can we learn? That’s a great example of how it is that we can prioritize psychological richness and find something interesting, and not be bored with life. That’s huge.
Jim: I point people to, as I often do, in the middle of a podcast to an earlier episode, EP 130, with Ken Stanley, who’s one of the world’s leading evolutionary AI guys. But he wrote a book on open-ended exploration, and the book is called Why Greatness Can’t Be Planned. It’s an excellent episode and it hits right exactly on this, how some of the most interesting discoveries were not, “Oh, I’m going to sit down there and figure out how to do this.” Einstein famously, he just started musing and get into these geometric models. And the way he came up with relativity, wait a minute, it was just a mind experiment, a Gedankenexperiment as he called it. And, “Wait a minute, this doesn’t add up. What the hell?” And then he went down the rabbit hole. And here he was a patent clerk in Switzerland, and he ended up writing one of the most influential, important scientific papers of all time. In fact, wrote four papers that year while a clerk in the patent office, all four of which would’ve gotten a Nobel prize, how the hell does somebody do that?
Lorraine: Amazing.
Jim: Other than by open-ended curiosity and just going with it. And he wasn’t being paid to write these things. He wasn’t even a professor, though he eventually got a professorship out of it. That really wasn’t his point.
Lorraine: And that’s I think so important to think about. I look at all that we would miss out on discovering if we were just so focused on getting to a goal or finding one thing. The open mind that you’re raising there is crucial towards having these experiences because if we don’t have an open mind, we won’t let them go where they want to. We won’t be able to follow our curiosity in a way that’ll make our experiences psychologically rich. And so bringing an open mind to our experiences, and being okay diverging from a plan or having no plan is important.
Jim: Yeah, it’s a little bit further in my outline, but let’s hop to it right now. One of the bad attractors, I shouldn’t say it’s a bad attractor, you need to do it at certain parts in your life, but talk a little bit about the pursuit mode as opposed to open-endedness. You wrote some very interesting things about the nature of the pursuit mode.
Lorraine: Yeah, yeah, thank you. I think pursuit mode is… it’s a trap that many of us fall into, and what it is getting so focused on the pursuit of something that we exclude from our minds, anything else that doesn’t really contribute to that pursuit. So when we’re in pursuit mode, we are always looking for something. We have expectations, and we’re trying to satisfy those expectations. We’re trying to fulfill a plan. We’re always trying to get to some end point. And when we’re so focused on that, we miss everything else that can come up. So one example I talk about in the book, I love this example is it’s a very early on when this research was first starting to come out. So a journalist had contacted me and she said, “Well, let’s go have an interesting experience.” And right away I was like, “Oh no, we can’t plan for this, how are we going to set up and have this?”
And we took this drive, we found something that we thought would be interesting, which is to look at these fairy houses that somebody had built around this vast farmland. And we thought that it would be really interesting. But we were looking for them, we had researched them and they were cool, but they weren’t that interesting. And yet along the way, we were driving the loop around just this farmland and woods. And along the way we just found this forest full of very colorful birdhouses and full-sized dinosaur statues.
And that was by far the most interesting thing of that day, and we could have missed it, we could have missed it. That wasn’t on our map of where the fairy houses were, we could have missed it because it is hard to find these fairy houses. So we really did have to focus on them, and we could have missed it. And to me that’s just such a central lesson of why you should keep an open mind, and why you shouldn’t let a plan take such hold of us as they tend to do. When we’re planning, it tends to take this big grip on us, and demand our attention. And that cuts us off certainly from having interesting experiences.
Jim: Now you gave again an example of someone who led a extremely interesting life, and oddly, somebody I was utterly obsessed with in my younger days, and that’s Neil Cassidy, the guy who was the inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s famous book On the Road, but not as well known that he was also the inspiration for an even better book that’s not as nearly as well known called Visions of Cody, also by Jack Kerouac. So if you’re sucked into Cassidy a little bit, don’t stop with On the Road. Go on and read Visions of Cody. I’d also recommend Cassidy’s own book called The First Third, which is unbelievably good, even though a little bit on the weird side. So anyway, tell us about who Neil Cassidy was, and why he was so damn interesting.
Lorraine: First of all, it’s so great to hear from a fellow fan when I first discovered beat literature, but then also Neil Cassidy in general I similarly just became obsessed with him. And what I found so fascinating about that generation or about that group of characters simply was the way that they engaged, the way that they talked, the way that they would just go on adventures and see what happened. And Neil Cassidy is this figure within that group, who he’s famously the character or the character driving Jack Kerouac in On the Road. He had this really huge presence within their lives, and he inspired so much of what the writing was about to, and he inspired so many people to notice him and to be influenced by him. So he influenced not just the beat generation, but he was the driver of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test bus.
And he was so influential, yet if you look at it, he didn’t achieve much. He inspired a lot of the writing. He used to write these crazy letters, but they were crazier than Jack Kerouac’s open writing style, they were not very bound in, and yet they influenced this very distinctive writing style we see there. And that’s the kind of capturing of attention that Neil had. And I think he had all of this influence, and it was just because they found him interesting, and the ways in which they found him interesting shaped their lives. And so together we see this fascinating example of how it is that someone can capture your attention so vividly, and play such an important role in your lives when they’re interesting, and also how the interesting really can spread between people. So when you’re around someone who’s really interesting, then your life becomes more interesting, and there’s this great cycle that happens.
And when I was first reading about Neil Cassidy when I was in my early 20s, and I had this thought for so long, “What is it about this guy?” He stood out to me as someone just so amazingly influential, yet had not even at that time during his lifetime, he never published anything. The First Third came out, I think recently in that last decade or something. So within his lifetime, he never really published anything, and he had this huge influence.
And it was not until I was researching, doing this research on psychological richness and really thinking about examples of people being interesting, that I really was able to go back and be like, that’s what Neil had. He was living this psychologically rich life. And he was just so interesting that that’s how he became such a legendary figure amongst these times.
Jim: Even though he died young of an overdose along a railroad track in Mexico, probably had a heart attack from too much speed. The characteristic drug of that era wasn’t cocaine or wasn’t opioids, it was Benzadrine. The boys would sit there and do the speed, and sit there… Kerouac probably was speeding the whole time he wrote On the Road on that famous scroll of butcher paper, because he didn’t even want to slow down to change the paper in his typewriter, so he rigged up a thingy to hold butcher paper that was approximately the width of regular typing paper. And he wrote all of On the Road in two and a half weeks on this roll of butcher paper. And I’ve actually seen the roll of-
Lorraine: Me too. Me too, yes.
Jim: Came to Santa Fe when we were living there and was at the library for a month or so, and of course had to go down and check it out.
Lorraine: It’s amazing. And even actually getting back to the choice of drugs. So the Benzadrines were so part of their sphere because it engaged their minds. It allowed them to keep going on these interesting thoughts. And it’s just an interesting example. They’re not going for morphine, heroin that doles you, that gives you pleasure, but this other stuff is engaging your minds. We don’t need it to engage our minds. And in many ways, when we’re on speed, we extend the lifespan of our minds. We don’t need it, but it is-
Jim: Well, you may burn it out too. I used to enjoy a little bit of speed now and then, I never wasted any on studying. But I’ve preferred it by far to things like cocaine, which were also around at the time. Cocaine is the classic hedonist drug. And what I tell people I don’t think it ever does for me is make me want to talk more, which is the last thing in the world that I actually need. And the other thing, of course it does, and this is why it’s so dangerous, is it presses the dopamine do it again button.
And once you’ve been doing it for very long, that’s all it does is push the dopamine do it again button. I have never purchased cocaine. I occasionally would do it if people gave it to me for free, but I just said, “Eh, not so good.” All right, so now let’s go from the very vivid example of Neil Cassidy, one of the most interesting people ever. To a little bit more formal approach to the characteristics of the interesting, you laid out three in particular, novelty, complexity and engagement.
Lorraine: So the interesting, we’re trying to think about what it feels like to have these kinds of experiences. We can learn about how to get these experiences and we can understand what they are by thinking about these ways in which it’s correlated with.
So novelty is a great example of something that really just forces your mind to engage. When you’re confronted with something new, your mind strives to wrap its head around it. And if you let it’ll really take off, and let you have deep interesting thoughts about something that’s new. And this I think is really a key dynamic and an insight into the kind of engagement that’s at stake when we’re thinking about interesting experiences. And it’s a very robust form of engagement. And so for example, if we think about complexity and complexity, which is also a really important aspect of these experiences that generate psychological richness, the reason why is because there’s so much to wrap your head around.
And when we have something complex, our mind is working to try to understand it, it’s stimulating new ideas. It might not be fun, it might not be pleasant, but it is really a distinctive and rewarding experience. And the idea of engagement that’s at stake here is something that is a very robust kind of engagement. And in fact, one of the results we’re seeing from the latest research on psychological richness is that over time, psychologically rich experiences will generate a more expansive sense of self. And I think this just explains so much about the engagement that’s involved in these kinds of experiences is that we’re firing on all fronts.
We’re thinking about how things hit us on all different levels, not just in one way about how they can help us attain things. But we’re really just allowing ourselves to be enriched in the complexity. And that really does create this more expansive sense of self where we’re firing on all fronts.
Jim: Now interestingly, when I read that piece, regular listeners know that I’m involved in the Game B social change movement, which includes the good life or well-being as we call it. And when I read this piece, I said, “This fits almost exactly, and we take the three together to one of our core concepts, which is that the modern world has reduced the dimensionality of life. And that in the past, our lives were extremely high dimension. We were listening we were feeling. We were feeling the mud with our toes, trying to find some tubers. We were politicking because forager era groups did not have leaders. If anyone tried to be the big man, they’d kill them. First they’d ignore them, then they’d laugh at him, and then they’d hex on him. If he came back, they’d kill him. Nobody was the boss in the forager community other than for expertise.
So the lady that knew how to find the tubers was the boss of the tuber hunt. The kid that was really excellent at chasing rabbits. He led the rabbit hunt, but there was no big men. So we referred to that as high dimensionality, a life of high dimensionality, and that is what has been crushed in many ways by our modern world. And that just so resonated with me when I read those three elements together.
Lorraine: And I think high dimensionality is a great way to describe what this is about. It is about not shying away from complexity, not trying to make things easier, but in fact allowing ourselves to be challenged and embracing the challenge, not trying to conquer it and put it down, but actually embracing ourselves in something that is complex and challenging and letting it take over. Or so as you said used to let’s look for the ways out. As soon as we’re experiencing a complicated emotion, let’s find our way out so we can just be happy again or something. And that kind of thinking is really counterproductive I think in many areas, but it’s certainly counterproductive towards living a really rich full life.
Jim: We touched on a little bit in the episode that’ll come out just before this one with Alex Ebert, who’s a very interesting philosophical rock and roll star believe it or not. And he put forth the idea of suboptimal technology. Technologies that are specifically designed to add interestingness to your life. One of the examples he cooked up was a Google Maps that 5% of the time would take you somewhere else other than where you asked to go, preferably knowing something about you, but not being deterministic in that regard. It may just decide, “Well, sometimes she likes to go sailing, so instead of taking her to college, we’re taking her to the harbor.” But only at low enough level that you could go with it. And it wouldn’t totally disrupt your life, the push to make everything as perfect and as zipless, as Erica Jong said a long time ago is one of the things that makes our lives much less interesting than they could be.
Lorraine: It does. So often we do use the word boring, and we think about the word boring, and let’s really think about what that means. When we’re living a boring life we’re not engaging, we’re not firing, we’re not stimulating our minds, and it really is just boring. It might feel pleasant from time to time, but it’s still a really negative way to be. And we can benefit ourselves a lot by really paying attention to when we say something’s boring, saying, “Okay, well, I’m saying a lot there and I’m saying a lot about what I need, which is something more interesting.”
Jim: I will say, I think the attempt to eliminate boringness is a huge mistake. And in fact, when I talk about goddamnit, the end times have come with TikTok. This is the vacuum cleaner to suck up all of our attention, which isn’t used elsewhere. Parents out there, don’t let your kids do TikTok, it’s worse than cigarettes. I did it for two and a half weeks, and as the designer of online products, I know how they work. And I go, “This is the most genius product I’ve ever seen and the most evil, this is online fentanyl.” But anyway, I think it’s major problems.
No one will ever be bored who has TikTok on their phone. It’s just perfectly designed to keep pushing the do it again button. And so boredom can be very good. In fact, I know when I’m on the verge of some break through into some new interesting domain is that I read a lot of books.
I probably start a 100 and finish 75 a year or something like that. And I’ve done since I was 10. So I’ve read 5,000 books, something like that. And every once in a while, every two years maybe I get to a point where I can’t find a book to read. I go into the best bookstores I know and walk around. Normally, I come out with bags I can barely carry. But when I’m in this certain kind of mode, “No, that doesn’t appeal to me. Oh, fuck that. I’m tired of that shit.” Even one of my favorite literary fiction authors, “Another one of those, no.” And it’s interesting, so I’m bored at some level, and yet I know that’s a precursor to the next thing. So staying in boringness forever, horrible, but to try to squash boringness and make it go away, I would not recommend that.
Lorraine: And I do agree with that. I’m thinking a lot about boredom lately, and I do think that this TikTok phenomenon or getting sucked into your social media or whatever it is, that that’s actually, I worry about that state because I don’t think you’re really resolving boredom then. What you’re doing is just giving over your attention and you’re not really engaging. And that’s what I think the key things lie. Do we need to engage and how can we engage? Where we’re doing that with some sense of agency, where we’re not just letting algorithms suck us in and capture our minds. We’re bringing something to that. And I agree that there’s a sense in which for all of us, we’re talking about engaging our minds, and at some point we need to give it a break. And whatever that might look like, we need to give it a break so we can go back out there and really do it well.
Jim: I ran into those idiot things on Facebook that show you trends over time, moving graphs, saw one this morning. I’m on Facebook sabbatical, so I’m not posting much on Facebook for six months. Six months a year I think a social media sabbatical. I do check my messages every few days, and I look at a couple of things, but I don’t post. If the data is true, which I did send the guy a message, asked him what was his data source.
It’s quite interesting that back in 1930 when the time series starts, it was basically allocating how was our time allocated between friends, family, school, work, bars, and then the bottom one online. In 1930, obviously online was zero, and the top two were family and friends, with family on top. Adding together came out to about 42%.
By 1976, family had fallen, but friends had gone up and the number between the two was still 42%. I did the numbers on the side, the friends up to 26%. The high point for friends and family is falling, church is falling. Education oddly is falling for how we actually spend our time. 27% of our time was spent with friends in 2004. Online at that point was a couple of percent. And then online zoomed up until now, according to this thing, I don’t know if it’s true, online is 60.76% of our time, and friends is only 13%, and family 4.5.
Lorraine: That’s just so sad.
Jim: Low-dimensional, right?
Lorraine: That is low-dimensional.
Jim: In fact, when I first came up with the concept of low-dimensional, we talk about in our world weak links and strong links. We talk about online links as having the advantage of being cheap and fast, but they’re weak. And why are they weak because they’re low-dimensional, their words or their images, something like this is higher-dimensional.
It’s kind of in the middle, but it’s not as high dimensional if we were sitting across the table drinking some wine and deciding what to order for hors d’oeuvres, and laughing, and making fun of the people at the next table who are going like this with their phones. That’s high dimensional. And so we have strong links. And the thing that I was struggling with, well, I know there’s the distinction between strong links and weak links, what’s the difference?
And I decided it was dimensionality, that was the difference. And that’s probably not the only difference. Pheromones who knows what else. But of course that’s more dimensions, and that’s really a lot of what I suspect is being tapped into with this concept of the interesting. Well, now that we laid out a little bit of the taxonomy of the interesting, tell us another story. Again, this is a popular book, people, it’s not one of these ultra nerdy books, which I do sometimes. Anybody can enjoy this, full of interesting stories. Tell us the tale of Sam and Joel.
Lorraine: Oh, yeah. So Sam and Joel are characters in this show Somebody Somewhere, and they are very ordinary characters. They’re just ordinary people, and they’re in their 30s. And they find themselves stuck their hometown and they’re in periods of transition, but they’re stuck back in their old town and they’re just hanging out. There’s this one scene that just describes perfectly why we need the interesting in our lives. And in this one scene they’re talking about, “What are you going to do over the weekend?” And so Joel begins, he asks Sam, “Well, what are you going to do this weekend?” And she said, “Well, I’m going to drink wine in my underwear.” And he just laughs. And she says, “Well, what are you doing this weekend?” And Joel says, “Well, I’m going to volunteer at the church. I’m going to volunteer with the kids being a clown. I’m going to help out somebody else.” And just racks up this very long list of very meaningful contributing activities.
And if you watch this scene, the dullness in their lives is so clear. They’re telling you what they’re going for. Sam’s just taking the weekend off, going for pleasure. Joel is taking the weekend to really try to enhance his life in some meaningful way, and yet neither one of them is at all satisfied with what they’re doing.
And the message screams so loudly from this conversation that neither of them think that they’re up to anything good, even though they’re getting these different aspects to their life. But the emptiness of what they’re doing really shines through. And it is just so ironic because during this conversation, they’re actually having a really interesting experience. They’re stalking someone’s husband, they think is doing drugs, they’re having an interesting experience together, but they don’t have the language.
They still think, “All right, if I’m going to choose what to do with my time, I’m going to choose for this either very basic pleasurable experience, or I’m going to try to develop as much meaning in life.” And when they do that, no matter which side you’re taking, they’re both clearly living a very impoverished life. Something is very absent from their life, and it is psychological richness.
It is what they’re stimulating together and asking these questions and going on these crazy adventures. So it is psychological richness, they just don’t have the label for it.
And they don’t know that when we don’t have a label for it, we can’t really validate placing priority on it with our lives. We feel like, no, we should be doing something else that is really recognized to be good. So my central message here, let’s recognize psychological richness to be good. Give it a role in your life. Go after it, recognize it when you have it, to prioritize it in your life. Don’t get into these traps I think we all get into where the weekend is just for lazy pleasures or helping others. But no, there’s so much more in between.
Jim: And now we’re going to turn a little bit towards the more practical self-helpy side here, but we’ll keep a little theory in it too, being this is the Jim Rutt Show and not Dr. Phil or something.
Now one of the, I thought very good points you made about the interesting or psychological richness as opposed to happiness and meaningfulness is it’s much more under our own control.
Lorraine: This is huge. These other dimensions of the good life, they’re very much not in our control. We’ve talked about how pleasure, our experiences of pleasure is limited by our basic physiology, so that we just can’t get to that place no matter how hard we try. We just can’t get to that place where we’re experiencing enough pleasure to fill out our lives without falling into these other traps.
And same thing goes with respect to meaningfulness, that it is really dependent on achieving something or succeeding on some tangible way. And then other people have to affirm it. So whether or not we’re experiencing happiness or meaning in our lives really is not up to us.
We’re either bounded by our physiology or we’re bounded by making some kind of impact on our world and other people in it. But whether or not we have an interesting experience, it’s completely up to us.
We can develop skills that we can bring to our experiences, and turn them into interesting experiences just by using our minds. And that’s a really unique and distinctive aspect about this, that is really promising. I think it’s a very empowering kind of message. And the message is that there is this area in our life that is in our control, and we can shape it to make things more interesting just using our minds. We don’t even have to really change our lives. We don’t have to go way across country. There’s many ways in which we can make our experiences more interesting just by bringing a different mindset to it.
Jim: The fact that it’s under our control. And the other thing that I found, you mentioned it in passing, but I’m going to call it out, maybe get a little bit more reaction to.
Is one of the very cool things about interestingness, actually you do mention it pretty clearly, is that it’s pluralistic. We don’t all find the same things interesting. An example I read On the Road when I was 16, I think, and I gave it to my mother who reads even more books than I do. God knows how many books she read in her life. There were times when she was reading two books a day. She was one of these just… mostly garbage, but she liked to read. And so I gave her On the Road, and she was utterly horrified by the book and all the characters, what was the Cassidy character’s name?
I forget whatever it was, I said, “What did you think about blah, blah?” And she goes, “Oh, that person belongs in an insane asylum.” And my mother’s a very interesting person, she did lots of cool things. Left home when she was 14, made her own way in the world. And ended up being friends with George H.W Bush and his wife. How did that happen?
But she was horrified by those deep nicks and they belong in insane asylums, literally. And I think this is actually even more important than you made out. Because when you think about the pursuit mode, how many tenure track assistant professorships in the philosophy department are there at Middlebury College at any given time? Two, maybe, three on a good day with the wind. So if that’s your dream because you want to live in Vermont, and you want to be at a first-class philosophy department, then there’s only three.
And so you’re absolutely in utter competition with the world’s gross excess supply of PhDs from good programs, and the chances of actually succeeding are low. On the other hand, because interestingness is extremely pluralistic. You might decide that learning how to be a sword, swallower has become your obsession and you’re going to spend six months doing it. How many people are going to want to become sword swallowers.
So there’s far more nodes of potential in the interesting space than there are for sure in pursuit mode space. And also I would say that in the hedonistic space, there’s only serotonin and dopamine basically, and maybe some oxytocin thrown in there too. So that space is not nearly as plural as the interesting space. I think that’s a really important point.
Lorraine: What’s interesting is up to us, it is our own interesting experience. It is feature of how our minds, and all of the stuff that’s in them are interacting with what we’re doing. And so things are going to be interesting to me that will not be interesting to others. And that’s why to really wrap your heads around how you can have more interesting experiences. I can’t tell you what experiences to have because it’s not clear that you’ll find them interesting. So the key to really getting this or trying to develop more psychological richness in our lives, is to really train our minds and allow our minds to cultivate interesting experiences. And they will be ones that are really interesting to us. And there are shared features of interesting experiences that we can draw on, but it’s up to us. And that really captures, I think, so much of what makes us unique. And I think it really feeds into this notion of self-expansiveness.
Because when we really are in tune with what we find interesting, it’s like being in tune with ourselves. This is our unique aspect of us. And so I certainly have found the more I embrace psychological richness, and the more I go after interesting experiences, the more I feel like myself, and the more that myself comes out of that.
Jim: You made a good point that the thing that interesting experiences often have, not always. And a good thing to think about when you’re thinking about increasing the interestedness in your life is your passions and your values.
Lorraine: Yeah, absolutely. So I talk about passions and values as a way of really trying to give content to your good life. So we can think about the good life in terms of this three-legged stool it has happy experiences, meaningful ones, interesting ones. And so we’ve got these three dimensions of value out there. These are ways in which our experiences can be valuable, but what it looks like for us, what a good life looks like for us is going to be very individualistic. And it’s going to be informed based on what it is that we are passionate about. So I really encourage folks to think about what they’re passionate about as a way of really learning about yourself, and where it is that you can point your activities, and your various stages of life into areas which you will find enhancing your life. And so by thinking about what we’re passionate about, it can be hard.
And I think a large time when we go into adulthood that there’s so much adulting there that we just forget all about what makes us passionate because we’re doing all this other stuff. And yet if we don’t take the time to just sit back and think about what we’re passionate about, we just can’t thrive. We won’t know what it looks like. We’ll be shooting for these empty concepts, but we won’t know what it feels like inside for us to have them. And we will live empty lives if we can’t find our passions and think about what they are.
Jim: I love the name that Ken Wilber came up with this flat land. There’s no peaks. There’s no valleys, you’re just following your nose through the day. Oh my God, that would be horrible. Digging in a little bit into developing an interesting mindset, you detail some of the characteristics such as curiosity, openness, and a willingness to explore the unknown. Maybe can you give some people now a little bit more self-helpy nudge towards how do we develop an interesting mindset.
Lorraine: So first thing we have to do is develop this or bring openness to our experiences. And by that I mean two things really. I mean being open about the kinds of experiences that we can go into that might benefit our lives, and not prejudging them too much. And so being open about the kinds of experiences that we’re going into, but also bringing an open mind to them so that we’re not evaluating them. I go back to that experience of your mother when you gave her On the Road.
Part of what seems to have happened there is that she was so caught up in evaluating the lifestyles that she couldn’t actually see what’s interesting about this. And I think that’s true whenever we bring an evaluative mind to our experiences, it really again puts a narrow stake on that really stamps out the interesting, and it sparks. And if we bring an open mind, a non-evaluative mind to our experience, and we let ourselves notice the things around us in a way that maybe we’re not used to.
We’ve talked about how novelty is a feature of interesting experiences, because it forces our mind to engage. And we might think that our lives and every day is just so utterly novel that there’s no hope of this. But I guarantee you, if you look around your room and if you look around your environment, and you really take it in and start to try to notice things about it, again without judgment, but just to notice things. You’ll find some novelty there and you can let that spark, and have a little interesting experience just thinking about that.
And through doing that, what you’re going to do is pick up on how it is that the interesting feels inside. It’s kind of being sparked. When something sparks you, that’s the interesting arising. And when we pay attention to that feeling arising, then we can learn about what the interesting feels like for us. We can learn to tap into it when it’s starting and let it expand. And we can also learn a little bit about what makes something interesting for us. So it’s all about bringing this open mind and allowing yourself to engage with the environment in a way that is very open, and again does not involve any evaluation of what you see around you.
Jim: Now as regular listeners know, I’m a heavy reader and researcher in personality theory, not researcher, but student of personality theory, particularly the ocean model, and some of the 10 facet variations on that. And one of my reactions when I read that is that’s great for people like me who’s extremely high on openness, like 98%, something like that. And also I’m about 99% on disagreeableness, which is I think helpful for doing novelty search. Because I don’t give a shit what anybody else thinks, and I’m also extremely low on neurosis.
100th percentile, anti-neurotic. And so my personality profile is actually a very good fit for the pursuit of the interesting, and hence that’s what I’ve done my whole life, basically. I did not know it until I read this book, by the way. So kudos to actually putting an important concept that was fuzzily probably in my mind. Give it a name, as you said, very important. But how practical is it for somebody who is not open, very agreeable and highly neurotic to pursue novelty in the interesting.
Lorraine: That’s an excellent question. We’re all starting from a different point of comfort, and we’re all starting from a different point about the extent to which we are open to experiences. And so being open to experiences, I think this is the really central one that’ll allow us to have more interesting experiences. And we’re all bringing a degree of openness to our experiences and a different degree. So part of what this means to me is that the ways in which we can develop more will vary between people. And so for example, say you were not raised at all to have different kinds of experiences or maybe even just focusing on food, different kinds of cuisine or different kinds of tastes.
And so some of us can be raised in a way where we’re very not open to experiencing different kinds of food, but that doesn’t destined us to never being able to experience different kinds of food. And so we can start to develop more openness just by changing something little, just by trying something new. And so for this person who might be very low in openness to experience, they can develop more openness just by ordering something different, or just by trying something different for dinner. These little steps will help you develop more openness to experience. And that’s what I think we want to go for. What we want to go for is to increase the ways in which we’re open to experiences, so that we give some space for interesting experiences. And again, that’s going to look different for everyone. So if someone is starting very low, then different kinds of things will be novel to them, and it can be small, and that’s okay. We can start small in opening our minds to different experiences, and that’s okay.
So someone can have a very interesting experience eating sushi might be too hard too far if you’re very conservative, but someone can have a very interesting experience in eating noodles. I talk in the book about learning to eat with chopsticks. What an interesting experience that was for me coming out of this very small town where I’d never used them before. And just something that small can really build your openness to experience, and it can help you have an interesting experience along the way. So I think that there are things we can do, and one of the things that I think will help a lot is to get to know our starting points. So we’ve all got different comfort zones, and whether that’s defined by what we eat, where we go, who we talk to, we all have comfort zones, and those are really important. That’s where we feel safe, that’s where we can feel pleasure.
Those are super important, but the more we stay in those comfort zones, the more we’re closing ourselves off to various other experiences and particular interesting experiences. So what I think is really helpful for us, no matter where we are on this spectrum of openness, is to really look into what our comfort zone is and then try to push its boundaries out. And again, we don’t have to go far. You don’t want to go too far to where you’re all of a sudden doing something really dangerous for you. When you’re there, your mind shuts down, it can’t engage. But you just want to dip your toes out of your comfort zone, see how that feels, see how it happens. And then gradually, I think you’ll be at this point where you develop more openness, and you’re more readily able to experience something new.
Jim: About The only thing I disagreed with on this book, and it’s just a matter of degree, was your reluctance to go into the danger zone. At least for me, and again, each of us is different. Each of us has our own history, and our own settings on our ocean protocol, though remember the map is not the territory. I enjoyed motorcycle riding, riding motorcycles in the rain while drunk, things like that, and racing cars. I was a student pilot at the age of 60, I did the research before I did it. Being a student pilot is more dangerous than driving a motorcycle until you have 1,000 hours worth of experience. So did a rather unhealthy collection of drugs in my late teens, early 20s, did not end up dead somehow. Hitchhiking, well, not as dangerous then as it is now, probably. I had some mildly terrifying experiences, and at least the Ruddian view, the interesting zone goes further into the danger zone than I think you were talking about.
Lorraine: This is a great point. One of the concerns I have about the danger zone is that at a certain point we’ll get beyond stimulating our minds, and we’ll just be going after sensations or something like that. And that’s a little different than what you were talking about. So what I’m worried about is getting into the sensation seeking track, where you’re skydiving and doing all of these things to feel some kind of extravagant endorphins or things like that. So that’s not going to deliver necessarily interesting experiences. That’s sensation seeking, which we know has detrimental impacts on your overall well-being.
And so there can be dangerous activities though, but there can be dangerous activities within your zone of interesting, right? So for you, you just described all these things that are dangerous, but that you are able to engage with them fully. And that’s how I’m carving out what this danger zone is. So when we are in direct danger or when we believe we are in direct danger, that’s what counts, then our minds just go into fight or flight. We just need to get out of there and we’re not able to engage.
Jim: I’m going to give the Ruddian perspective on that. That if you’re in a danger zone, but one that you have understanding of and know what the risks are, I would say you don’t go into fight or flight, you go into vigilance, which is a very interesting and one of my very favorite states. It’s also why I love deer hunting. Deer hunting is high dimensional. You’re listening, you’re smelling, you’re looking for hours at a time, totally still, but your vigilance is just incredibly intense.
Same is true driving a motorcycle in the rain at high speed, if your vigilance isn’t absolutely there, you’re dead. So I would say fight or flight if you’re not dealing. But maybe that’s the thing, maybe that’s what we could draw a line. If you can deal, then no matter how dangerous it is, even if you have a 10% chance of dying within 24 hours, but your in vigilance state, it might be worthwhile. To rescue the princess from the tower, and slay the ogre, and have fairy stories written about you even though there was a 10% chance you’ll die. Maybe you go for it.
Lorraine: I think we’re in agreement there. I’ll have to think more about vigilance, but that is exactly kind of what we’re at here. Can we engage with it? Can we immerse ourselves in what we’re doing? And that’s again, that’s going to look different. What we are able to do is going to look different for lots of people. We know lots of people who wouldn’t step foot on a motorcycle, and much less do all of the very interesting things you’ve done with it.
It’s getting to know what you can handle and what you can bring your full self to. So if you can go somewhere even if it’s very dangerous, if you can go in with that attitude that you’re engaging with this, and maybe that is diligence. But if you go into that with that kind of attitude, then you can have an interesting experience there.
Jim: I guarantee you I am. Second to last topic, friends make everything better.
Lorraine: Yes, of course. That’s the title of one of my chapters. And what I’m jabbing at there is all this research we hear about how important connections are to happiness. And it’s totally true, but I really worry that the more we just seize on that little piece of research, the more we forget that friends make everything better. And it comes up in the context of thinking about psychological richness in a couple of ways. We just talked about dangerous activities and things like that. Friends can serve as a very grounding things to keep us somehow anchored or tethered, so we don’t go too far, so that we do come back at a certain point or do things like that.
And I think one of the most fascinating ways that friends can make everything better that we don’t talk enough about is the way that friends can share in emotions and share in experiences. And so go back to one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume. So he had this really deep understanding of what we would call now empathy, and how it is that our minds connect with one another. And one of the things he really was emphasizing about that was the ways in which that our ability to connect with another on this way helps us share feelings. And so when we’re around other people, we can share our feelings with others, and that often helps us feel them more robustly. And I think that’s just a really important, crucial part of what it means to be connected to somebody. And it’s really fun to think about in the course of the interesting.
Because when you are around somebody and you’re sharing with them and you’re deeply connected to them. And they’re experiencing something very interesting, you’re going to be able to tap into that, and you’re going to be able to share what that experience is like. So one thing I think that is really helpful as we’re thinking, wrapping our heads around how we can find more interesting experiences, just to be around an interesting person and see how it is that they shape their lives.
I talk a lot about how over the course of recovering from my divorce and meeting who’s now my new husband that I was working on this research at the same time, I was around somebody just very interesting, who knew how to live this way. And it really does help. I talk about the interesting spreading. That spread between Neil Cassidy and Jack Kerouac and us. And it spreads between people. And so if you’re around somebody really interesting, it opens up a different way of perhaps thinking about your experiences. But it does allow us to just experience better, I think no matter what it is we’re experiencing, especially when we’re trying to experience psychological richness and interesting things. Being around someone who you think is interesting is just the best.
Jim: A few things are better than that, but I’d also go one step further and say that people themselves are inherently interesting. Hanging out even with a boring person or a crazy person within limits is interesting. Why is this person crazy? Am I sure? What is the nature of their craziness? What interesting, but crazy things might they say.
To pay back people for all the rides I got for hitchhiking in the late 70s and early 80s when I was a traveling salesman, I used to pick up hitchhikers all the time, and probably a good 10% of them were schizophrenic. By that point, the hippie hitchhikers we were all gone, not all gone, but the numbers were way lower. And crazy people were now a fair number. And I also had a wonderful… I picked up a guy who was a professional armed robber, and he gave me two hours high IQ guy, extremely eloquent, gave me everything you needed to know about how to do armed robbery and get away with it.
And he even took me up to his hideout, and I hung out with his friends for a couple hours and we talked armed robbery, as they were getting ready to plan a job, that was pretty crazy. Would I want to hang out with good old Frank every day, no, but for four hours it was wonderful because people themselves are interesting, even if they’re not necessarily the best people. So I would just add that to another way that friends connections, the whole Dunbar range from Robin Dunbar.
One of the best episodes we ever had in the Jim Rutt Show talked about the various Dunbar numbers from one and a half to five to 15 to 50, and the famous 151. But the 151 is less personal than the ones up to 50. Each of those have their merits and their interestingness. Now the last topic, one critique of the Besser model is that it is lacking in morality and virtue.
Lorraine: That is such a hard critique. I started as a moral philosopher.
Jim: I know I read that, I go, “She didn’t mention morality once, I don’t think, at least not in a positive vein when she was talking about the interesting.”
Lorraine: I think it’s separate. I think that what we’ve been talking about is how to live well, how to really enjoy and get something out of the life that we’re given. I think it’s really important to be moral, but I think it comes in at a different level. And so in one of my first books, The Eudaimonic Ethics, I really do explore the role of morality within well-being conceived from a very contemporary understanding of a psychologically informed understanding of eudaimonia. And what I do there is, and what I really believe is true is show how important it is to be good to one another just as a way of maintaining this basic level of psychological well-being.
And I don’t think we can thrive unless we have this baseline. So the way that I see morality coming into this is much earlier on. By the time we’re talking about living pleasant lives, and interesting lives, and meaningful lives, we better make sure we’ve already got this basic, really important level, that’s the level that I think that morality is really important to at least interpersonal relationships. And so if we aren’t treating others well, we are not going to satisfy many of our basic needs and we’re just not going to be able to thrive. So I feel that morality comes into play much earlier and allows us. Being moral allows us to really thrive and engage at this more positive level at the good life. And also constrains it too. So I think that interesting experiences that harm others are wrong. So they may deliver the interesting, right? But you know what? They’re wrong. And so we shouldn’t go about it that way.
Jim: Frank and his band of armed robbers, for instance. Extremely interesting, the amazing amount of thought that goes into getting away with doing a high dollar stick-up, and where the lowest risk and highest return. Very interesting stuff, but not so moral. And I’d also suggest that our mutual literary friend, Neil Cassidy, would not have passed too many moral systems, the scrutiny thereof. So maybe there’s some orthogonality here between morality and interestingness. And we each have to make our choice, where we want to be at the intersection of those two dimensions.
Lorraine: And I think those examples make it very clear when we’re talking about something being interesting, it’s just a different question than whether or not it’s moral. So we all need to ask the question of whether what we’re doing is moral, but it’s just a separate category. We can have interesting experiences that are not moral. But I think we’re better off when we have them, when we are moral, yet they’re just separate categories.
Jim: That’s actually a great answer. Well, I want to thank Lorraine Besser for an extraordinarily interesting conversation, this has been truly wonderful. I suspected it would be after reading the book. But you never known occasionally, an author who writes a great book is a total dud in a conversation, and vice versa. I’ve had some people have written pretty bad books that were great conversationals. So thanks to Lorraine Besser, and go out there and if you’re interested in our conversation, The Art of the Interesting, I can recommend it.
Lorraine: Yes, thank you, Jim, this is talking to a kindred spirit. I really think we got to capture the sense of interesting around us, and so thank you for doing this.
Jim: This was a lot of fun.