The Art of the Interesting - Lorraine Besser, PhD

Is it time to work on what you'll be retiring to? Join our upcoming Designing Your New Life Group Program Choose from two groups: Thursday (6pm ET) or Friday (12 pm ET) starting in January. 🔹 Limited Spots Available! Each group is capped at 10 participants. Don’t miss your chance to join at a discounted rate. Kick off 2025 with a supportive community of others designing their new life in retirement. Learn more ____________________________ Happiness and meaning have long been considered the foundations of The Good Life. But there's a key third element that's  overlooked in what constitutes The Good Life: the interesting. Life is simply richer with experiences that captivate our minds, our thoughts and our emotions and have the power to shift our perspectives. Emerging research is highlighting the importance of  "psychological richness" as a key component of a well-lived life through experiences with novelty, complexity and challenge. Lorraine Besser, PhD joins us to discuss her research and her new book The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It. In addition to the research base of the book, she shares practical ideas we can use to develop the skills to make our lives more interesting - without having to make sweeping changes.   Lorraine Besser joins us from Vermont. ______________________ Bio Lorraine Besser is the author of the new book The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It. She earned her PhD in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has MA degrees from UNC and the Claremont Graduate School, and a BA from Tulane University. Before joining the philosophy department at Middlebury College, she held positions at the University of Waterloo and Stanford University. Professor Besser’s research focusses on the nature of happiness and well-being. She specializes in moral psychology, value theory, and the philosophy of David Hume. She lives in Vermont with her family and dogs. ________________________ For More on Lorraine Besser The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It Website ________________________ Podcast Episodes You May Like The Good Life – Marc Schulz, PhD Not Too Late – Gwendolyn Bounds Living Like You Mean It – Jodi Wellman Why Settle for Happiness in Your Retirement? – Emily Esfahani Smith _________________________ Wise Quotes  On Psychological Richness "So psychological richness, describes the set of experiences that tend to be novel, complex, and challenging, and they're unified in that they have a particular impact on our mind. So when we engage in these kinds of experiences, we stimulate new thoughts, we have new emotions arising. And the cumulative effect of this kind of rich state of mind leads us to shift our perspective even just ever so slightly after a really psychologically rich experience. We find ourselves somehow changed. And this is the kind of richness that I think we can bring to our lives. And so psychological richness is this much needed third leg of the stool. It taps into a different part of our minds than meaning - it's the part that is curious, that brings wonder to our experiences, that finds things interesting. And it allows us to really harness our mind's ability to create that state inside of ourselves." On Not Pursuing the Interesting "We think about what we want out of an experience. We think about what we're going to get. And those expectations in that plan really dictate how that experience goes for us. Because we've set it up. There's this goal that I need to get to, and I will focus on that and then judge that experience based on whether or not it meets my expectations. And that's the kind of mindset that really focuses and structures us, but it eliminates the possibility for us to open our minds up and take in new ...