Oishi Quotes

Oishi had research assistants review and code obituaries for an entire year from a major US newspaper and found that there were three primary ways people were described as having lived a good life—it was either happy, meaningful, or filled with fascinating encounters and experiences; that is, psychologically rich.

Studies done in more than 132 countries show that the wealthier a country becomes, the more its population struggles with feelings of meaning and purpose. See Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener, “Residents of Poor Nations Have a Greater Sense of Meaning in Life than Residents of Wealthy Nations,” Psychological Science 25, no. 2 (2014): 422–30.

Amy Oishi is compliant. Her mother is sick and her father is a prisoner and they’ve left her alone to care for her shrinking family. Amy Oishi is trapped. I don’t want to be her. I want to be different. I need to be different. I can’t be the same girl I was on the outside. If that girl is in a detention center, an American citizen imprisoned without trial or even charges, then the world doesn’t make sense. But if I’m someone else, then it’s easier to accept that the world now operates by different rules. Up is down. Wrong is right. Captivity is freedom. Day 27 After that night, things change.

In a sense, they are forgotten people in the extant scientific literature on well-being. By proposing the idea of the psychologically rich life, we attempt to shed light on the likes of Renée and Aaliya, both of whom we believe led good lives.

the idea that material riches make us happy has been around for a long time. In fact, the original definition of the word “happiness,” traced back to 1530 by The Oxford English Dictionary, was “good fortune or luck in life,” which reflected the belief that happiness comes from external circumstances largely outside of a person’s control. Psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, who has examined the historical definitions of happiness, notes that it was not until the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary that the definition of happiness as “good fortune; good luck; prosperity” was deemed archaic. Rather than uncontrollable things that happen to people, happiness came to mean a pleasant internal state or the satisfaction of one’s desires. Oishi suggests that because life became more controllable over time, happiness was no longer viewed as the result of whims of fortune but something that people could strive for and achieve.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity. —Christopher Morley