What the data actually shows
The oldest of these threads is Aristotle's idea of 'eudaimonia,' usually translated as flourishing. For Aristotle the good life is not pleasure (hedonia) but living well over time by exercising virtue and realising one's distinctive capacities. This distinction — between feeling good and living well — still anchors much modern thinking, and it pushes back on the assumption that the good life is simply the maximally pleasant one.
Carol Ryff translated a flourishing-style view into something measurable. Her model of psychological wellbeing identifies six dimensions: autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relationships with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. The value of the framework is that it treats 'a good life' as multidimensional rather than a single happiness score, so a life can be strong on some dimensions and developing on others.
More recent work by Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues (Oishi and Westgate) proposes a third strand alongside the happy and the meaningful: the 'psychologically rich' life, marked by interesting, varied, perspective-changing experiences. Their research suggests some people, when asked, would actively choose richness even at some cost to happiness or conventional meaning — evidence that 'good' is genuinely plural rather than reducible to one currency.
Why this feels different from how it actually is
A good life can feel like it should have a single right answer because the culture keeps offering one — usually some version of 'be happy' or 'be successful.' That makes the multi-account reality feel like indecision, when the convergence across philosophy and psychology is actually that more than one version is defensible.
It also feels different because pleasure is the most legible signal. Feeling good is immediate and easy to measure against; flourishing, growth and purpose unfold slowly and are harder to read in the moment. So a life heavy on the slow goods can feel like it is missing something even when, by the eudaimonic and multidimensional accounts, it is doing well.
And the psychologically rich life is the least talked-about of the three, so experiences that are interesting and perspective-changing but not obviously 'happy' or 'meaningful' can feel like detours rather than part of a good life. Oishi's work suggests that is a blind spot in the usual framing, not a flaw in the life.
The good life is best understood as a small family of credible accounts, not a single formula.
What the research says to do about it
The most defensible move is to stop treating 'good' as a single target and look at the dimensions instead. Ryff's six — autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relationships, purpose, and self-acceptance — give a concrete vocabulary for asking where a life is strong and where it is thin, without collapsing everything into a happiness verdict.
It also helps to weight the slow, eudaimonic goods, not just momentary pleasure. The Aristotelian thread suggests that living well over time — acting in line with your values and developing your capacities — is part of the good life that immediate feeling cannot stand in for. That points toward investing in growth, relationships and purpose even when they do not pay off in instant good mood.
And the psychologically rich life offers a third lever many people overlook: pursuing interesting, varied, perspective-changing experiences. Oishi's work suggests this is a legitimate way a life can be good in its own right, so building in novelty and breadth is not a distraction from the good life but, for some people, a core part of it.
What the research says does not help
Equating the good life with maximising pleasant feelings is the assumption all three threads push against. Aristotle distinguished living well from feeling good, Ryff's model treats happiness as one outcome among several, and Oishi's work shows some people knowingly trade happiness for richness — so optimising for momentary pleasure alone is a narrower target than the evidence supports.
Chasing a single prescribed template — one culturally approved version of success or happiness — also misses the point. The convergence is that there are several defensible versions of good, so forcing your life to match one external script can mean neglecting the dimensions that the frameworks suggest actually matter to you.
And dismissing interesting, perspective-changing experiences as frivolous because they are not obviously productive or 'meaningful' is unsupported by the richness research, which treats them as a genuine route to a good life rather than a detour from it.
A life can be strong on some dimensions and developing on others — that's what treating a good life as multidimensional means.
What this looks like in real life
Same question, three defensible answers
Asked what makes a life good, Aristotle points to eudaimonia — flourishing through virtue and realising your capacities over time, not mere pleasure. Ryff points to six measurable dimensions — autonomy, mastery, growth, relationships, purpose, self-acceptance. Oishi adds a third: a psychologically rich life of interesting, perspective-changing experiences. None is the definitive answer; each captures something real.
The life heavy on slow goods
Someone deep in growth, relationships and purpose can feel like their life is missing something, because pleasure is the most legible signal and those goods unfold slowly and read faintly in the moment. By the eudaimonic and multidimensional accounts, that life may be doing well — it just isn't producing the instant good mood the culture treats as the scoreboard.
The interesting detour that wasn't a detour
A stretch of varied, perspective-changing experience that is neither maximally happy nor obviously 'meaningful' can feel like time off the path to a good life. Oishi's work on psychological richness suggests that's a blind spot in the usual framing rather than a flaw in the life — for some people, novelty and breadth are a core part of what makes a life good.
Real numbers in context
This is a question philosophy and psychology address with frameworks rather than statistics, so the honest answer is conceptual, not numerical, and any single 'score' for a good life should be treated sceptically. The useful structure is that there are at least three credible accounts: eudaimonic flourishing (Aristotle), multidimensional psychological wellbeing (Ryff's six factors), and the psychologically rich life (Oishi and Westgate). They overlap and sometimes pull in different directions.
What the research adds is evidence that these are not just abstractions. Ryff's six dimensions hold up as distinguishable, measurable aspects of wellbeing, and Oishi's work finds that, asked to choose, a meaningful share of people would pick a psychologically rich life even over a straightforwardly happy or meaningful one. The practical upshot is plural by design: a good life can take more than one defensible shape, and recognising that is more accurate than searching for the one correct definition.