I work in longevity. We are very good at measuring one dimension of a life, and it is the length.
Diane Ackerman named the other one: “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to live the width of it as well.”
Width is how much of human experience you actually contain by the end. Range, rather than mileage.
The thing is, you cannot widen a life on pleasant experiences alone.
What reliably broadens a person is grief, being badly out of your depth, loving someone whose life makes no sense to you, failing publicly, sitting with someone who is dying. Nobody signs up for these. They arrive. And people who have been through them are wider afterwards, in a way no holiday achieves.
Which raises a confusion worth separating, because most people hear “live wider” and book a trip.
Novelty does something real, and it does something else. Years accelerate with age partly because routine leaves few distinct memory markers, while childhood was full of firsts. New experiences lay down more markers, so a period feels longer looking back. That is felt duration, and it is worth having.
But you can take a fortnight of dense, unfamiliar travel, come home with a hundred vivid memories, and be the same person who left. Novel, memorable, no wider.
And you can spend a year in the same house watching a parent die, with no novelty in it at all, and be permanently changed in what you can understand about other people.
Oishi and Westgate put a frame around this. A life can be good in three separate ways: happy, meaning it feels good; meaningful, meaning it matters; and psychologically rich, meaning it changes the mind that is living it. The three come apart. A rich life is often an uncomfortable one.
Two things keep this from becoming a licence for self-inflicted drama.
Width costs pain. Suffering is optional and separate. Pain is the direct experience of the thing. Suffering is the second layer, the story that this should not be happening to me. The first widens you. The second just hurts, often for years after the event is over.
And a quiet life can be very wide. Attention does much of what novelty does. The familiar route, studied properly, stops being familiar. Raising a child, staying married, doing unglamorous work well — more range in those than they advertise.
So when you are weighing two options by which is safer or looks better, there is a third column most people never open.
Will I be a larger person on the other side of it?
