The Missing Dimension

 I had a stimulating email exchange with John today. It made me think about the nature of social media [particularly after the switch over to recommendation engines] and Oishi's term psychological richness.  

First, a review of the three dimensions of well-being, as laid out by Oishi: 

    1. Happiness: comfort, pleasure, stability

    2. Meaning: coherence, purpose, narrative belonging

    3. Psychological Richness: novelty, perspective change, complexity

The first two are very compatible with social media. The third is actively filtered out.

When it comes to happiness, algorithms are great at serving dopamine—predictable pleasures, positive feedback loops, curated feeds. Surface comfort and low-friction interaction. And as for meaning, our systems give people a story, a cause, a tribe, an identity.  Conflict is a key tool. I hope it's not news to anyone that our media often gives people the message I am the kind of person who fights against X.

But these same systems smash richness. Richness requires disruption—not novelty-as-clickbait, but actual perspective dislocation. Richness also requires ambivalence, unresolved experience, reframing. In-feed, this gets flattened into contradiction, then moralized or memed. Even aesthetic complexity is reduced -- think of the way Instagram “novelty” means new format, not new mode of seeing.

This is why scrolling doesn’t actually lead to depth. You might be exposed to more information, but not more interiority. You accumulate fragments, even enemies, but not depth. Psychological richness depends on lingering, on the kind of temporal and emotional elasticity that social media, by design, compresses.

It also depends on cognitive friction. Not just exposure to other views, but the slow, often private reworking of one's own stance in light of them. Richness requires the possibility of non-resolution: “I used to think X, now I’m not sure.” Try posting that and see what happens... People will try to just resolve it for you, accuse you of bad faith, or just ignore you. The platform will reward whichever version of you is most legible.

In this sense, psychological richness is structurally incompatible with platform logic. It threatens the efficiency of categorization, the metrics of engagement, and the rapid legibility required for virality. Richness doesn’t trend, as it in counter, or even anti- trend. Rich lives often look scattered online. The values that make them rich -- complexity, contradiction, delay -- are illegible to the feed.  Usually they’re just invisible, but if understood, they can be treated as threats.

That’s what John and I were circling, I think.  The necessity of quiet and space for trying to preserve a psychologically rich life.