I have a theory that many adults are underexposed to wonder.
We are exposed to plenty of information. We see an endless stream of images from beautiful places, extraordinary homes, new restaurants, other people’s vacations, breaking news, product launches, and major life announcements before breakfast. Our eyes take in more novelty than people in previous generations could have imagined, yet the experience of being genuinely amazed can still feel strangely rare.
Awe asks something different from us. It requires enough attention for an experience to register.
Researchers often describe awe as an emotion associated with encountering something vast, complex, or difficult to fit inside our existing mental framework. It can happen in obvious places, like looking across a canyon or standing under a night sky with very little light pollution. It can also happen while listening to music, watching someone perform an extraordinary skill, seeing a work of art, hearing a story about human courage, or noticing something in nature that you have walked past a hundred times.
Awe appears to be good for us
The research on awe is still developing, but the findings are interesting. A 2018 study involving military veterans, young people from underserved communities, and college students found that awe during nature experiences predicted improvements in well-being and stress-related symptoms. More recent studies have continued to examine how awe may influence attention, repetitive negative thinking, and subjective well-being.
I like this research because it gives language to something many people already know from experience. There are moments when your problems temporarily become smaller because your attention is captured by something larger.
That shift in scale can be incredibly useful.
The practical question is how to invite more of it into a life that is full of meetings, errands, notifications, traffic, and the highly efficient routines that make adulthood possible.
Stop scheduling every minute of the experience
One of the easiest ways to remove wonder from a trip is to plan it within an inch of its life.
I understand why we do this; travel is expensive. Vacation days are limited. There is pressure to maximize the destination. If you have flown across the world, you understandably want to see the things you came to see.
The problem is that awe rarely operates on a fifteen-minute calendar block.
Some of the best travel moments happen because there was enough margin for something unexpected to take over: a street you followed because the light looked beautiful, a market you stayed in longer than planned, a conversation with a local that changed the afternoon, a long swim, or a museum room where one piece of art made you forget the rest of the itinerary.
I now think of unstructured time as part of the itinerary. A free morning is an activity. A walk without a destination is an activity. Sitting somewhere beautiful with no immediate next step can be one of the most memorable parts of a trip.
Let nature do some of the work
Nature remains one of the most reliable places to encounter awe because scale is built in. Mountains, forests, ocean, desert, weather, animals, and night skies all have the ability to pull attention outward.
A study published in Emotion found that awe experienced during outdoor activities predicted improvements in well-being and stress-related symptoms. Another randomized study published in 2024 found that brief exposure to awe-evoking nature clips was associated with reductions in repetitive negative thinking and increases in subjective happiness over the course of the intervention.
A video of a mountain is obviously different from standing on one, but the broader point is interesting: attention can be trained toward experiences that expand perspective.
Wonder can happen close to home. A botanical garden, beach, wooded trail, sunset, storm, or morning walk can create a similar opening if you are actually paying attention.
Novelty helps, and it can be local
Travel gives us wonder partly because our attention wakes up in unfamiliar surroundings. You notice the doors, signs, food, transit, plants, clothing, architecture, and sounds because your brain is still treating the environment as new information.
You can borrow that attention at home.
Visit a neighborhood you rarely go to. Take a ferry if your city has one. Go to a museum alone. Attend a performance by artists who are completely new to you. Eat somewhere tied to a cuisine you have never tried. Walk through an architectural district. Go to the beach before sunrise. Book the garden tour. Take the class that sounds slightly strange.
The activity matters less than the quality of attention you bring to it.
Put the phone in a supporting role
I love taking pictures, and I have no interest in pretending phones are the enemy of a good life. They are useful travel tools, cameras, maps, translators, and ways to share a beautiful moment with people we love.
They can also flatten an experience when documentation begins before experience.
One small practice I like is giving myself a few minutes before taking the first photo; look first. Let the place become three-dimensional. Notice sound, temperature, scale, and movement. Take the picture after the moment has already registered.
That sequence changes something.
Wonder is a design problem too
Awe may arrive spontaneously, but a life can still be designed to make room for it.
You can choose destinations with access to nature. You can protect an afternoon with no itinerary. You can subscribe to the museum calendar. You can sit outside when the sky is doing something interesting. You can travel by train through a landscape and experience the transition between places. You can prioritize places that make you feel curious.
The larger idea is to stop treating wonder as a luxury reserved for major vacations and milestone moments.
A good life needs some encounters that interrupt our certainty. They remind us that the world is larger than our schedules, our problems, our feeds, and the tiny loop of familiar places we move through each week.
Wonder works on a different clock, and that spaciousness may be part of its value.