Audit your life for access to vastness

Map your environment for how much genuine vastness it contains — and adjust it.

Why it works

Chronic under-exposure to vastness keeps the self perpetually at the center of attention, which sustains the ruminative, self-monitoring mode that awe temporarily relieves. Keltner’s research implies that the design of modern life — indoors, screen-mediated, human-scaled — systematically under-provides awe. Auditing and deliberately restructuring your environment treats awe as a regularity rather than a lucky accident.

How to do it

1. List all the places you spend more than an hour per day. How many of them contain something genuinely vast or beautiful?
2. Identify the easiest change: a commute route past open sky, a workspace window, a recurring time outdoors.
3. Schedule one high-vastness encounter per week as a non-negotiable appointment.

Evidence

Keltner’s population-level argument that modern environments are "awe-poor" and that this matters for well-being is supported by the awe-wellbeing correlations across his research; the environmental-design prescription is a logical inference rather than a directly tested intervention. (mechanistic)

The causal claim that environment design directly improves well-being via awe frequency is plausible but not tested longitudinally at the individual level.

Common mistake

Treating awe as something that has to be sought in dramatic locations, while ignoring the smaller adjustments (a walk route, a view, a recurring outdoor lunch) that would provide it daily.