“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul.” – John Muir
Just as we are constantly influenced by what’s inside us, so we are constantly influenced by what’s around us.
One of those influences is beauty.
A recent article in The Atlantic looks at the influence of beauty on happiness.
Beauty tends to feel like something that must be found in special places—parks and museums, galleries and exotic cities. Lunch is not a place one would normally think to look. But finding beauty in normal activities can bring deep happiness to life, studies show.
“In a paper titled, “Untangling What Makes Cities Livable: Happiness in Five Cities,” Abraham Goldberg, a professor at University of South Carolina Upstate, and his team conducted a statistical analysis of happiness in New York City, London, Paris, Toronto, and Berlin.”
In addition to the usual “Big Seven” influences (wealth, family relationships, career, friends, health, freedom, and personal values), Goldberg found that what makes people happiest is the beauty around them.
It seems part of humans’ appreciation of beauty is because it is able to conjure the feelings we tend to associate with happiness: calmness, a connection to history or the divine, wealth, time for reflection and appreciation, and, perhaps surprisingly, hope.
Beauty, famously, is “in the eye of the beholder” and maybe some of the images I’ve included here are not what you might find beautiful (but I do!), but what interested me about this article was not just that beauty can be found in big works eg architecture, great paintings etc, but also in everyday small objects and scenes.
I also especially liked the quotations towards the end which highlight a very interesting aspect of beauty – it’s connection to anticipation, or hope…..
“So long as we find anything beautiful, we feel that we have not yet exhausted what [life] has to offer,” writes Nehamas. “That forward-looking element is … inseparable from the judgment of beauty.”………… As the 18th-century French writer Stendhal wrote, “Beauty is the promise of happiness.”