There are mornings when life seems to possess a purpose. The sun rises with suspicious competence, coffee behaves as coffee ought to behave, and even the trees appear to be enjoying the light or light wind.
There are other mornings when existence resembles a badly organised meeting or just a boring schedule of things to do repeatedly. Wait for another evening.
At such times, advice about finding one’s purpose can be irritating. Purpose is generally presented as something hidden inside us, like a misplaced house key. We are told to identify our passion, formulate our goals, optimise our habits and perhaps buy a tasteful notebook. Yet the difficulty is often not that we have failed to discover the correct purpose. It is that the whole idea of having one feels remote and artificial.
This is where awe may have a part to play.
Awe is the feeling that appears when we encounter something too vast, beautiful, powerful or unexpected to fit comfortably inside our ordinary understanding of the world. The vastness need not be physical. A mountain may produce awe, but so may a piece of music, an act of courage, a scientific discovery or the sudden realisation that another person possesses an inner life as complicated as one’s own.
Psychologists usually describe awe as involving two elements: a perception of vastness and a need to revise our existing mental map. Something exceeds our usual frame of reference, and the mind must stretch a little to accommodate it.
Most emotions confirm the world we already know. Anger tells us that someone has violated our rules. Fear tells us that danger is present. Pride assures us that the universe has correctly noticed our importance. Awe is less flattering. It suggests that reality is much larger than the account of it currently being maintained in our heads.
This may be precisely why it helps.
The problem of living inside a very small universe
Purposelessness often feels like emptiness, but it is frequently a kind of overcrowding. The mind becomes filled with the same few concerns: work, money, health, status, mistakes, unfinished tasks and the mysterious tone used by someone in an email three days ago.
These matters are not imaginary. But when they occupy the whole field of consciousness, life begins to feel smaller than it is. We mistake the contents of our immediate anxiety for the contents of reality.
Bertrand Russell regarded excessive self-absorption as one of the great enemies of happiness. He argued that people become more resilient when they develop genuine interests outside their private worries. Astronomy, history, art, politics, gardening or almost any sincere curiosity can restore a sense of proportion. The world, he observed, is full of things “tragic or comic, heroic or bizarre or surprising,” and to remain uninterested in them is to decline one of life’s privileges.
Modern awe research arrives at a similar conclusion by a different route. Awe tends to reduce the dominance of the everyday ego, producing what researchers sometimes call the “small self.” This does not necessarily mean feeling worthless. At its healthiest, it means seeing oneself as a small but connected part of a much larger reality.
This distinction is important. There is a miserable kind of smallness in which one feels insignificant and excluded. There is also a liberating smallness in which one realises that not every event is a referendum on one’s personal success.
A recent review in Nature Reviews Psychology argues that awe may be understood not simply as self-diminishment, but as a shift toward a broader, less egocentric view of the self. We do not disappear. We are placed in context.
The difference is rather like the difference between being told that your house is tiny and looking at it from a hill at night, one warm square among thousands of lights. The first is an insult from an estate agent. The second can be oddly comforting.
Can awe create meaning?
Awe cannot hand us a completed purpose. Mountains are notoriously poor career advisers, and the night sky has never produced a satisfactory five-year plan.
What awe can do is alter the mental conditions in which purpose is sought.
A preregistered study on awe and meaning in life found a curious double effect. Awe could reduce people’s immediate sense of personal significance, yet at the same time increase their motivation to pursue purpose. Overall, the increase in purpose-seeking outweighed the temporary reduction in self-importance.
This makes sense. Meaning is not identical to feeling important. In fact, the demand to feel important may interfere with meaning. A person who asks, “How can I become significant?” is still looking into the mirror. A person who asks, “What deserves my attention?” has begun looking through the window.
Another series of six studies, involving 1,115 participants, found that awe was associated with greater meaning in life partly because it encouraged what the researchers called authentic-self pursuit. After encountering something vast, people appeared more inclined to consider what genuinely mattered to them, rather than merely following habit or expectation. The effect was strongest among those who did not already possess a strong sense of personal authenticity.
Awe therefore seems less like a purpose and more like a clearing in the forest. It removes some mental undergrowth. It gives us enough distance from routine ambitions to ask whether we actually chose them.
A person may spend years climbing a ladder and then, during a concert, a journey or an encounter with nature, briefly wonder whether it is leaning against the correct wall. This can be inconvenient. It can also save decades.
The philosophers discovered awe before the psychologists named the variables
The connection between wonder and a meaningful life is not a recent invention.
Plato and Aristotle both treated wonder as the beginning of philosophy. Aristotle wrote that people began to philosophise because they wondered about ordinary puzzles, then the moon, the stars and the origin of the universe. Crucially, such knowledge was pursued not for immediate usefulness but for its own sake.
This is a radical idea in an age that wishes every activity to justify itself on a spreadsheet. Wonder interrupts usefulness. It asks questions before anyone has calculated whether the answers can be monetised.
The eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke explored the related idea of the sublime. He noticed that certain experiences overwhelm ordinary thought. Vast landscapes, darkness, storms and oceans can produce astonishment mixed with a trace of fear. In the strongest moments, he wrote, the mind becomes so filled by its object that it can entertain almost nothing else.
Immanuel Kant later distinguished between the mathematically sublime, which confronts us with apparent immensity, and the dynamically sublime, which confronts us with overwhelming power. For Kant, the interesting part was not simply that nature made us feel small. It was that the mind could recognise a magnitude it could not fully picture. Our imagination failed, but reason remained aware that reality extended beyond the failure.
Kant, as usual, made the experience more complicated than the mountain had intended. Yet his basic insight remains useful: awe brings us to the edge of our conceptual abilities. It reminds us that reality is not limited by our capacity to explain it.
Schopenhauer, not generally accused of excessive cheerfulness, believed aesthetic contemplation could temporarily free us from the restless machinery of desire. When absorbed in music, art or nature, we stop asking what the object can do for us. For a while, we simply perceive. This creates a form of transcendence from the frustrations of daily wanting.
Across these traditions, awe, wonder and the sublime perform a similar service. They loosen the grip of the practical self, the creature forever calculating advantage, avoiding discomfort and wondering whether everyone else has a better kitchen.
Awe and happiness
Is awe essential for happiness, or merely an attractive decoration?
It depends on what we mean by happiness.
If happiness means frequent pleasant feelings, awe is only one possible contributor. A good meal, a warm bath and the cancellation of an unnecessary appointment may do the job more reliably.
But if happiness includes vitality, connection, perspective and a sense that life reaches beyond private irritation, awe begins to look less like spice and more like a nutrient.
In a 22-day diary study involving 269 community adults and 145 healthcare professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic, people reported less stress and greater well-being on days when they experienced more awe than usual. Some associations remained even after other positive emotions were taken into account, although the researchers were careful to note that the longer-term effects were less clear.
A 2024 meta-analysis covering 38 articles, 57 independent effect sizes and more than 20,000 participants found a moderate positive relationship between awe and prosocial behaviour. Awe was associated not merely with feeling better, but with greater generosity, cooperation and concern for others. The effects varied with age and cultural background, which is a useful reminder that no emotion works identically in every human being, however convenient that would be for textbook authors.
Research on “awe walks” offers a charmingly modest example. Older adults asked to take brief walks while deliberately attending to vastness and novelty reported greater positive emotion and less daily distress over eight weeks than a comparison group. Their photographs gradually contained more of the surrounding world and less of their own faces. Even the selfie, that proud monument to modern civilisation, briefly surrendered some territory.
Awe should not replace therapy, medicine, social reform, friendship, sleep, or a tolerable income. Psychology has a recurring temptation to prescribe inner adjustments for problems that are partly caused by outer conditions. One cannot gaze at the stars until an abusive employer becomes reasonable.
But the inner perspective is not therefore useless. A larger view may help us decide what must be endured, what must be changed and what does not deserve another hour of mental occupation.
Not all awe is cheerful
Awe has a dark border.
Storms, war, religious authority, political crowds and powerful leaders can all evoke it. The feeling of being part of something larger can encourage connection, but it can also suspend criticism. History contains many spectacles designed to make the individual feel small and the institution feel eternal.
A 2025 registered report distinguished positive awe from threatening awe. Both increased feelings of connectedness and self-loss compared with a neutral condition, although positive awe produced stronger connectedness. This suggests that losing the ordinary self can be expansive or unsettling, depending on the source and setting.
Awe, then, is not automatically wise. It enlarges attention, but it does not guarantee that the object receiving our attention deserves reverence.
The proper companion of awe is not gullibility but curiosity. We may be moved by a cathedral without accepting every doctrine preached beneath its roof. We may feel astonishment at technology without assuming that every new machine represents progress. We may admire a charismatic person while retaining possession of our wallet and political judgement.
Awe opens the mind. Reason must decide what is allowed to enter.
Cultivating awe without turning it into homework
The modern wellness industry has an impressive ability to transform spontaneous pleasures into duties. Soon, one is not merely watching a sunset but completing one’s scheduled evening awe practice, perhaps while recording its intensity in an app.
This rather defeats the purpose.
Awe requires more attention than effort. It can be encouraged by walking somewhere unfamiliar, looking carefully at a familiar place, listening to music without doing anything else, learning about deep time, watching skilled craftsmanship or considering the private courage of people around us.
The essential habit is to notice what exceeds immediate usefulness.
Look at the Moon, not because it will improve productivity, but because it is there, travelling around the Earth with magnificent indifference to your inbox. Read about the formation of stars. Stand inside an old building. Watch birds navigating a winter sky. Listen when someone describes a life unlike your own.
The result may not be happiness in the cheerful sense. Awe can contain sadness, fear, and longing. Yet it often brings a deeper relief: the recognition that the self is not the whole stage on which existence performs.
This is why awe can help with purposelessness. It does not provide a final answer to the question “What is my life for?” Instead, it questions the narrow world in which no answer seemed possible.
Awe says: there is more here than your routine, your disappointment and your present explanation. That may not be a purpose, but it is often where purpose begins.
Awe is therefore neither a luxury nor a complete philosophy of happiness. It is not the meal, but neither is it merely seasoning. It is closer to appetite. It restores our capacity to be interested in the world, and from such interest come knowledge, affection, commitment and sometimes purpose.
A life without awe may still be comfortable. It may be efficient, respectable and well organised, the calendar will function, the bills may be paid.
But maybe it is worth opening the windows?
