The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - The Power of Awe... and Where to Find it

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Awe reduces stress, helps us forget our minor worries and makes us feel more connected to the people around us. We all need more awe in our lives - but surely it's not that easy to find awesome experiences on your average Tuesday? Actor Tony Hale explains how everyday awe helps ease his anxieties, while UC Berkeley's Dacher Keltner shows us how to find awe in music, art, scenery... even in a walk around our block. And Dr Laurie explores the things that give her a sense of awe with the help of Mike Menzel - who built a space telescope that lets us see billions of years into the past.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. guests I really admire and from whom I learn a lot. Take one of my favorite interviewees. Hey, I'm Tony Hale and happy to be here. I spoke to Emmy award-winning actor Tony Hale for an episode about being in the present moment. The star of Veep and Arrested Development puts an impressive amount of effort into following mindfulness practices in order to tame his negative thoughts. I can honestly say that I felt like I was a victim to my thoughts and my feelings. I was so drowning in my thoughts and my feelings. And when I became more of an observer of them and took a seat and didn't identify with them so much, you're never going to be fully in the driver's

seat, but it felt like I was a little more in the driver's seat. But there was another part of our conversation that left a huge impression on me. It was about the depth and importance of Tony's religious beliefs. The truth is my faith is everything to me. My faith is really what, for me, centers me and is a cornerstone for me. Tony gets many, many unexpected happiness benefits from his Christianity. Building relationships better, listening more, not being so isolated. Like, it really opened me up, and I get a lot of comfort thinking of the big picture. Study after study shows that people who practice a religious faith are significantly happier than

non-religious individuals, irrespective of what religion they practice. People who attend religious services report lower levels of stress and depression. They tend to recover faster from illnesses like cancer and live, on average, about five years longer. Plus, they often report feeling more supported and less lonely. I mean, I think about in life, if I'm going somewhere and I don't know where I'm going, but I'm with somebody who knows where they're going, I relax. If I'm in a car and I know somebody knows exactly where we're going, I sit back and I'm like, okay, now I can enjoy the journey a little more. And that's how I feel with God.

Him seeing the bigger picture of my life, it's gonna be tough. But I know that he is with me and he sees where I'm going. That is a real balm for me. People have said before, which I get, they'll say, well, they see faith as a crutch. And the truth is, I'll take two.

I'll take two crutches because life is hard. We live in a world where independence is really praised, but healthy dependence is okay. It's nothing wrong with being healthily dependent on something. And I'm very healthily dependent on God because that's a relationship that gives me a lot of comfort. I was particularly struck by the importance of Tony's faith, in part because I don't really have that same spiritual comfort in my own life. You see, I'm an atheist. Unlike Tony, I don't believe there's a benevolent God who's watching over me

and helping me to make sense of the big picture. But as a well-being expert, I also know that I'm really missing out on the happiness benefits that believers like Tony experience on a daily basis. So is there any way I can experience at least some of the emotional perks that believers like Tony experience on a daily basis. So is there any way I can experience at least some of the emotional perks that come from spiritual practice? It turns out, yes, there is. But to get those benefits, I'll have to learn to tap into an emotion that's key to spirituality. So join me on my journey to find awe. And bonus, along the way, we'll also get to hear about some very cool, very nerdy space stuff.

When I look up at the stars at night, I see furnaces that are all making the same stuff that we're made of. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. We're in this sterile classroom. It's 1979, and UC Santa Barbara student Dacra Keltner

has signed up for a meditation class. This guy in this white clothing, you know, white linen clothing, starts having us chant, I am a being of purple fire. And that was too much for my friend Memo and I. You know, we start laughing, I am a being of purple fire, you know. And he tosses us out of the classroom. Despite this disappointing experience, Dacher spent the intervening decades trying to understand the special emotion people experience during transcendent spiritual moments. Today, Dacher is a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley.

He's also the author of Awe, the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life. it can transform your life. Awe is the emotion we feel when we encounter vast mysteries that we can't make sense of with our current knowledge structures. Religious people like Tony Hale experience awe when they connect with the divine through their faith. But awe can also occur outside religious contexts. People experience awe when they see a beautiful work of art, or take a walk in nature, or look up at the vast night sky,

or hear a stunning piece of music. And here's where it gets really interesting, Lori. When people feel awe, they're wordless, their mouths drop, they feel silent. And I love the word that my former grad student Sarah Gottlieb used to describe it, which is destabilizing. Most of the emotions we experience as humans feel either good or bad. An emotion like sadness or anger, that's mostly bad. A feeling like gratitude or laughter, mostly good. But awe is kind of weird. Experiencing awe does feel pleasurable, but it also feels threatening and scary. In some cases, awe can feel closer to dread. There's a really interesting little sliver of time during the unfolding of awe where you just are like, I can't make sense of what I'm seeing.

Despite not being religious in the traditional sense, Dacker grew up with plenty of opportunities to experience the secular version of awe. My mom taught romanticism and Blake and Shelley and Wordsworth. My dad was a painter,ved Goya and Francis Bacon. And I grew up in Laurel Canyon, a very wild place in the late 1960s. I just could not not study awe, given my background. Today, Dacher regularly seeks out awe, visiting breathtaking natural places

like the Sierras and the Alps, and immersing himself in art, like the works of Dutch master Pieter de Hooch. He has these paintings in a period of his life when he was really poor, of just everyday life, and they blew my mind. Dacker also experiences awe reading great literature. I love Walt Whitman, who taught us, if the soul is not in the body, where is the soul? You know, what a deep idea.

But Dacher's awe also springs from less genteel art forms, too. I was in England in 1978, and I heard the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen. And I was just like, this is it. This is the truth. You know, when I saw Iggy Pop, he stage dives. I'm like holding him up by his chest. I'm like, that is awesome. Totally slamming.

He starts bleeding, blood gets on me. And I have a classic awe experience where I touch his arm and his skin felt like God. Felt supernatural. I'm no Iggy Pop, but Dacher even got an awe boost from our short interview. You know, I'm embarrassed. Lori, I just got goosebumps with your question. I'm not kidding. So vulnerable am I to awe? But experiencing awe and examining it scientifically are two different things.

First of all, people thought you couldn't measure awe, that it was ineffable. I think there was this sense that you were bumping into realms that are beyond science, the sacred, spirituality, the sublime. But heck, you know, I'm at Berkeley. I grew up like this. I have long hair. It's like, you know, I should do this. So Dacher became one of the first scholars to study awe.

His initial task was to characterize this emotion's physical manifestations. Awe's bodily signs are spectacular. The chills, these little rushes of goosebumps that go up your arms and up your neck and into your scalp. Awe is such a strange emotion. Those goosebumps and chills are the same reactions we have to a scary threat. But awe can also feel reassuring. Witnessing a profound event can put the petty concerns of daily life into perspective. It reduces your sense of stress. Stressful things. My work colleague, that parking ticket. Don't stress you out. All this reminds me of the calm feeling that Tony Hale gets from his Christian faith. He called it a balm that helps soothe all the problems and irritations of life. Secular awe also seems to deactivate regions of our brain known as the

default mode network. That's where we ruminate about the past and fret about the future. Awe shuts off all this self-oriented worrying, which kind of lets us just be. That voice in your mind that Aldous Huxley called the nagging, neurotic, interfering voice of the self, it kind of just dissolves. But just how much does our sense of self disappear when we undergo an awesome experience? Dacher and his students traveled to Yosemite National Park, a spot voted as one of the most awe-inspiring in the U.S. Tourists there were handed a piece of paper with an image of sun and grass printed on it, and were asked to draw themselves into that

scene standing at the park. These self-drawings were then compared to ones done by tourists at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, a similarly popular but much less awe-inspiring location. What did Dagger find? Well, the Yosemite tourists drew really tiny pictures of themselves. Their self-portraits were 33% smaller than those made at Fisherman's Wharf. Being in an awesome place makes us feel really tiny,

like we're a cog in something much bigger. The self tends to dissolve, and importantly, and this is less well understood, what forms of consciousness does it open us up to? And one of the things that we've documented is the sense that you are actually intertwined with larger things. You are actually intertwined with larger things. Another group of Yosemite tourists were asked to complete what's known as the inclusion of community in self-test. It shows a series of overlapping circles that vary in the amount they meet, from a complete 100% overlap to not overlapping at all. Visitors to Yosemite were asked,

which of these pairs of circles best represents the connection you feel between yourself and your community? People with a greater sense of connection tend to choose the pairs of circles that overlap the most. And tourists looking at awe-inspiring vistas in Yosemite picked sets of circles with super high degrees of overlap. You're not looking at people. You're looking at a big slab of rock,

and you're suddenly aware of I'm part of a community. I think we need more of that in our world today. I think people are really hungering for it, pressing for it. And here's an emotion you can get in a couple minutes that makes you open to that. So feeling awe will make me stress less. Great. It'll help me stop beating myself up about the past and future. Ideal. And it will help me feel more deeply connected to the people around me. Sounds perfect. But where exactly can I lay my hands on some more awe? The Happiness Lab will be right back. I clearly need much more awe in my life.

But such a powerful emotion doesn't just grow on trees, right? It's actually the most easily accessible emotion in many ways. Psychologist and awe expert, Dacher Keltner, has graciously offered to be my guide. There are these misconceptions of awe, right? It's only about God. Nope, it's about a lot of things. And then another is you can't go out and find it intentionally, right? It has to happen to you. You have to be

like St. Paul on the road to Damascus and you collapse and you see God. You know, you can't plan this in your life. How is Dacher so sure of this? Well, he carried out a worldwide survey of awe, asking people from 26 different countries to describe an experience of awe. And by awe, we mean when you've encountered a vast mystery that you don't understand. Dacker collected more than 2,500 different stories of awe. But he was shocked to find that these thousands of different stories seem to involve only eight different kinds of experiences, what he calls the eight wonders of life.

The first wonders, unsurprisingly, involve religious experiences and being in nature. People also reported powerful moments of transcendence when enjoying sublime cultural experiences, like great paintings and music. But these four wonders, religion, nature, music, and art, weren't the most frequent ways that people reported feeling awe. The most common source of awe from these stories around the world is the moral beauty of other people. It was just like how kind and courageous people are in overcoming obstacles. This is a mom from the United Kingdom who says, you know, the way my daughter dealt with the stillbirth of her son was with her at the hospital when he was delivered, and her strength in dealing with

this left me in awe. As a source of awe, this is kind of awesome, right? The newspapers are full of stories of people who do amazing, brave, and selfless things. If only we stopped to talk to more people, we might even find more awesomeness on our very doorsteps. The sixth way in which people experienced awe was during epiphanies, moments where they learned something profound that totally reshaped their worldview. Wonder of life number seven are moments of so-called collective effervescence, in which groups of people get together to have a shared experience, like being in a crowd at a music festival or a club, or even at a protest rally. We start moving in unison.

We have a shared attention of what we're looking at. You know, wow, it's this hip-hop artist or it's this political figure giving a speech. And you know this, Laurie, like there's this incredible new science of how quickly our heart rates, our brains sync up and it becomes transcendent. But Dacher's final wonder of life occurs at moments of birth and death. Dacher's final wonder of life occurs at moments of birth and death. My younger brother, Rolf, was a year younger than me. We did everything together. He really was, in some sense, my moral compass. He was much kinder than me and stronger and more courageous. And he got colon cancer and after two brutal years, passed away.

Dacher says sitting at his brother's bedside was by far his most powerful ever experience of awe. And there it was. I was watching my brother die and it was transcendent. Like, what is this? What is he? Where's his life? He's still with me. How? As I thought about adding more daily awe into my own life, I got a little worried. We can't always engineer major epiphanies or fly off to Yosemite or MoMA, and crowd surfing with Iggy Pop seems pretty unlikely for a nerdy professor like me. So, I asked Dacher, is awe really the kind of emotion that the average Joe can experience whenever they want? You know, we tested that idea, and so Virginia Sturm and I had people do a regular awe walk once a week. They go out and they just go somewhere weird or

new and look for awe. That's all we really said. These simple walks significantly increased people's experience of awe. Plus, the walkers were happier and less stressed afterwards. Open your eyes when you're walking through town and you're going to find some human goodness. Is awesomeness actually more common than I'd been assuming? Well, Dagger has done an experiment to see if it is, saying to ordinary people. Here's a definition of awe. At the end of the day, did you experience something that was vast and mysterious that you would call awe? Tell us. People reported experiencing something vast and mysterious two to three times every week. We just have to open our eyes, you know, and suddenly you're like,

wow, the pen I have is remarkable. Or think about where this tea came from. And then off we go. We feel awe. For an Iggy Pop fan like Dacher, seeing live music is clearly the fastest way to experience awe. At a concert, we can feel overwhelmed by the beauty of the light show and the music. We might have an epiphany when we hear the lyrics of a familiar song in a new way, and we might feel collective effervescence, standing in a sweaty throng of fellow fans. For Dacher, live music is an awe no-brainer. I love asking people, describe a moment when

you really found yourself at a musical concert. How about you, Lori? What's a moment of collective effervescence in music for you? Dacher, I'm much more embarrassing in my musical taste. I was like reading all your stories about going to Iggy Pop concerts with jealousy because I'm a like poor child of the late 80s, early 90s. Mine are like, I was at this New Kids on the Block show. So mine are the same phenomena, more embarrassing. We're all human.

You know, we all find it in music. So New Kids on the Block, more power to you. Much as I loved Donnie Wahlberg and the other New Kids, I don't think my most reliable source of awe will be found in music. I'm a science girl at heart.

I should probably lean into that. And just as Dacher dotes on Iggy Pop, I've found a nerdy object that rocks my world. Unfolded, it's the size of a tennis court. It cost over $10 billion, and it's over 1 million miles away from me right now. I personally believe that there are two ways to make the world a better place. You can decrease the suck, and you can increase the awesome. So today, I must talk about the James Webb Space Telescope because it's freaking awesome! You'll hear how I get awesomely awestruck by this

awesome telescope when the Happiness Lab returns from the break. When I talk about the space program people are always like NASA's money could be better spent on services for humanity. I've long been a big fan of nerdy YouTube bloggers. And to them I say, I do not want to live in a world where we only focus on suck, but we also have to make good things happen. And my favorite of the nerdy YouTube bloggers is Hank Green. And that is why I love the James Webb Space Telescope.

His enthusiasm for science is just infectious. A freaking awesome frick space telescope! But I think his 2011 video on the top five awesome things about the Webb Telescope was his best work ever. It is awesome. That was how I first learned about this amazing project. In the truest sense of the word awesome. Hank made his famous video long before the telescope launched into space. But today, that amazing device is up there, gliding along a million

miles from Earth and sending back the most amazing images. As I started thinking about how much I loved hearing about the telescope and talking about it and marveling at it, I started to realize that the James Webb may be my version of touching Iggy Pop, walking in Yosemite, and admiring a Dutch painting all rolled into one. And so I wanted to spend some time sharing my awe about this invention, not just with you, my listeners, but also with someone who really gets my passion. Hey, Mike, how's it going? Good. Can you hear me, Laurie?

I first met Mike at a small workshop. I had no idea who he was, but when I learned what he did for a living, I completely swooned. My luck with these Zoom meetings is marginal at best. I admire Mike a lot, but I did expect him to be a bit better with technology. You can still hear me, right? Mike, are you still there? You kind of cut out with your audio. Okay, I think I got it. So anytime you're ready. Cool. We usually just start by just having you say your name and your title so you can introduce yourself. Yeah, my name

is Mike Menzel and I am the mission systems engineer for the James Webb Space Telescope. That's right. Mike was the lead engineer on the James Webb Space Telescope. He spent 25 years building the most powerful and most insanely ambitious deep space telescope that our species has ever created. So yeah, he kind of gets a pass on the whole Zoom thing. The James Webb may be the most amazing object our species has ever designed, but I'm guessing that at least some of my listeners may not know why it's so incredibly awesome. So I'm going to channel my inner Hank Green and take some time to unpack my wonder about this amazing project. The first thing that's so wonderful about this telescope is the sheer scale of its mission.

The James Webb is called a telescope, but it's probably more accurate to think of it as a time machine. Any optical device that you have is not seeing the universe as it is, but seeing it as it was. Even your eyes are time machines. If you go out at night and look at the stars in the sky with your own eyes, most of those stars that you see are somewhere between four and a couple thousand light years away. That means that you're seeing those stars not as they are, but as they were. Some of them you're seeing as they were when the Roman Empire ruled the Western world. So, you know, the farther the object, the farther you're looking back in time. But the James Webb isn't just looking back to Roman times,

or even when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It can see light from the first stars ever created. And they would have turned on probably around 13.5 billion years ago. Cosmologists think the universe is 13.7 billion years old. So the James Webb is able to look at stuff that happened right after the Big Bang, which is totally incredible. But the ability to time travel back that far requires a very unique kind of device. So astronomers knew if you really want to see the first things that lit up our universe, you probably better make it a really, really big telescope. And the James Webb is very, very big.

Its primary mirror is about the size of a three-story house. And the sun shield that protects it from the sun's destructive rays is the size of a whole tennis court. And it has to fold up and fit into a rocket that's only five meters in diameter. Which means that in addition to being very, very big, the James Webb telescope also had to have the capacity to be very, very small. Mike had to design a telescope that was also a transformer. It had to fold up like a piece of origami and reopen once it reached its destination near the sun, which is kind of dangerous from an engineering perspective.

You never, ever build anything that has to be deployed in outer space. That was the very first rule I learned in 1981 for satellite design. Well, James Webb breaks that rule in spades. You know, 50 of the most complex, ridiculous, insane deployments ever attempted. Aside from the fact that folding it up and unfolding it and deploying it in space is very hard, what makes it even harder is that the type of things that you're folding up are what us engineers would call non-deterministic. You're folding these flexible membranes the size of a tennis court. And when

they're in zero-g and they're unfolding, they could float and get in places where they'd snag and, you know, and just the little stupidest error could ruin the mission. Mike and his team had only one opportunity to get it right. Most of the other space telescopes currently in operation are close enough to the Earth that we can fix them if something goes wrong. The Hubble telescope, which Mike also worked on, has been serviced many times. So we trained the astronauts, we built their tools, we built the hardware that they would take up to keep Hubble running. If Hubble blows a fuse, it's just a few hundred miles from Earth. But the James Webb is far, far beyond the reach of any human intervention.

It had to be foolproof. Every review board always reminded me that, you know, Mike, you better get this right because you can't fix James Webb. You're not going to have a second chance like Hubble. Can you imagine the guts required to build a $10 billion machine that simply cannot break down? That was the level of badass science tenacity that Mike and his team brought to the project.

And even once the rocket carrying his creation blasted off, Mike couldn't allow himself to relax. Well, this is the first step of 50 that all have to go right in the next 14 days. So I knew that the tougher days were still ahead of us. And those tougher days went on and on. Can you imagine how stressful it was? Deployment number 10, number 11,

number 50, number 51. It was a nail-biter every single time. Eventually, the final deployment, step number 178 in the mission program, went off without a hitch. The telescope was in place. But Mike still didn't know if the Webb telescope would see anything worthy of all the intense effort and vast expense. Then the telescope's optical

image manager handed Mike the very first photos. When he kind of snickered, he said, hey, this thing's going to work really, really good. That's when I knew. I think there were probably about five or six of us that have stayed on this job for over 20 years who all really knew in our guts the risks that we were taking. It was going to be over for us if it failed. There was no coming back. We were history. Our lives would have been summed up as failures, and that would have been it. But I was proud that none of us left the program.

We all been it. But I was proud that none of us left the program. We all accepted it. So with that in the back of your mind, when you see everything working and you see the images, you do get emotional. The James Webb Space Telescope has now been sending its emotionally inspiring images back to Earth for several years. I was curious if Mike had a favorite image so far, one that really filled him with a sense of awe. Turns out he did. It was the first image that NASA shared publicly, what's come to be known as the Webb's first deep field. That was the one that they were showing to all those galaxies over 13 billion light years away. It's worth pausing this episode and googling this image if you haven't seen it already. At first, you might assume that you're looking at the usual

astronomy photo, that it's just showing a bunch of star stuff. But the Webb's first deep field is actually showing thousands of galaxies. When you look at that image, you're able to see parts of our universe that humans have never seen before, including stuff that's nearly 13 billion years old. With that single image, you are time-traveling 13 billion years into the past. The deep field was the Webb's first public image, but it already allowed our species to see and study some of the oldest physical structures that have ever existed. I mean, how insanely cool is that?

The hairs on the back of my neck started to stand up, and that's where it hit me. I think I said something like, whatever the hell's out there, we're going to see it. The story of the James Webb Space Telescope fills me with an incredible sense of awe. It ticks so many of Dackard Keltner's boxes for experiencing wonder. As an object, it's beautiful and impressive. Its images are already making me think differently about the universe and my small place in it. But what I didn't realize before talking to Mike

is the awe I'd get from the human part of this invention, that source of wonder that Dacker said we often overlook. I'm also awed by Mike Mentzel, and not just because of his recent achievements. Mike seems to have been awe-inspiring his entire life. You know, I was interested in astronomy since I was six years old. I don't come from a poor family, but definitely lower middle class, you know, blue collar. You know, I was born in 59 and I grew up with NASA.

I grew up watching them go to the moon. My father's father would babysit me and he read to me from a book called the Time, Life, Nature Library on the Universe. And it struck a chord. I loved hearing about it. I loved the pictures of other planets. I just fell in love with astronomy. I fell in love with the space program. When Mike turned 11, his parents bought him his first telescope. But finding a safe spot to set it up in the dark wasn't exactly easy. I grew up in

Elizabeth, New Jersey. And I tell folks, you know, if you're not familiar with what's walking around the streets at one or two in the morning in Elizabeth, New Jersey, I can assure you it's not the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings. One night, Mike was out stargazing alone when he spotted a menacing group of teens hanging out by his yard. And they saw me out there with the telescope and they started giving the usual obscene calls. And one of them says, hey, Galileo, what are you looking at? Instead of running off, this courageous 11-year-old invited the intoxicated teens to check out the wonders of the night sky. Lucky for me that Saturn was out that night.

I put the telescope on Saturn. And one by one, they saw that planet and how beautiful it looked. They were amazed. The awe and the beauty of what they saw just cut through all the nonsense, cut through all the hard guy attitudes or even the drugs they were on. And one by one, they were going, oh, check this out. Look at this. Oh, my God. And they just wanted to see more and more. Mike's uninvited guests were clearly experiencing their very own epiphanies. Maybe seeing Saturn even gave them a sense of shared experience with every other human on this tiny blue speck. The encounter certainly led to some unexpected

benefits for Mike. Probably about a week or so after that incident, I'm out in the playground. I'm out there on a basketball court, you know, an 11-year-old little nerd with my basketball. And some guy comes over and he looks at my basketball. He takes it and he goes, hey, man, I like this. This is a cool ball, which is the prelude to, well, you're going to get beat up. You're going to give him the ball. And as I'm about to get ready for the butt kicking that is just typical in Elizabeth, New Jersey, there's a crowd of guys over in the side and I hear them yell, hey man, leave him alone, that's Galileo, he's cool. So I remember thinking to myself, hey, this astronomy stuff has some practical application.

And sharing this astronomical thrill never gets old for Mike. He loves showing off not just the Webb's images of galaxies billions of miles away, but also the photos he's gotten from our own solar system. I was with a bunch of astronomers, and I started to yell down the hall to my engineering friends, hey, look at this, check this out. Oh my God, this is Neptune. Look at how beautiful it is. And while I'm saying this, I remembered instantly the reaction that my hoodlum friends had 50 years ago in my backyard. It was the same guttural reaction that the first time you see something, it just invokes an emotion of awe and wonder that can't be contained.

Do you like to get awe in other domains? Are you into art or music? I wish I could answer that in the affirmative, but the truth is I've been a science nerd my whole life and that's all I really got. If I disappear tomorrow, some of the learning and some of the information that I help gather will somehow live on and propagate.

And I find that there's something, I don't know, wonderful about that. I started this episode with the assumption that an atheist like me might have to miss out on the sort of awe that many people experience through faith. I worried that it'd be tough to find transcendent experiences on a regular basis in the absence of religion. But talking with today's guest has made me realize that goosebump moments are there for all of us.

We just need to be a bit more intentional in seeking out something awesome. Taking time to experience awe makes us feel less stressed, less self-absorbed, and more connected. Pondering the vast stuff we don't understand can destabilize us, but in ways that make us feel happier. It does take a small bit of effort, but we don't necessarily need some huge telescope to find wonder. As Dacher's work so nicely shows, everyday awe is all around us. We just need to look for it. People always ask me, like, what do I do? And I say, go find some awe.

You know, it's powerful.