It’s easy, maybe too easy, to make fun of those dudes skating around the park, chugging Mountain Dew and saying “awesome, bro” to each other very five seconds. Make fun of the way they dress, the pointlessness of their past-time, what brominated vegetable oil is doing to their kidneys. Best of all, make fun of the way they talk. Is it really “awesome” to ollie into a 50-50 and then kick-flip to manual? What would Oprah say about “awesome?”
But your brain really does prefer it if you shed the superiority and give yourself, a little to something greater than yourself. This is not a call for your religious conversion, this is simply a note on how finding “awe” can make you a better person.
What does “better” mean? How about behaving more altruistically? A research paper out of Stanford University in 2012 found that people who experienced awe were “more willing to volunteer their time to help others” and also “experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.”
The experiments defined awe as “the emotion that arises when one encounters something so strikingly vast that it provokes a need to update one’s mental schemas,” which is subjective, to be sure, and lesson one in reserving judgment if a person claims to find something awesome. Maybe you can’t tell a kickflip from a pop-shove it, but to our skater friends, watching someone do something amazing is as much about self-reflection as it is about respect
The result of the Standford experiment found that people who experienced awe expanded people’s perception of time, which itself is very telling. We live at breakneck speeds in the modern world, and none of us feel like wwe have enough time as it is. Stopping to smell the roses is a luxury few of us can afford.
And yet, it takes time to claim others are wasting theirs. So eschew the hypocrisy of cynicism, humble yourself to something awesome, and feel your overall happiness improve. Its infectious.
