The Aesthetics of Wellbeing: How Developing an Eye Changed the Way I Think
The art of paying attention, or the most underrated wellness practice
When we think about wellness practices, the obvious candidates like movement, sleep, and food usually come to mind first. For the more committed among us, there’s the cold plunge and the sauna. Yet, some of our deepest sources of fuel are rarely recognized as wellness.
Last year, I read a book by French philosopher Charles Pépin titled Quand la beauté nous sauve, which translates roughly as When Beauty Saves Us. He argues that beauty is never superficial, describing it instead as a gateway to self-understanding that helps us trust our own judgment and open up to the possibilities of life. I had long felt this before reading his book and when I turned the last page, I felt seen.
Encountering beauty, whether in a film, a building, the design of a face cream, or a loved one’s smile, often triggers a physical response. Over time, I started to wonder whether this was just a personality trait—I am a Taurus, ruled by Venus after all—or whether paying attention to my surroundings and engaging with the world through a creative lens was doing something real for my wellbeing.
It turns out, it is.
The wonderful thing about Pépin’s vision is that beauty is described as a sensation rather than a diktat. He argues that it’s not about having taste, which he views as a social construct, but about the raw feeling of finding something beautiful. Don’t you feel like the pressure is off suddenly? While Pépin writes about beauty specifically, the mechanism he describes—that moment of genuine, groundless feeling—reaches much further. In my humble opinion, it extends to creativity in all the forms it takes in real life.
The Creative Misconception
The word creativity tends to intimidate. When I was in high school, a friend of mine was the epitome of creativity: she sang, danced, and drew with a radiant ease, embodying the very essence of what it means to be an artist. Naturally, for a long time, I thought that was the only way to be creative, that it belonged solely to artists in studios, requiring years of practice or a rare talent.
This is a limited definition that leaves many of us unaware of its inherent benefits. Creativity, at its most honest, is the ability to transform an idea into something new; beyond just talent, it’s a skill of observation. It lives in the way we select a film, choose one shirt over another, or treat a dinner with friends as worthy of thought. This matters because most of us have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that unless we paint, write, or play an instrument, creativity is not our claim. But that framing forgets the heart of it: the curiosity to look closer and the sensitivity to let what we see mean something.
Creativity is good for us
This is where it gets interesting. Because noticing or pausing to contemplate an object is about more than just pleasing the eye, it triggers a neurological response.
Research shows that encountering beauty activates the brain’s reward circuits, the same ones involved in other forms of pleasure. A 2024 study published in Scientific Reports recently gave a name to what many of us intuitively feel: brief, everyday encounters with beauty act as a consistent emotional anchor, lifting our mood in real-time. This isn’t just a fleeting spark: decades of research on creative engagement show that these moments accumulate, building our psychological resilience and softening the edges of anxiety over time.
Yet, beyond what can be measured in a lab, there is a deeper, more personal resonance. Listening to your own sensitivity, whether it’s a director’s particular use of light (I personally love Sofia Coppola’s work for this exact reason) or the deliberate design of an everyday object, builds an internal library of references, desires, and perspectives. It generates ideas and, more importantly, an appetite for life. We meet Pépin again here: beauty opens us to other possible lives. Not as an escape, but as an exposure to what we now believe is available to us.
A little practice
The good news is, none of this requires a new hobby or a reorganization of your schedule. At its simplest, it’s just about paying a little more attention to what piques your curiosity. For some, creativity lies in the visual: fashion, film, photography, or simply contemplating the outside world. For others, it’s sound, movement, or even taste. But the medium is secondary. What truly matters is the quality of engagement, the moment when an element produces an internal response and, instead of moving on immediately, you stay with it for a second longer. That second is crucial because it carries, over time, the accumulation of these moments, building a defined sense of what you value and a greater capacity to imagine your life differently.
This is exactly what Pépin means when he says beauty helps us trust ourselves. It isn’t about becoming more cultured or sophisticated, it’s about staying longer in your inner world, when the outside is constantly asking for your attention. You don’t need to be an artist to live like this. You just need to look up, every now and then, and stop.