Why a Lack of Beauty Is Draining American Culture
Tuesday, September 9, 2025.
Walk through a typical American airport: fluorescent lights, vinyl floors, anxious crowds. It looks like stress had a baby with laminate.
Now imagine the opposite—a vaulted cathedral, a redwood grove, or just a row house with consistent cornice lines. One scene depletes; the other restores.
The difference isn’t luxury. It’s beauty.
When beauty recedes, cultures don’t collapse spectacularly. They just eventually get bone-tired.
Beauty Is Fuel for the Nervous System
Beauty isn’t frippery. It matters to our nervous systems.
Patients with tree-view windows healed faster than those facing brick walls (Ulrich, 1984). Natural environments, with soft fascination, relieve attention fatigue and calm cortisol levels (Kaplan, 1995).
Neuroscience confirms as much: beauty activates the medial orbitofrontal cortex (a reward hub) and the default-mode network—our brain’s meaning-making machinery (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011; Vessel et al., 2012; Vessel et al., 2019).
In short: beauty steadies the wheel in our brains.
Surprise: Beauty’s Spark Plug
Beauty needs surprise. Not shock—resolution of the unexpected.
Berlyne (1971) showed novelty and complexity matter: too little, boredom; too much, overwhelm.
Neurobiology echoes this: beauty often elicits prediction error signals—that "aha!" moment when the unexpected fits (Schultz, Dayan, & Montague, 1997). Think of a jazz improvisation that bends and resolves, or a wildflower forcing its way through concrete.
In other words, surprise wakes us up.
Awe: Beauty’s Big Sister
If beauty is a cool sip, awe is a plunge.
Awe is our response to vastness that rearranges the mind (Keltner & Haidt, 2003).
It shrinks the ego, expands attention, and fosters humility. Physiologically, awe can even reduce inflammation (Stellar et al., 2015). “Awe walks” lower stress and lift mood, especially in older adults (Anderson et al., 2022).
Spectacle is loud. Awe is silent expansion.
Why American Culture Feels Enervated
Zoning for Soul Fatigue
Postwar suburban sprawl gave us strip malls, parking lots, and cookie-cutter housing—built for cars, not people. This environment clobbers nervous systems with ugly, stale efficiency.
As James Howard Kunstler argued in The Geography of Nowhere (1993), this is “not simply bad architecture—it’s the psychic toll of environments without dignity.” Jim never minced words: “The tragedy of suburbia is that it represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.”
Read More: James Howard Kunstler on the Aesthetics of Place
James Howard Kunstler has been one of America’s sharpest critics of suburban sprawl and the cultural cost of ugliness. In The Geography of Nowhere, he argued that much of postwar America was “built for the car, not for the human being.”
For Kunstler, the real tragedy isn’t just bad architecture—it’s what ugly, placeless environments do to our spirits: they sap vitality, weaken civic bonds, and leave us, quite literally, nowhere.
He has continued this critique in books like Home from Nowhere and in his long-running blog Clusterfuck Nation, where he connects aesthetics, politics, and the future of American life. Unfortunately, I’ve not quite resonated with his more recent social commentary, but Jim has an inspired and incisive wit, and is a joy to read.
If you want to understand why your nervous system feels assaulted by strip malls, cul-de-sacs, and soulless public spaces, James Howard Kunstler is required reading. I sincerely hope his “World Made by Hand” series would become a series of films. They are cinematic and memorable novels of a post-collapse USA in upstate New York with an unforgettable cast of characters..
Algorithmic Aesthetics
Our digital feeds push click-rate novelty—flashy, quick, disposable. Surprise without resolution. Our brains are baited by dopamine hits but starved of meaning. The result: attention bleed, not relief.
Spectacle vs. Awe
America often substitutes bigness for vastness.
We broadcast mega-events, but we've forgotten how to slow down. Awe—vastness structured for humility—is rare. A society addicted to spectacle rarely welcomes awe.
Minimalism Without Mercy
Minimalism’s ethos of “less is more” can curdle into aesthetic dieting when stripped of ornament.
Without surprise—a flourish of color, texture, human irregularity—emptiness feels cold, not calm.
Inequity of Beauty
Beauty in American cities is often a zipcode privilege.
Affluent neighborhoods get tree-lined streets, parks, thoughtful zoning. They poorer folks? They get the concrete deserts.
Kunstler’s warning resonates here: rebuilding civic art and civic life is essential for reviving our anemic sense public virtue and common good.
Beauty isn’t just nice—it’s also a form of social justice.
Beauty, Awe & Relationships: A Nervous-System Rescue
Habituated to ugliness—harsh light, clutter, screens—couples argue more and soothe less. Enter a candle-dinner, dusk walk, thoughtful waiting room—nervous systems drop from fight mode. Surprise matters too: a small, artful gesture ruptures routine and makes repair real.
Beauty says, “You’re safe enough to soften.”
Awe says, “You’re small enough to belong.”
What You Can Do Right Now
Beauty Audits. swap harsh light bulbs for soft, if you are a therapist, maybe add some greenery in your waiting areas.
Design “Pattern + Grace Note.” Coherent structure—then bang! A surprise. A mural, a bloom, a maybe a handcrafted detail.
Schedule Awe. Take Dusk strolls, attend museum Sundays, go star-gazing.
Curate Resistance. Read essays, watch craft videos, linger in poetry feeds.
Equitize Design. Every school, clinic, library deserves human-scale beauty. Civic design equals civic health.
A Focus on Beauty is Evidence of Cultural Vitality
America isn’t short on money or ideas.
We’ve just forgotten that loving attention to form is democratic oxygen.
Beauty isn’t a luxury for the elites—it’s essential for all of us. We all need bread and roses.
Jim warned us decades ago: when the environment ceases to nourish us, so does the culture. It’s still time to rebuild—street by street, home by home, soul by soul.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Anderson, C. L., Monroy, M., Keltner, D., Schmader, T., & Stellar, J. E. (2022). Awe walks promote emotional well-being in older adults. Psychological Science, 33(5), 732–743. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211039477
Berlyne, D. E. (1971). Aesthetics and psychobiology. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Biederman, I., & Vessel, E. A. (2006). Perceptual pleasure and the brain. American Scientist, 94(3), 247–253.
Haidt, J., & Keltner, D. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314.
Helbich, M. (2018). Toward dynamic urban environmental exposure assessments in mental health research. Environmental Research, 161, 129–135.
Ishizu, T., & Zeki, S. (2011). Toward a brain-based theory of beauty. PLoS ONE, 6(7), e21852. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021852
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182.
Scarry, E. (1999). On beauty and being just. Princeton University Press.
Schultz, W., Dayan, P., & Montague, P. R. (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science, 275(5306), 1593–1599.
Stellar, J. E., John-Henderson, N., Anderson, C. L., Gordon, A. M., McNeil, G. D., & Keltner, D. (2015). Positive affect and markers of inflammation: Discrete positive emotions predict lower levels of inflammatory cytokines. Emotion, 15(2), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000033
Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may influence recovery from surgery. Science, 224(4647), 420–421.
Vessel, E. A., Starr, G. G., & Rubin, N. (2012). The brain on art: Intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 66. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00066
Vessel, E. A., Isik, A. I., Belfi, A. M., Stahl, J. L., Starr, G. G., & Rubin, N. (2019). The default-mode network is engaged during high levels of internally focused aesthetic appeal. NeuroImage, 188, 584–597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.12.019
White, M. P., Alcock, I., Grellier, J., Wheeler, B. W., Hartig, T., Warber, S. L., Bone, A., … Fleming, L. E. (2019). Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and well-being. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 7730.