Why Do We See Things as Beautiful?

Every day I see something beautiful. A sunset. A flower. All the usual things that make us grab our phones to snap a photo. But sometimes I stop and wonder, why do we see them that way?

I get the basics of how our eyes work with our brains, but I don’t fully understand how we got there. Was it evolution? Did we slowly train ourselves to find beauty in the world around us? If trees were dark purple and the sky some diarrhea shade of green, would we still stand there in awe? Would thousands of years eventually make us see that as beautiful?

We know color helps us remember objects and stirs emotion. Maybe that’s part of it. Objects don’t actually have color. They just reflect light in different wavelengths, and our brains interpret those as color. So maybe beauty lives in that translation, in what our brains decide to do with those signals.

Take yellow. It’s just a color. But say you see a carpet that shade of, let’s call it, piss yellow. You probably recoil. But if you were brand new to this planet, had never gone to the bathroom, and saw that same yellow, would you see beauty in it? We’ve linked certain colors to smells, decay, even disease. Evolution may have wired those associations to keep us alive.

To quote Army of Darkness, “You found me beautiful, once.” Did we once admire deep brown the same way we admire a bright orange sky? Or did time sculpt our perception, shaping what beauty means the same way it shaped our bones?

I don’t really have an answer. Just a thought that keeps bouncing around. The same applies to animals, to people. The first day I saw my wife ten years ago, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. This morning, sitting on the couch, I still do. But why? Is it her face? Her eyes? Sure. But if I’d never seen a human before, would I have felt that?

My dogs, the cardinal that keeps coming back to my yard, every shark on this planet. They’re all stunning to me. And I can’t fully explain why. Maybe beauty is just the brain’s way of saying, stay close to this.

Anyhow, that’s my rant for the day. I just keep wondering, if we grew up on a piss yellow planet, how many sunsets would we be watching every night?