What the data actually shows
The core mechanism is habituation, one of the most basic and well-established features of the nervous system: when a stimulus repeats, our response to it weakens. This is adaptive — it frees attention for what is new or threatening — but it means that repeated exposure to almost anything, however beautiful, gradually mutes its impact. The same sunset, commute, or relationship cue that once stopped you starts to disappear into routine.
Awe — the feeling of wonder in the presence of something vast, novel, or hard to fit into our existing mental categories — has been studied extensively by Dacher Keltner and colleagues. Their research associates experiences of awe with higher wellbeing, greater humility, a sense of being part of something larger, and stronger feelings of connection to others. In this account, wonder is not a frill; it is tied to how we relate to the world and each other.
Keltner's work also points to why adults seem to feel it less: awe depends partly on novelty and vastness, and adult life tends to be saturated with the familiar and increasingly mediated through screens, which can crowd out the kinds of direct, novel, expansive experiences that trigger it. Children, encountering more of the world for the first time, have novelty working in their favour by default.
Why this feels different from how it actually is
It can feel as though the world itself has become less wondrous — duller, smaller, more predictable — when what has actually changed is your response to it. Habituation operates quietly and automatically, so the fading registers as a property of the world rather than of your own attention. The sunset is the same; your brain has simply stopped flagging it.
It can also feel like wonder is a childish thing you are supposed to outgrow, which makes its loss seem natural and even appropriate. But the research suggests children's wonder is driven substantially by newness rather than by some special capacity that adults lack, and that adults can deliberately recreate the conditions for it.
And modern life makes the loss easy to miss, because screens supply a constant stream of mild, manufactured novelty that feels like stimulation without producing the expansive, hard-to-categorise quality of real awe. The feed is busy, so it does not feel like anything is missing — even as the deeper experience of wonder gets crowded out.
It can feel as though the world has become less wondrous — when what has actually changed is your response to it.
What the research says to do about it
The most direct implication of the awe research is to seek out the conditions that produce it: nature, especially vast or open settings; art and music; genuinely new experiences; and moments of scale that don't fit neatly into your existing categories. Because awe depends on novelty and vastness, deliberately exposing yourself to those tends to rekindle it.
A 'fresh eyes' stance helps counter habituation directly. Slowing down and attending to the familiar as if encountering it for the first time — sometimes called savouring — can partly reverse the automatic muting, restoring some of the impact routine has worn away. Practices like awe walks, in which people deliberately attend to the novel and vast around them, have been studied in this vein.
Reducing screen saturation also appears to matter, because the constant manufactured novelty of feeds can crowd out the direct, expansive experiences awe depends on. Making room — unstructured time, real-world novelty, contact with the natural and the large — is the broad pattern the research supports for getting wonder back.
What the research says does not help
Chasing ever-bigger thrills or constant consumer novelty tends not to restore wonder, because habituation catches up quickly — each new purchase or stimulus fades into baseline much as the last did. The treadmill of more does not deliver the durable, expansive quality of awe.
Scrolling for novelty is a poor substitute. The manufactured, bite-sized stimulation of feeds can feel like wonder-adjacent excitement while actually crowding out the direct, vast, hard-to-categorise experiences the awe research associates with real benefits.
Waiting passively for wonder to return on its own is unlikely to work, given that habituation is automatic and routine reinforces it. The research suggests wonder is recovered through deliberate exposure to novelty and a fresh-eyes attention, not by hoping the world will start feeling magical again by itself.
Children's wonder is driven substantially by newness, not by some special capacity that adults lack.
What this looks like in real life
The sunset is the same; your brain stopped flagging it
Habituation runs quietly and automatically, so when a familiar sunset, commute, or view stops stopping you, the fading registers as a property of the world rather than of your own attention. Nothing out there dimmed — the nervous system simply learned to respond less to what it has already seen.
The busy feed that hides what's missing
Screens supply a constant stream of mild, manufactured novelty that feels like stimulation without producing the expansive, hard-to-categorise quality of real awe. Because the feed is busy, nothing feels absent — even as the deeper experience of wonder gets crowded out. Making room for real-world novelty and nature is the broad pattern the research supports.
Fresh eyes on the already-known
Slowing down and attending to the familiar as if encountering it for the first time — savouring, or a deliberate awe walk that attends to the novel and vast — can partly reverse the automatic muting that routine has worn in. Recovering wonder tends to take some intention rather than returning on its own.
Real numbers in context
This is a topic carried by mechanisms rather than precise statistics, so the honest anchors are two well-supported ideas: habituation, the nervous system's basic tendency to respond less to repeated stimuli, and Dacher Keltner's body of research on awe. Habituation explains the fading; the awe literature explains why getting wonder back is worth the effort.
What Keltner's work reasonably supports is that experiences of awe are associated with higher wellbeing, greater humility, and stronger feelings of connection, and that they depend partly on novelty and vastness — which is why routine and screens, by reducing both, tend to reduce awe. These are well-supported tendencies rather than precise effect sizes, and wonder appears to be recoverable rather than permanently lost.