Gretchen Rubin's Life in Five Senses and Artistic Interests (O2)

Gretchen Rubin, who built a career studying happiness, noticed one day in the Metropolitan Museum that she had been living almost entirely in her head, barely registering the taste, sound, and feel of her own life. Life in Five Senses is her year of deliberately waking those senses back up. She describes the starting problem on her own site: "She'd spent so much time stuck in her head that she'd allowed the vital sensations of life to slip away, unnoticed." How wide-open your senses run in the first place is, in the Big Five, a facet.

The appetite for sensory experience is Artistic Interests

That facet is Artistic Interests (O2), under Openness, which measures how much you are moved by beauty, art, music, and the texture of the physical world. A high scorer lives closer to their senses by default, catching the quality of light or the sound of a room without being told to. A low scorer moves through the same environments more functionally, using their senses to navigate rather than to savor. Rubin, by her own account, drifted toward the lower end through sheer busyness, and the book is her method for pulling attention back down out of the head and into the body.

What makes the book useful rather than precious is that Rubin treats sensory attention as a skill you can practice, not a gift reserved for aesthetes. She goes looking for her senses on purpose, visiting the same museum weekly, paying attention to smell, learning to actually taste. This is O2 approached as a muscle, and it is a quietly reassuring idea for a lower scorer, because it means a life that feels a little gray and heady is not a fixed sentence but an attention problem with a fix. The senses were there the whole time, mostly ignored.

Your O2 tells you whether Rubin is describing your default or your assignment. Naturally high on it and the book reads like a kindred spirit narrating a richer version of what you already do. Lower on it and the more honest takeaway is that you are probably missing more of your own life than you realize, not because you lack the senses but because attention keeps getting spent upward, on thinking and planning. Rubin's fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Go find one sense today and actually use it.

Read the book: Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World by Gretchen Rubin.

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