Our consciousness is inextricable from our environment.  Colors, angles, textures, and lights all conspire to sway our moods and shape our experiences; molding our conscious and unconscious minds according to the prevailing social norms and cultural trends of the time.  We can feel this every time we walk into a room, a very subtle but noticeable reaction to our surroundings—perhaps a sense of calm and spaciousness, or of creativity and energetic vibrancy, or of anxiety and claustrophobia.  You can feel this right now as you read this, your immediate habitat inescapably affecting the sound, feel, and meaning of every word.  There is no simple mathematical equation to make sense of the connection between consciousness and environment, as the same surroundings can elicit entirely different reactions from psyche to psyche, culture to culture.  Adding to the complexity, we often surprise ourselves by naturally surrounding ourselves with environs that dramatically contrast our interior states:

“Very often people think that people are like the environments that they choose to build or go to.  But it’s not so much that we are like them, it’s more that these things capture our aspirations.  So the person that lives in a minimalist New York loft probably isn’t a very calm person—that’s why they need the loft so badly!  The person who builds in a very gaudy and expensive way, it’s not so much that this person feels rich—in fact they feel very poor, that’s why they had to go in for all this conspicuous display.  So there’s kind of an element of opposites at play whenever you look at people’s tastes.” -Alain de Botton Read the rest of this entry