Types / Five pillars / Beauty
One part of life
Beauty
Art, music, and nature—and how much of them reaches your life
What Beauty covers
Beauty covers the ways art, music, nature, and other forms of perception enter a person’s life. It includes attention, curiosity, pleasure, and participation, whether those experiences happen in a museum, outside, at home, or somewhere else. It belongs in this check-in because beauty was one of the five areas in Carl Jung’s view of a happy life, shared in a 1960 newspaper interview. That’s one thinker’s view, not a proven recipe.
The questions include ten statements about interest in art and beauty, time spent outdoors in nature during the past week, and how often someone made or took in art. They also ask how satisfied someone is with this part and how much it matters. The artistic-interest statements come from a public-domain scale in the International Personality Item Pool. The satisfaction and importance questions were written for this site and haven’t been validated.
What it leaves out
This doesn’t measure taste or talent. It asks how much art and nature reach you—and how much that connection matters to you.
Where the questions come from
For Beauty, each card below gives the credit for the questions that organization asks, printed word for word.
the International Personality Item Pool
Statements adapted from the International Personality Item Pool (ipip.ori.org), which is in the public domain.
Nomigram
Our own questions. They haven’t been validated yet.
None of the organizations named here endorses this site or its check-in.
The other four parts
See all five →-
Health
Your body and mind, and how they’ve been doing lately
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Relationships
The people closest to you—family, friends, a partner, or chosen family
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Money and work
A reasonable standard of living, and work that satisfies you—paid or unpaid
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Outlook on life
A way of seeing life, religious or not, that helps you through hard times
Make room for a closer look
51 questions give each part its own place, including the distance between what matters and how life is going.
Questions
Is there one overall score?
No, on purpose. Each part is shown on its own, and how much something matters is never multiplied by or added to how it’s going. The Office for National Statistics says even its own four questions must not be added together.
Should someone take it more than once?
Yes, that’s what it is for. It reads a moment, so the same questions a few months later can show what moved. A retake within a year asks 41 questions instead of 51, because the 10 statements about art and beauty are asked once a year.
Which questions are ours?
Most questions come from a government survey or a published scale, and they’re used word for word. The satisfaction and importance questions are ours, as are the outlook questions, and they’re marked wherever their answers show because they haven’t been validated. That’s the difference between an established measure and an experiment.