Okay, Weirdo. I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Mike Mon. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, what's the point of nostalgia?
Who's this man flying around in green tites?
Hi, I'm Peter Pan. Angela, today our question comes from listener Michael.
He says, sometimes when I'm feeling stressed, I'll close my eyes and pretend I'm in my parents' backyard with my old dog or at my wedding or pushing my daughter in a swing, all super happy places for me.
I think I'd be a healthier person if I had even more of those happy places to go when times get tough.
Why does nostalgia exist and how helpful is it?
What's beautiful? This is a happy place question.
I guess it's an nostalgia question.
Yeah, so the thing that I thought was really interesting about how he asks this, he uses it as almost a, an escape mechanism, a coping mechanism.
Maybe you'd say a grounding mechanism to go back to a happy place and kind of reset himself.
And I will say that I have most often thought of nostalgia more as a place that I go when I'm just sitting around with the family and thinking back to great traditions that we have or.
So not a coping mechanism, but just a savoring.
Yeah, yeah. Kind of thing.
But I liked the idea of it as a coping mechanism.
So the first time I recall hearing the phrase happy place, like going to your happy place, it was the summer before my senior year in college.
And I was very stressed because I was working at this summer program for little kids.
And it was a summer school taught by college students and high school students.
And I had spent lots of time with kids with, you know, my experience as a tutor and as a big sister and a big sister program, I had never, ever, ever worked that hard.
I mean, it was just brutal.
I think there was something about the hours and the pressure of being a teacher suddenly even though you were like 20 years old and you didn't know what you're doing.
And it was just, it was wonderful, but it was extremely stressful.
And at one of the staff meetings, the director, she said, I'd like everyone to come to everyone to close their eyes.
And mind you, this is like 1991, I think, right?
So this is before we did like mindfulness on mass.
Right, right. She's like, everyone close your eyes.
And I want you to think of a happy place.
And I want you to each go to that happy place.
And I want you to see and hear and smell and experience all the things that that happy place was for you.
And I close my eyes and I didn't know where I would go.
And where I did go, it surprised me.
I had this friend, Michelle, who I was really good friends with in middle school.
And actually by the time that this was all happening, my like nostalgia moment, I didn't even consider Michelle and I to be very good friends.
But in middle school, we were best friends.
And I would go down the shore as we say in New Jersey.
We don't say going to the sea shore.
And also going to the beach, we go down the shore in Jersey.
And I went down the shore with Michelle to her parents' second home, this like condo.
I remember it was on the second floor.
It was gray on the outside.
I remember it had a deck.
And I remember laying out on the lounge chair with of course no sunscreen because those were the days.
And I just would go there every time that I was asked to go to my happy place.
And you know what, when I opened my eyes and I got myself back into the park, I was the president.
I have to say, I don't think it made all my problems go away, but it was incredibly calming.
It was kind of like a bomb.
I will say when I go back to my happy place, my family, we would go to this lake in Utah called Lake Powell.
We went there every summer with these four other families, an amazing experience.
But once in a while my family would go just us.
And so one time we went with just my siblings and my parents.
And I remember we had what I would call the perfect day.
You know, we tubed and we skied behind the boat and we enjoyed the sun and each other's company and we were all just together.
And I said, this is so dumb.
I'm probably 14 or something.
And I said to my family at the end of this day, I said, if this had to be your last day on earth, this would be an awesome last day.
You said that when you were 14?
Yeah. And they kind of laughed like, okay, weirdo.
But I honestly, I go back to that as this beautiful place of nostalgia because there was complete belonging in my family.
There was complete unity.
There was so much fun. We were outside with the sun.
And anyway, that's kind of my happy place.
You know, the Americans like a logical association.
I mean, I don't think they use the word happy place, but they do have a definition of nostalgia.
Actually, they give two definitions of nostalgia.
So according to the APA, nostalgia can mean, quote, a longing to return to an earlier period or condition of life recalled as being better than the present in some way.
And here's the second definition, a longing to return to a place to which one feels emotionally bound, for example, home or native land.
See also homesickness.
I think what's so interesting about these stories that we tell, you know, like I'm no longer friends with Michelle, you're not 14 anymore, right?
I mean, like pal, still exists in your family.
But what's funny about nostalgia is it's defined as a bittersweet emotion.
So there is this longing, this sadness, this loss, but then also it's positive, right?
It's always a memory of a very positive moment in your life.
And most people enjoy nostalgia.
What I think is fascinating is kind of our attitude toward nostalgia.
If you look at it now versus how it was once viewed.
So during the 17th to 19th centuries, nostalgia was considered a psychopathological disorder.
This journalist Julie Beck wrote an article in the Atlantic called when nostalgia was a disease.
So a Swiss physician named Johannes Hauffair coined the term in a 1688 medical dissertation.
And it comes from the Greek no-stoess or homecoming and algoess or pain.
So this idea of homecoming and pain, right?
And they thought it was very similar to paranoia.
And there were so many examples, especially in wartime, where these people would obviously miss their friends and family.
Let me tell you this story.
In 1733, the Russian army says there is a quote outbreak of nostalgia.
And they're on their way to Germany and the general told the troops that the first person to come down with the quote nostalgic virus would be buried alive.
And the general actually made good on the promise.
Wait, what? Yes. No, you're kidding.
Which, as you can imagine, nipped that problem right in the back.
Wait, somebody started telling stories about their childhood and then they like carded him off, tied him up and buried him under the ground.
The second part, yes, I don't know that it was stories about once childhood.
But the fact that it was viewed for a long time as a psychopathological disorder is kind of crazy to me.
I mean, nostalgia, right?
So like, no, this means home and Alja means pain.
Yeah, no, no, no, homecoming, algoess, pain.
I mean, I think there's a reason why APA says like see also home sickness, which is different, but it's related.
I mean, when nostalgia is studied by contemporary scientists, I don't know why it's bitter sweet.
And I don't know why the sweet seems stronger than the bitter.
People get nostalgic for music or somebody they loved, but isn't in their life anymore.
Things they used to do, feelings they used to have.
I mean, even like TV shows or movies, you know, I think it's so intuitive.
Like we all know what it means to feel nostalgic.
You can see why it could be considered mostly bitter or kind of borderline on home sickness or sadness or grief, because these are all emotions of loss.
But the positive side is clearly there, right?
When I remembered my happy place, when you remember being 14 and being on Lake Powell with your family.
For some reason, the fact that that's no longer true, I'm not in my happy place and you aren't either.
Somehow research now shows that on balance, it makes us feel better.
There's a nuance though.
And I'm thinking about this article by Erica Hepper and Amelia Dennis from Rosie Pass to happy and flourishing present nostalgia as a resource for hedonic and you dimonic well-being.
So what these two psychologists suggest is that there are two ways that nostalgia could make us happier.
And they refer to this Aristotelian distinction between the good life, that's the you dimonic life, like a life that is meaningful, a life that has purpose, and then a different kind of happiness, a kind of like a shiny cheerful happiness, the hedonic life.
And you can guess where Aristotle lay ended in terms of like which one is the better life, like yes, you dimonic.
But we all actually have the need, I think, to experience happiness in you dimonic and hedonic ways.
And what these authors suggest is that the evidence on how nostalgia could help you lead a more hedonically happy life is mixed because it's bittersweet because the emotional signature, this reverie for things in the past that we no longer have is not unmitigated pleasure, right?
There's this like after note, this like secondary tone as they put it of loss and longing.
On the other hand, the idea that nostalgia could help us lead a more you dimonically happy life, there they say the evidence is really solid that consistently when people remember things in their past, and you can randomly assign people to do that in experiments, what you find is that inducing nostalgia actually does increase measures of you dimonic well being
like feelings of social connectedness, like feelings of meaning and identity in purpose.
So I guess I want to say that when I think back to what spontaneously led to my mind, when I was stressed out, whatever I was, 2021 year old, trying to cope with the summer that I was happy to be in, but it was just the hardest thing I'd ever done.
I think maybe there was this like remembering a friendship that was like where I felt safe.
Right. I felt wholly accepted.
At least when I was remembering it, I felt like I was, I don't know, it was like very little house in the prairie feeling like, you know, you're Laura with Mary.
If that means anything to you, I reference that I don't know that I follow.
No, that doesn't make you nostalgic.
Just the words little house of the prairie make me feel weaves of nostalgia.
No, here's what I love about what you just said.
You talked about feeling safe.
I talked about these replaces of belonging.
I think to take it even one step further, what I found super interesting, I read this article, said why we reach for nostalgia in times of crisis.
This by a journalist named Danielle Campo Amor, short in the New York Times in 2020, and she references this trauma specialist, Florence St.
John, who's the executive director of Global Trauma Response.
And Dr. St. John talks about nostalgia as a way to cope during these times of duress that our brains take us to a place and uses the word that you use that is safe.
And it helps us to have a group of, quote, safe places that we can go to in our mind when people are experiencing trauma.
I'm not going to go so far as to say that Michael who wrote in this question is experiencing trauma, but he talks about in times of great stress.
He goes back to these moments.
Dr. St. John again uses it with her trauma patients.
The interesting thing though is she's very pro using this, but also warns of a couple of downsides.
And one of those downsides that she talks about is in trauma patients, if they're always reaching back for nostalgia, especially if they're dealing with things now, they have a tendency to just look at their past through rose colored glasses.
And get stuck there. Right.
They might think, for example, about an X.
And at time they were with this person and how great it was, but they forget to think about that they left that relationship because there was a lot of negative things.
And that's why they're no longer with the X, but the nostalgia takes them only to this capy place.
And then the last thing was this idea of it keeping us too anchored in our past in a way that makes it so that we're just avoiding the future.
We're avoiding the problem.
And in that sense, it doesn't allow us to kind of overcome the trauma that we may be dealing with or the situation that we're fighting.
Well, it might depend on the person, but I think in general, when you remember these happy events that are in your past and that you no longer have in general on average, they make you more approach oriented unless avoidance oriented, right?
Oh my gosh, I love that. Like there's two things an organism can do.
It can like approach or avoid and approach things that are good.
You avoid things that are bad.
And generally nostalgia seems to kind of like make you feel emboldened somehow, but maybe that depends.
Honestly, I've been thinking like why doesn't this make me feel worse and I don't have a fully satisfying answer.
I do think you're onto something or this general idea is right that what nostalgia is is selective attention.
It's, you know, some people would say that animals basically experience the present, but only human beings can do time travel that we can fully in our minds like represent a future that has not come to pass.
And we can fully recreate in as rich an experience as it was when we were there, something that happened decades ago.
And so this question of like, well, when you do this time travel back to one select memory and you're only going to curate the parts that were rosy, I do wonder like why wouldn't you just feel terrible that that's not, you know, like shouldn't I even at that moment have been mourning my lost friendship with Michelle?
It's interesting. I watched a TED Talk that I cannot remember what it was right now, but it was about resilience and I'll never forget the question that this person talked about was asking yourself, does this help or does it hurt?
And the example that she used was loss of a child and how sometimes, you know, having pictures of maybe that child everywhere because she had lost a child, I believe.
Is it helping or am I doing something that's hurtful in trying to remember all these things?
Am I going down a spiral that's just going to hurt my ability to kind of move on or is this helpful because it's a way of honoring the past and honoring their legacy?
I think on balance, like you're saying, it's generally helpful, but I think that there are times when like anything taken to extreme, there's a difficulty.
Right. When people grieve, you know, my father died, right, when I grieve for my father, sometimes there is a kind of nostalgia, but sometimes it's just sadness.
Yeah. You know, there's the old adage the past is to be learned from, not lived in.
I think that that is a way to think about this, right?
Nostalgia, if it becomes the only thing you have and keeps you trapped in the past and you're living there, that's negative.
Maybe you need to visit, but not take up residence.
Yes, and much more succinct way of saying.
So Angela and I would love to hear your thoughts on how nostalgia affects your life.
How often do you reflect back on the past and how do these memories make you feel?
Record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and email it to NSQ at Freakinomics.com and maybe we'll play it on a future episode of the show.
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Still to come on No Stupid Questions, has collective nostalgia gotten a stuck in a cultural rut?
Don't roll your eyes the next time you see like Rocky 29.
Now back to Mike and Angela's conversation about nostalgia.
So Angela, there's this article hindsight is 2022, the psychology behind our cultural nostalgia by journalist Kyle Shekha.
He talked about one of the challenges of nostalgia is that culture can get stuck on a loop and he uses the example of movies.
He says unable to imagine the future we return to the past.
Oh, you mean there's like sequels that there's like the eighth of the nine.
It was a big deal. Like Rocky 2 came out because we were like, oh, come on.
Seriously, you're going to make Rocky 2.
And now I don't know how many Roman numerals there are after Rocky mission impossible.
When you look at the fast and the furious franchise, you look at the Marvel movies.
We just got kind of crazy with it.
This is a negative view of nostalgia then, right?
I mean, to state the obvious, but just to make sure this is like.
In creative stock in a right nostalgia.
Yes, I think that that's what this article is referring to is, hey, culture is stuck on a loop because we're staying in nostalgia and we're not inventing new things like a journalist, Imran Ramon Jones, who writes for the BBC, wrote about this remake nostalgia thing where Disney has done all of these remakes.
And with their sixth recent remakes as of 2020, they'd made almost six billion dollars at the box office.
Wow. The remakes were the jungle book, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, Aladdin, Dumb O.
They're things that we experienced in our childhood and then your kids are old enough or grandkids and you want them to experience it.
Then we cart them off to the movies because we want to relive it ourselves, right?
It's not nostalgia for our kids.
It's nostalgia for us. Exactly.
But because the parent is buying the ticket to the movie, it works.
So I think that was the argument against it that culture gets stuck in this loop and maybe we are not as innovative.
Maybe we're not coming up with as many new stories.
You know, it's interesting that that's the conclusion of this article because you could have ended that article saying, look, you know, don't roll your eyes.
The next time you see like Rocky 29, like it's just human nature to want to do this emotional time travel and relive this thing that was special to you, right?
Like, yeah, you could say it's getting stuck in a loop, it's being in a rut, it's not moving forward.
And sometimes I guess that's just an accurate description.
But in some ways, I'm like, what?
They remade Mulan. Like I can't wait to like add that to my playlist.
Right. I'd love to watch Mulan again, right?
So the fact remains and actually there's new research on this that nostalgia is a universal human experience.
There's a study that was done across 28 different countries with thousands of adults and they surveyed people about nostalgia and also the effects of nostalgia.
And what they found was that in every culture around the world that they had studied these 28 different countries, nostalgia was like immediately understood.
It was always experienced as bittersweet and mostly positive that recalling an nostalgic memory, increased social connectedness, a sense of self-continuity or identity that was consistent over time and also meaning in life.
So the fact that this very complex emotion is so universal makes me think that even though there is a kind of like stuck in a rut aspect of it almost by definition, I think in a way this mental time travel that we do, I think it's possible to have these bittersweet memories but to have them mostly be nurturing.
Well, the phrase that I love that you said from the research was self-continuity.
It does give us that groundedness and I think helps us to figure out who is the self that I created.
What are the moments or places, even if they are romanticized in our minds a little bit?
Those give us memories that give us a foundation but it's this continuity of self that maybe is why it's so helpful because it's not an anchor in terms of like an albatross that's dragging you down but an anchor that's more of a foundation that's allowing you to continue to build.
You know, I know where I came from.
I know what moments made me who I am today and maybe that's why when my call goes back in these stressful moments and says, hey, I want to go to my wedding, I want to go to pushing my daughter on a swing.
It's identifying who he is and that his self-continuity is not his job, is not that stressful moment.
It's not what he's dealing with in that vortex of life sometimes but it's really hate who am I and I can create the self-continuity that reminds me to go back to my foundation instead of reacting to the situation that we're in that frankly, no matter how stressful it is, we're going to forget in a month or three months.
Like, I can't tell you how often in life, you know, I'm dealing with this thing at work or whatever and you're like, this is the biggest deal ever and then I can't remember it.
And this is like the worst thing ever, you know, right.
We'll never get over this.
Mountains in retrospect are molehills.
Yes. So the other day my friend Naomi calls me, my friend Naomi is somebody that I have stayed and touched with and she was my best friend in high school, not middle school and we started, I don't know, nostalgicizing.
I think I said to her like, oh my gosh, do you remember when we used to take the train in from the suburbs to Center City, Philadelphia and we would walk down Walnut Street, like the street with all the fancy jewelry stores and clothing shops and do you remember when we would buy a little cup of soup, not a bowl of soup because I don't think we had enough pocket money to buy
a whole bowl of soup but we got the cup of soup because it came with a free roll like the same size rolls if you buy the bowl of soup.
She was like, oh my gosh, yeah.
And then on special occasions, do you remember going to the walk?
Is the walk still there?
And I was like, oh my gosh, Naomi, it's not there anymore like this Chinese restaurant where you used to always get the Kung Pao chicken, right?
She was like, yes, I remember that.
Anyway, so we take this walk down memory lane and I think in a way when you're talking about this self continuity and our narrative, we're about to talk about personality a lot on those two questions like we're going to have a series on the big five personality traits, other psychologists who are not big five personality researchers think there's a dimension of our
personality that we would best label as our narrative personality, the story of Mike Maughan, the story of Angela Duckworth.
And I think what nostalgia means to me is that it is a connection to the story of my childhood and my young adult years.
It is this continuity. I guess it is rose colored.
You know, I could have remembered terrible times with Naomi, but I do think it is who I am today.
Like it's gone. Those stores aren't there.
The walk's not there. I don't get to walk around with Naomi.
I hardly talk to her these days, but it was there and that means it's kind of still part of me.
Angela, I want to end with the story of Peter Pan.
I never read Peter Pan. So I'm all ears, but don't expect me to experience nostalgia.
Are you serious? Am I the only person who didn't read Peter Pan?
Yeah, I'm serious. Or have you seen any of the plays or movies or?
No, I'm Peter Pan free. Oh, I don't even...
You can't believe it, can you?
I'm serious. You cannot believe it.
The story is that there...
Where do we even start? There's a little boy who can't grow up or something.
Wow. Peter Pan is a boy who lives in a place called Neverland.
And Peter Pan and the lost boys are all little kids.
In Neverland, they never grow up.
And there is this mean guy named Captain Hook who is, of course, an adult.
And Captain Hook has other pirates in there, the archnemesis of Peter Pan.
And so, of course, it's setting up this idea of childhood versus adulthood and the joys of childhood and imagination and all of these things.
But Peter Pan comes to see a family.
And so he sees these three siblings, Wendy John and Michael.
And he watches them sleep sometimes, which sounds so creepy.
It's not in the way it's written.
But he comes in to their bedroom again, sounds so creepy, I guess, when you think about all these things.
And he can fly. And he's teaching Wendy John and Michael at some point to fly because they all are going to go together to Neverland.
Oh, he, like, at some point introduces himself to these three...
Yes, yes. Okay, got it. Yeah.
He's this man flying around in green tides.
Hi, I'm Peter Pan. But this is what he does when he teaches them to fly.
And this is a quote from the book, you just think lovely, wonderful thoughts.
And they lift you up in the air.
Oh, God, I love that. Isn't that beautiful?
Yeah. And so I love this idea.
Now again, this is not just rose-colored glasses.
This is not just, hey, avoid your problems.
But I do think there's something really beautiful coming from this question from my Cole who's saying, hey, in these times of stress, I go to this place.
And maybe it's you just think lovely, wonderful thoughts.
And they lift you up in the air.
And you can kind of rise above the stress of the moment.
You rise above whatever you're going through.
And the stagic can be that place of anchoring.
It can be that place of foundation, that place of self-continuity.
Yeah. You can see the whole landscape from this place with perspective, which we generally can't do when we're feeling stressed.
Our vision goes, you know, like a laser to the thing that's the problem.
Maybe that's why we were doing that exercise, right?
When I was 20 or 21, listening to somebody just walk me through this.
But I think actually that is what happened.
Like it gave me perspective.
And I was like, you know what?
In the grand scheme of things, there's a lot to be grateful for.
And in the grand scheme of things, this is going to be okay.
I will say one of the best pieces of advice I heard recently was from someone was telling me about a children's book.
I don't know what book it is.
But the entire book just repeats over and over the two words, zoom out.
Zoom out, zoom out. And maybe that's the power of nostalgia, put simply it allows you to zoom out.
Zoom out and then zoom in on this very positive, probably highly curated memory.
So I think maybe this positive time travel that we do is exactly what you said.
It kind of like lifts us up.
And maybe that's why we do it when we're biopically focused on our problems.
Exactly. But I think it's such an interesting, complex emotion.
And now here's a fact check of today's conversation.
Florence St. Jean is the executive director of Global Trauma Research, not Global Trauma Response.
The TED talk about resilience that Mike refers to is the three secrets of resilient people from 2018 by Lucy Hone, who happens to be a former student of Angela's.
And the children's book Mike discusses at the end of the episode is zoom by Istvan Banyai, although it doesn't contain any words, just pictures.
Finally, Mike gets a few details wrong about the story of Peter Pan, at least as it's told in the original 1911 novel, Peter and Wendy by Scottish author and playwright, J.M.
Barry. Mike says that Peter Pan and the Lost Boys never grow up.
In certain adaptations of the story, this is true.
But in Barry's classic, the Lost Boys do have the capacity to grow older and are eventually forced to leave Neverland.
Also, Mike says that Peter teaches Wendy, John, and Michael that in order to fly they just need to think lovely, wonderful thoughts.
Peter does say this in Barry's book, but the children find that his instructions don't work, and that they actually need fairy dust in order to fly.
That's it for the fact check.
Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some thoughts about last week's episode on Gut Instincts.
Three times I got up for my desk during the morning to go out to check on the car, possibly even to move it, and three times I stopped myself and sat back down on my desk thinking, nah, there's nothing wrong.
Then suddenly there was an announcement over the PA, pay anybody parked by the loading dock in the back of the building, you need to move your car, it's flooded.
Now, running out there, there was a crowd and there was a huge pool of water and water above my door wells.
I should have listened to my gut.
Anyway, that's my story.
I hope you enjoy it. Hi, my canangela, my name is Isabella from Median Colombia, and I just heard your episode on when to trust your intuition.
And all through the episode I kept thinking about my career choice.
When I was in high school, I used to be like a physics nerd.
I went to math and physics Olympiates, and it was very clear to everyone around me that I was going to go into physics or maths or engineering or something of the sort.
And somehow I was really into literature, and I discovered historic novels, and about three months before graduating high school, I was like, oh, no, wait, I don't want to be an engineer.
I decided to go into history, just like that.
And it was a big shock for my family, my dad's an engineer, and he didn't quite get it.
Well, I went into history, I did the program, and now I have a fantastic work as a curator and an investigator at a science museum, and I design museums for other parts of the world.
And in the university, I met my girlfriend, and now we have a beautiful house that we just renovated, and we have a really, really nice, quiet life.
And yeah, like I went with my god against everything that was planned for me, by me, and it turned out great.
And I don't know, maybe that's not the way you should always choose your career, but I do believe God has a big role into what we really, really want, and we really, really like in our soul.
It was, respectively, Anthony D and Isabella Viejas, Korea.
Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us.
And remember, we'd love to hear about your experiences with nostalgia.
Send a voice memo to NSQ at Freakinomics.com, and you might hear your voice on the show.
Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, how fixed is your personality?
I'm really happy again, I laugh more for you, and much more comfortable with myself in who I am.
That's next week on No Stupid Questions.
No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakinomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakinomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things.
All our shows are produced by Stitcher and RunBud Radio.
The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lyric Baudich is our production associate.
This episode was mixed by Greg Rippen with help from Jasmine Klinger.
Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra.
You can follow us on Twitter, at NSQ, underscore show, and on Facebook, at NSQ Show.
If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ at Freakinomics.com.
To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakinomics.com slash NSQ.
Thanks for listening. By the way, you did not mention the Star Wars franchise.
You better not, or you're gonna get death threats.
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