April 28, 2017 • 29 mins
Ah, the “good ol days.” If America had its own brochure it would depict rocking chairs on front porches, pristine farms and tidy downtowns. But did this America ever exist? And is thinking it did doing us some serious psychological harm?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
I spent a lot of money, I spent a lot
of time. That trip remained to Hollywood. Still, for all
the things you could find an out of bad, do
you make it? This is the stuff of life, and
I'm your host, Julie Douglas. In our last episode, we
(00:32):
explored adolescence, the time when we lived our lives like
a fever dream and carved out some of our most
poignant memories. Now we look at how those memories become
the fertile ground of nostalgia, and how nostalgia works on
us personally, politically, and culturally. And this way, nostalgia is
a time machine, stringing together memories to give meaning to
(00:53):
the present and framing our expectations for the future. I
my fring was so cold for relicing. That's Curtis. We
met him in a Washington, d C. Park on the
evening of President Trump's inauguration, a moment in time when
many in the US were taking time to reflect. Some
were jubilant with nostalgia and the idea that we're returning
(01:16):
to another era, Like Dan, who was on his way
back from inauguration festivities, We're going to return to the
constitutional status where people can work to be free, where
they can work for merit, where they can work for
their future. And I honestly believe we're in the rising
tide that will lift all boats if you let it.
Some people like Curtis Wax nostalgic about in America that
(01:40):
he thinks no longer exists. The biggest thing in all
these ways is everybody out here protesting. I spent the
same amount of time protesting volunteering. We wouldn't have anything
to protest over. We wouldn't they be anything of protest
over everyone the beginning, everybody like we used to Nolden
America helping your neighbors. In this episode Our House Stuff Works,
(02:12):
coworkers Holly Fry and Christopher Hesiotus discussed the pitfalls of nostalgia.
I think if you're grasping at the way things used
to be and imagine that they're better, um, even if
they were better in certain measurable ways, it can prevent
you from looking at the world around you as it is.
(02:33):
And we talked to psychologist Clay Rutledge about how nostalgia
may just be one of the most potent survival tools
in our psychological tool kits. The people who are naturally
using nostalgia as the age seem to be doing pretty
well in terms of psychological health. But first we talked
to a professional antique picker, Larry Singleton. He's the decor
(02:55):
manager of Cracker Barrel and he curates a kind of
nostalgic nuity for sixty two Cracker Barrel stores in the
United States, complete with a warehouse full of artifacts at
the ready for new store openings. I can walk out
in our warehouse every day and and see something that
(03:17):
brings back, brings that back to me. It brings back
that memory of my dad, you know, teaching me how
to drive a T Model truck. I remember, you know,
him telling me the stories of his adventures growing up
(03:37):
and taking a trip in a T Model to Indiana
with a friend, you know, to pick up rabbits. They
were going to go into the raising rabbit business. You
know that. You know, it just kind of when I
see something like that here or you know, it just
it brings back family. It brings back, you know, that
(03:58):
connection to my history three and my family's history. It
just you know, and it and it's it's always a
good feeling, you know, it's always that connection to him.
You know, Dan w. Evans opened that first Cracker Barrel
in Lebanon, Tennessee. Danny decided to you know, he'd come
up with the idea, you know, him and some folks
(04:19):
about doing a little place out on the interstate for
families to stop and uh, you know, serve them food
and serve some gasoline. He got mom and dad to
come in and set up the first first restaurant, uh,
and that was in September nineteen. Each Cracker Barrel has
(04:40):
a kind of old tiny general store looked to it
with rocking chairs on the front porch, creating that old
atmosphere in that field that he he had remembered. He
brought that to uh, you know, to a place out
on the interstates that other people could you know, set
set in and enjoy. Slow down, you know, slow down
(05:03):
and take it easy. The retail area has all kinds
of wears, from sweets and candles to quilts and old
fashioned toys. Inside the restaurant, trays of chicken and dumplings
emerged from the kitchen. Everywhere you look, there's an admixture
of antiques and objects that evoke by gone days. Talking
black and white family photos, butter churn a fiddle hanging
(05:25):
above that. Oh, I look at the things we hail
and the tools and the you know, I mean it
is what you know, these are the things that forged
and made our country. You know, these these farms, these
rural communities, these you know, as they were building industries
and making things, you know, these are all the things
(05:46):
they used to make that. A lot of the pieces
are you know, from when you know, America was really
really growing and and you know, uh, we're establishing you know,
I don't know about pioneers, but I mean I think
they were established in industry and community, you know, so
(06:07):
I think they they do have a connection. The antiques
differ from store to store, but among the five thousand items,
each store has the same. Five types of antiques can
be found. An ox yoke and a horseshoe hang above
each front door, a traffic light over the entrance to
the restrooms, a wall telephone next to the mantel, a
(06:29):
cracker barrel with a checkerboard in front of the fireplace,
and a deer head and a rifle over the mantel.
We just kind of follow that tradition, you know, the
deer head and the gun that mantle that fireplace is
just a central focus when you come into the dining room.
So you know, it's it's kind of it's kind of
(06:53):
from memory. It's kind of from you know, our you know,
we've seen our places and stores and cabins and houses,
and that's you know a lot of times that's that's
what they use. So we've just kind of followed that tradition. Larry,
who has purchased more than six hundred thousand original artifacts
(07:14):
over the years for Cracker Barrel, comes from a family
of antique pickers, and in some ways, the warehouse that
contains Cracker Barrel antiques also contains Larry's memories. I mean
a lot of it's, you know, the memory of my
my family and mom and dad, and a lot of
it is today it's it's about the memories of the
(07:35):
guys that I uh, you know, have dealt with us
and bought from over the years. And there's been a
lot of interested phones, you know, so that they're great memories,
you know, they really are those guys is you know,
they were my teachers, just like my mom and dad. Yeah,
(08:18):
Nostalgia is a powerful driver and for something it feels
like an actual physical ache for the absence of the
thing or person that was loved and lost suddenly resurrected
in the memory like an apparition. Perhaps this is why
during the American Civil War the song Home, Sweet Home
was banned from being played. The homesickness, the depression and
(08:38):
anxiety that resulted from the song's yearning sentiment was thought
to stoke what was regarded as a disease of nostalgia.
In fact, there were more than fifty cases recorded of
nostalgia in the General Surgeon's records, with seventy four deaths
attributed to nostalgia during the Civil War. Today, we better
(08:59):
under stand the bitter sweet nature of nostalgia and the
ways the bitter can be tamped down and the sweetness
once again offered up, something explored in the A MC
drama Madman and this scene. Don Draper forwards through Codex
new slide projector the carousel, using photos of his own
family from the last decade in front of him, A simpler,
(09:20):
happier looking life flicks before his eyes. Teddy told me
that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an
old wound. It's a twinge in your heart, far more
powerful than memory. Alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's
(09:50):
a time machine go backwards and forwards. It takes us
to a place where we ache to go again. It's
(10:16):
not called the wheel, It's called the carousel. Let's just
travel the way the child travels round and round, back
home again to a place where we know we are loved.
(10:51):
When I started doing the Stalgia research, I wasn't surprised
that when people engage in nostalgia and makes them happy.
I mean, look at the marketplace or nostalgia, whether it's
rebooting movies, rereleasing music, fashions coming back around. I mean,
nostalgia is big business. Anyone in consumer psychology or in
behavioral economics can tell you that. My name is Clay Relige.
(11:14):
I am a social psychologist and professor of psychology at
North Dakota State University, and I study, among other things,
the psychology of nostalgia. I'm interested in the big questions.
So what is it they give us meaning in life?
How do we cope with insecurities about things like death, loneliness,
(11:36):
and those sorts of issues that are uniquely human concerns?
So how does someone who studies nostalgia define it and
what triggers it Stalgia defined is a sentimental or wistful
longing for the past. Now what that means for most people,
(11:59):
based stun our analyzes of over you know, several thousand cases,
um for sure is nostalgia seems to be these special
memories that we hold dear, that we cherish, and that
we bring to mind when we want to revisit the
you know, some of the more important times in our
(12:20):
life are the times that we think are really important
to our our sense of self and our sense of
meaning in life. So there seems to be two general
classes of nostalgia triggers. One is, I think the most obvious,
which is we could call like a sensory trigger ac
cues that serve as reminders of the past. So they
(12:41):
might be familiar smells or sits, or things like music.
You hear an old song from you know, when you
were a teenager, and it brings to mind the memories
associate with that. You smell your mom's you know, grandmother's
apple pie baking in the oven, and it reminds you
of when you had it when you were a kid.
(13:01):
Seasonal changes can remind you, you know, the first snowfall
can remind you of when you were a little kid
and used to gosside build snowman UM. So there's those
types of century triggers UM that are really just primes
of you know, they're just they're just reminding you of
the past. The second class of triggers has to do
(13:23):
with feeling a psychological threat. These are things like loneliness,
feeling meaningless um, even boredom. And what nostalgia seems to
do is that when people have these sorts of experiences
that make them feel feel vulnerable UM or scared, or
some sense of loss and meaninglessness UM, they bring to
(13:45):
mind these nostalgic memories as a compensatory response or as
a coping mechanism UM to reassure themselves, to right the ship,
to feel like you know, no, I'm fine. So loneliness
is a good example because it's a very powerful trigger
of nostalgia. When you feel lonely UM, it inspires you
to remind yourself of times where you've had, you know,
(14:06):
relationships with people, and to remind you to remind yourself
that there are people that care about you, There are
people that you know love you, that you have had
experiences in your life of relationship success, and you can
use those memories as a way to boost your confidence.
You're into personal confidence that you know this. This might
be a tough time, but you can get through it
(14:27):
and the future is the future of your social life
could be bright. Again. This can be heavy stuff, especially
when just the right piece of music hits us don't
make you take a say, making better. The way I
(14:52):
think about it is we we kind of have a
soundtrack for our lives and for different times in our life.
Music is very meanful. I mean, it's it's pervasive in
all areas of culture, whether it's you know, religious or
secular culture. Um, whether it's you know then you know nationalism,
your national anthem or song junior at church, or even
just you know, the music you like to listen to
(15:13):
on your iPod. It does seem to be woven into
the fabric of of culture. And so it's not surprising
that that goes hand in hand with when we access
our memories of wanting, you know, wanting that soundtrack to
go with them. These snatches of nostalgia do something pretty magical,
mainly giving a person a sense of continuity, as though
(15:37):
there's a cohesive self among all the disparate thoughts and
actions contained in one person self continus is the sense
of stability and the self that I'm the same person
that I used to be and even though my life
you know, goes through twists and turns that you know,
there's some core part of me or some sense of
me that remains stable and the same. And this seem
(16:00):
to be good for psychological well being to feel like
you have like a stable sense of self. Um. What
now nostalgia can do, especially in times of upheaval, whether
it be economic change or major life transitions like going
off to college or starting a new job or retirement.
(16:21):
And what nostalgia can do is sort of serve as
a reminder, allow you to access these memories about who
you are, who your close friends and your family are
as a way to um regain some sense of stability. Yeah,
moving to a new place, I'm starting a new job,
I'm going off to college and getting a new retire um,
but I'm still the same person I used to be.
I still have the same um, you know, thoughts and
(16:44):
feelings and interests. In Clay's research, he found that people
who engage in nostalgic reflection get a motivational charge. We
found that having people listen to nostalgic music, for instance,
or having them write about a nostalgic memory again um
increase their desire to meet new people, their willingness to
(17:05):
um to work with strangers on a task, They're confidence
that they could solve problems they're having in their relationships,
and their desire to to make new friends and to
try new things. So it doesn't just seem to make
people feel meaningful, doesn't just seem to like make them
feel energetic. It seems to also mobilize people for pursuing
(17:29):
new opportunities, which I thought it was really cool because,
like I said, I mean, we think of nostalgia's, oh,
it's just you kind of avoiding the president and hiding
in the past. But it really seems to be a
catalyst for um future oriented behavior. Again, this comes down
to a kind of time travel, the ability to move
between the past, present, and future and create sense from it.
(17:51):
Something that drove Clay to research nostalgia in the first place.
When I was in graduate school working down my PhD.
I was interested in the fact that human beings are
the only species capable of a very sophisticated appreciation of time.
(18:13):
By being able to access memories and tell ourselves, are
you know, fashion our own life narrative? Um, we are
able to deal with some of the some of the
consequences of this awareness of time. You know, when we
can think about the future and think about the fact
that one day we're going to die, but at the
same time we can say to ourselves, well, I'm going
to do everything I can to live the best life.
(18:34):
I can make a meaningful contribution, to leave a legacy
and to live on in the memories of others. And
so that process um of thinking about the future and
what that might inspire UM in my mind got me
thinking about the past. How people can use the past,
use their memories for past as a way to cope
(18:55):
with these existential anxieties. So that's how I first got
into it, was just thinking about, well if the if
you're kind of afraid of the future, can you use
the past as a way to cope with that fear? Um,
And then it started going from there, Well, it looks
like the past can do lots of stuff for us
(19:17):
and puzzling out the pieces of our lives and how
they fit together. Nostalgia can be incredibly useful. But there's
also the temptation to use nostalgia like a movie set,
rolling it in and out of our lives, mistaking the
movie set as a reality, and glossing over the details
that are less charming or wonderful than we've remembered. In
(19:43):
her essay in the New York Review of Books, Z. D. Smith,
who is of Jamaican descent, rights of nostalgia, quote, in
that period, I could not vote marrying my husband, have
my children work in the university, I work in, or
live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a dis grecitionary art,
a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.
(20:07):
The initial like uh uh. The mechanism of it in
terms of survival is like, oh, it's a coping mechanism,
and you will be you know, sort of soothed, presumably.
But instead what's happening is angry. Now used to be better,
real angry. It's not back then like it. It's there's
some problem going on where it's not soothing at all anymore.
(20:30):
It's just like the longing has superseded any sort of
benefit the pleasant memory had, and now it's sort of
like this weird anger Maker for a Lot of People
podcast co host Holly Fry and editor Christopher Hasiotis explore
the problem of imagining a past that wasn't If you
look at ed Greece when has written in the seventies
and the film that came out in the eighties, it's
(20:51):
looking at the fifties in a very very nostalgic rosie view.
Everything's great, everyone's dancing, and the dancing is great, but
it completely ignored as all the social upheaval about around
the corner. It ignores the poor living conditions for a
significant amount of the population. And so I wonder if
we take this thing, which on a personal, you know,
(21:13):
individual animal basis, is helpful, and if it's applied culturally,
it prevents us from I don't know, looking accurately at
our at our own past. Well, first of all, let's
get it straight, like clearly Greece as a documentary and
it's accurate. Now, I'm not like a big grease person.
I just I'm sure there are people that think that's
(21:35):
exactly what the fifties was. Like you, I know I
did when my sister watched that movie every two days
(21:56):
when she was a kid, and I thought, oh, that, well,
that's what it was like a long time ago, in
the past, years ago, at the time you were innocent
in that you were ignorant of the things going on
around you. So it feels like that time was wonderful
and delightful and full of nothing but glitter and breakfast cereal.
But in fact, really you're just longing for the time
(22:18):
when you didn't know better. The problem is that this
kind of rhetoric, this a simpler time, become such an
ingrained idea that it's taken as a universal truth, which
is what I think nostalgia does, at least when it's
like this sort of super crowdsourced and nostalgia, there was
(22:38):
one truth. It was great, we had good times all
the time. And it's like, no, it's there's so much
more texture to any given moment in history than that
times before you were even born. You look back on
these these things that must have been great back then.
But you know, if you gave me a time machine,
I could take you somewhere and show you that it
was much worse than you think it was. And when
(23:00):
it comes to childhood nostalgia, the memories created in the
nostalgia factories of the mind can be very different from
other family members experiences. I sort of experience that with
my siblings sometimes and my friends. I don't know if
it's just because I'm super cynical, but like, I mean,
like any family, we had complicated stuff and it sometimes
(23:23):
we're great and sometimes weren't. But as we've aged and
like my mom has passed, and when my siblings talk
about are growing up years and there's a big gap
between them and me, So there's there's a different childhood
experience as part of it. But like they'll just talk
about like this magical, wonderful thing, and I'm like, did
we grow up in the same house? Like sometimes it
(23:44):
was cool, but do you remember the Okay, okay, hey
you're happy. I'm not gonna mess it up. And it
is kind of an interesting I mean, that's it's like
nostalgia has driven the bus at that point, and it's
kind of like covering the puddles that were ad and
just whitewashing the yucky bits and everything's good. It's all happy.
(24:06):
Remember those amazing cakes that we got on our birthday,
So those we're pretty great, And maybe that's a you
know again, that's a cultural survival mechanism. It keeps your
family closer that if you actually had to talk about
all the things that were complicated all the time with
your family, families wouldn't stick together. The problem is when
nostalgia is used as a manipulating force, fomenting hyper nationalistic
(24:28):
pride that would have wide swaths of the population cast
aside in favor of an America that never really existed
in the first place. And I wonder how much of
that is at play with UM A lot of what's
going on around the world right now politically in terms
of I mean, it's so we're recording a couple of
days after the vote for the Brexit and the referendum
(24:49):
on that it seems like from a lot of the
data that was driven by the older electorate UM and
a lot of people who express that they are really
no check for lack of a better word, about the
way things used to be before the EU before you know,
there was before borders were as open, before labor markets
(25:09):
were as open. And I think we see that a
lot of that in the US too, in certain political movements,
people wanting things to be the way they were when
when they were younger, or when they understood things better
when there was more. Do you think they were exactly
To all Americans tonight, in all of our cities and
(25:31):
in all of our towns, I make this promise. We
will make America strong again. We will make America proud again,
we will make America safe again, and we will make
(25:54):
America great again. To be clear, nobody here is begrudging
anyone of their nostalgia used in its best form. It
can be something when you return to again and again,
propping us up when we need it. I um bathe
in it, do you know what I mean? Like our
entire house, my husband is the same, is filled with
(26:18):
Star Wars toys that we had when we were kids,
all the way up to new stuffs, kind of like this,
this hallway that's always open to you to like kind
of still remember and retain that childlike wonder at something.
(26:45):
Holly's idea of nostalgia is beautiful, even helpful, in thinking
of the past as a touchstone to something elemental about
our existence, something full of awe, a reminder that on
this planet, in this galaxy, in this universe, we somehow
get to exist. In the next episode, we look at
(27:25):
what happens when fear takes hold and desperation takes over.
In the United States, we are a very suspicious nation.
We'd like to thank Larry Singleton for sharing his work
with us, and we'd like to thank Clay Rutledge for
showing us the ways nostalgia can bolster us and our
(27:46):
times of need. And thank you to Holly Fry of
stuff you missed in history class and editor Christopher Hessiotis
for taking a seat at the table and discussing nostalgia.
The Stuff of Life is written an executive produced by
me Julie Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Original
(28:08):
music is by Noel Brown, and editorial oversight is provided
by contributing producer Dylan Fagin and Head of Production Jerry Rowland.
This episode also featured music by Tristan McNeil, Aaron Grubbs,
and Dylan Fagin. If you have a story you'd like
to share with us, you can call into our podcast
line at one eight four four h s W Stuff
(28:31):
That's Stuff. We'll be doing a wrap up episode at
the end of the season and we want to hear
your voice in it, so leave a message. You can
find The Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter. And
you can email us at the Stuff of Life at
how staff works dot com. If you're just looking at
(28:53):
your own life and your own sphere of existence, to
a lot of people, that was the way life was.
And you know, I think that's why it's a lot
of times vialable to be able to look beyond yourself
and connect with others. Are I don't know, Yeah, sorry,
that's another ship hippie
I spent a lot of money, I spent a lot
of time. That trip remained to Hollywood. Still, for all
the things you could find an out of bad, do
you make it? This is the stuff of life, and
I'm your host, Julie Douglas. In our last episode, we
(00:32):
explored adolescence, the time when we lived our lives like
a fever dream and carved out some of our most
poignant memories. Now we look at how those memories become
the fertile ground of nostalgia, and how nostalgia works on
us personally, politically, and culturally. And this way, nostalgia is
a time machine, stringing together memories to give meaning to
(00:53):
the present and framing our expectations for the future. I
my fring was so cold for relicing. That's Curtis. We
met him in a Washington, d C. Park on the
evening of President Trump's inauguration, a moment in time when
many in the US were taking time to reflect. Some
were jubilant with nostalgia and the idea that we're returning
(01:16):
to another era, Like Dan, who was on his way
back from inauguration festivities, We're going to return to the
constitutional status where people can work to be free, where
they can work for merit, where they can work for
their future. And I honestly believe we're in the rising
tide that will lift all boats if you let it.
Some people like Curtis Wax nostalgic about in America that
(01:40):
he thinks no longer exists. The biggest thing in all
these ways is everybody out here protesting. I spent the
same amount of time protesting volunteering. We wouldn't have anything
to protest over. We wouldn't they be anything of protest
over everyone the beginning, everybody like we used to Nolden
America helping your neighbors. In this episode Our House Stuff Works,
(02:12):
coworkers Holly Fry and Christopher Hesiotus discussed the pitfalls of nostalgia.
I think if you're grasping at the way things used
to be and imagine that they're better, um, even if
they were better in certain measurable ways, it can prevent
you from looking at the world around you as it is.
(02:33):
And we talked to psychologist Clay Rutledge about how nostalgia
may just be one of the most potent survival tools
in our psychological tool kits. The people who are naturally
using nostalgia as the age seem to be doing pretty
well in terms of psychological health. But first we talked
to a professional antique picker, Larry Singleton. He's the decor
(02:55):
manager of Cracker Barrel and he curates a kind of
nostalgic nuity for sixty two Cracker Barrel stores in the
United States, complete with a warehouse full of artifacts at
the ready for new store openings. I can walk out
in our warehouse every day and and see something that
(03:17):
brings back, brings that back to me. It brings back
that memory of my dad, you know, teaching me how
to drive a T Model truck. I remember, you know,
him telling me the stories of his adventures growing up
(03:37):
and taking a trip in a T Model to Indiana
with a friend, you know, to pick up rabbits. They
were going to go into the raising rabbit business. You
know that. You know, it just kind of when I
see something like that here or you know, it just
it brings back family. It brings back, you know, that
(03:58):
connection to my history three and my family's history. It
just you know, and it and it's it's always a
good feeling, you know, it's always that connection to him.
You know, Dan w. Evans opened that first Cracker Barrel
in Lebanon, Tennessee. Danny decided to you know, he'd come
up with the idea, you know, him and some folks
(04:19):
about doing a little place out on the interstate for
families to stop and uh, you know, serve them food
and serve some gasoline. He got mom and dad to
come in and set up the first first restaurant, uh,
and that was in September nineteen. Each Cracker Barrel has
(04:40):
a kind of old tiny general store looked to it
with rocking chairs on the front porch, creating that old
atmosphere in that field that he he had remembered. He
brought that to uh, you know, to a place out
on the interstates that other people could you know, set
set in and enjoy. Slow down, you know, slow down
(05:03):
and take it easy. The retail area has all kinds
of wears, from sweets and candles to quilts and old
fashioned toys. Inside the restaurant, trays of chicken and dumplings
emerged from the kitchen. Everywhere you look, there's an admixture
of antiques and objects that evoke by gone days. Talking
black and white family photos, butter churn a fiddle hanging
(05:25):
above that. Oh, I look at the things we hail
and the tools and the you know, I mean it
is what you know, these are the things that forged
and made our country. You know, these these farms, these
rural communities, these you know, as they were building industries
and making things, you know, these are all the things
(05:46):
they used to make that. A lot of the pieces
are you know, from when you know, America was really
really growing and and you know, uh, we're establishing you know,
I don't know about pioneers, but I mean I think
they were established in industry and community, you know, so
(06:07):
I think they they do have a connection. The antiques
differ from store to store, but among the five thousand items,
each store has the same. Five types of antiques can
be found. An ox yoke and a horseshoe hang above
each front door, a traffic light over the entrance to
the restrooms, a wall telephone next to the mantel, a
(06:29):
cracker barrel with a checkerboard in front of the fireplace,
and a deer head and a rifle over the mantel.
We just kind of follow that tradition, you know, the
deer head and the gun that mantle that fireplace is
just a central focus when you come into the dining room.
So you know, it's it's kind of it's kind of
(06:53):
from memory. It's kind of from you know, our you know,
we've seen our places and stores and cabins and houses,
and that's you know a lot of times that's that's
what they use. So we've just kind of followed that tradition. Larry,
who has purchased more than six hundred thousand original artifacts
(07:14):
over the years for Cracker Barrel, comes from a family
of antique pickers, and in some ways, the warehouse that
contains Cracker Barrel antiques also contains Larry's memories. I mean
a lot of it's, you know, the memory of my
my family and mom and dad, and a lot of
it is today it's it's about the memories of the
(07:35):
guys that I uh, you know, have dealt with us
and bought from over the years. And there's been a
lot of interested phones, you know, so that they're great memories,
you know, they really are those guys is you know,
they were my teachers, just like my mom and dad. Yeah,
(08:18):
Nostalgia is a powerful driver and for something it feels
like an actual physical ache for the absence of the
thing or person that was loved and lost suddenly resurrected
in the memory like an apparition. Perhaps this is why
during the American Civil War the song Home, Sweet Home
was banned from being played. The homesickness, the depression and
(08:38):
anxiety that resulted from the song's yearning sentiment was thought
to stoke what was regarded as a disease of nostalgia.
In fact, there were more than fifty cases recorded of
nostalgia in the General Surgeon's records, with seventy four deaths
attributed to nostalgia during the Civil War. Today, we better
(08:59):
under stand the bitter sweet nature of nostalgia and the
ways the bitter can be tamped down and the sweetness
once again offered up, something explored in the A MC
drama Madman and this scene. Don Draper forwards through Codex
new slide projector the carousel, using photos of his own
family from the last decade in front of him, A simpler,
(09:20):
happier looking life flicks before his eyes. Teddy told me
that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an
old wound. It's a twinge in your heart, far more
powerful than memory. Alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's
(09:50):
a time machine go backwards and forwards. It takes us
to a place where we ache to go again. It's
(10:16):
not called the wheel, It's called the carousel. Let's just
travel the way the child travels round and round, back
home again to a place where we know we are loved.
(10:51):
When I started doing the Stalgia research, I wasn't surprised
that when people engage in nostalgia and makes them happy.
I mean, look at the marketplace or nostalgia, whether it's
rebooting movies, rereleasing music, fashions coming back around. I mean,
nostalgia is big business. Anyone in consumer psychology or in
behavioral economics can tell you that. My name is Clay Relige.
(11:14):
I am a social psychologist and professor of psychology at
North Dakota State University, and I study, among other things,
the psychology of nostalgia. I'm interested in the big questions.
So what is it they give us meaning in life?
How do we cope with insecurities about things like death, loneliness,
(11:36):
and those sorts of issues that are uniquely human concerns?
So how does someone who studies nostalgia define it and
what triggers it Stalgia defined is a sentimental or wistful
longing for the past. Now what that means for most people,
(11:59):
based stun our analyzes of over you know, several thousand cases,
um for sure is nostalgia seems to be these special
memories that we hold dear, that we cherish, and that
we bring to mind when we want to revisit the
you know, some of the more important times in our
(12:20):
life are the times that we think are really important
to our our sense of self and our sense of
meaning in life. So there seems to be two general
classes of nostalgia triggers. One is, I think the most obvious,
which is we could call like a sensory trigger ac
cues that serve as reminders of the past. So they
(12:41):
might be familiar smells or sits, or things like music.
You hear an old song from you know, when you
were a teenager, and it brings to mind the memories
associate with that. You smell your mom's you know, grandmother's
apple pie baking in the oven, and it reminds you
of when you had it when you were a kid.
(13:01):
Seasonal changes can remind you, you know, the first snowfall
can remind you of when you were a little kid
and used to gosside build snowman UM. So there's those
types of century triggers UM that are really just primes
of you know, they're just they're just reminding you of
the past. The second class of triggers has to do
(13:23):
with feeling a psychological threat. These are things like loneliness,
feeling meaningless um, even boredom. And what nostalgia seems to
do is that when people have these sorts of experiences
that make them feel feel vulnerable UM or scared, or
some sense of loss and meaninglessness UM, they bring to
(13:45):
mind these nostalgic memories as a compensatory response or as
a coping mechanism UM to reassure themselves, to right the ship,
to feel like you know, no, I'm fine. So loneliness
is a good example because it's a very powerful trigger
of nostalgia. When you feel lonely UM, it inspires you
to remind yourself of times where you've had, you know,
(14:06):
relationships with people, and to remind you to remind yourself
that there are people that care about you, There are
people that you know love you, that you have had
experiences in your life of relationship success, and you can
use those memories as a way to boost your confidence.
You're into personal confidence that you know this. This might
be a tough time, but you can get through it
(14:27):
and the future is the future of your social life
could be bright. Again. This can be heavy stuff, especially
when just the right piece of music hits us don't
make you take a say, making better. The way I
(14:52):
think about it is we we kind of have a
soundtrack for our lives and for different times in our life.
Music is very meanful. I mean, it's it's pervasive in
all areas of culture, whether it's you know, religious or
secular culture. Um, whether it's you know then you know nationalism,
your national anthem or song junior at church, or even
just you know, the music you like to listen to
(15:13):
on your iPod. It does seem to be woven into
the fabric of of culture. And so it's not surprising
that that goes hand in hand with when we access
our memories of wanting, you know, wanting that soundtrack to
go with them. These snatches of nostalgia do something pretty magical,
mainly giving a person a sense of continuity, as though
(15:37):
there's a cohesive self among all the disparate thoughts and
actions contained in one person self continus is the sense
of stability and the self that I'm the same person
that I used to be and even though my life
you know, goes through twists and turns that you know,
there's some core part of me or some sense of
me that remains stable and the same. And this seem
(16:00):
to be good for psychological well being to feel like
you have like a stable sense of self. Um. What
now nostalgia can do, especially in times of upheaval, whether
it be economic change or major life transitions like going
off to college or starting a new job or retirement.
(16:21):
And what nostalgia can do is sort of serve as
a reminder, allow you to access these memories about who
you are, who your close friends and your family are
as a way to um regain some sense of stability. Yeah,
moving to a new place, I'm starting a new job,
I'm going off to college and getting a new retire um,
but I'm still the same person I used to be.
I still have the same um, you know, thoughts and
(16:44):
feelings and interests. In Clay's research, he found that people
who engage in nostalgic reflection get a motivational charge. We
found that having people listen to nostalgic music, for instance,
or having them write about a nostalgic memory again um
increase their desire to meet new people, their willingness to
(17:05):
um to work with strangers on a task, They're confidence
that they could solve problems they're having in their relationships,
and their desire to to make new friends and to
try new things. So it doesn't just seem to make
people feel meaningful, doesn't just seem to like make them
feel energetic. It seems to also mobilize people for pursuing
(17:29):
new opportunities, which I thought it was really cool because,
like I said, I mean, we think of nostalgia's, oh,
it's just you kind of avoiding the president and hiding
in the past. But it really seems to be a
catalyst for um future oriented behavior. Again, this comes down
to a kind of time travel, the ability to move
between the past, present, and future and create sense from it.
(17:51):
Something that drove Clay to research nostalgia in the first place.
When I was in graduate school working down my PhD.
I was interested in the fact that human beings are
the only species capable of a very sophisticated appreciation of time.
(18:13):
By being able to access memories and tell ourselves, are
you know, fashion our own life narrative? Um, we are
able to deal with some of the some of the
consequences of this awareness of time. You know, when we
can think about the future and think about the fact
that one day we're going to die, but at the
same time we can say to ourselves, well, I'm going
to do everything I can to live the best life.
(18:34):
I can make a meaningful contribution, to leave a legacy
and to live on in the memories of others. And
so that process um of thinking about the future and
what that might inspire UM in my mind got me
thinking about the past. How people can use the past,
use their memories for past as a way to cope
(18:55):
with these existential anxieties. So that's how I first got
into it, was just thinking about, well if the if
you're kind of afraid of the future, can you use
the past as a way to cope with that fear? Um,
And then it started going from there, Well, it looks
like the past can do lots of stuff for us
(19:17):
and puzzling out the pieces of our lives and how
they fit together. Nostalgia can be incredibly useful. But there's
also the temptation to use nostalgia like a movie set,
rolling it in and out of our lives, mistaking the
movie set as a reality, and glossing over the details
that are less charming or wonderful than we've remembered. In
(19:43):
her essay in the New York Review of Books, Z. D. Smith,
who is of Jamaican descent, rights of nostalgia, quote, in
that period, I could not vote marrying my husband, have
my children work in the university, I work in, or
live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a dis grecitionary art,
a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.
(20:07):
The initial like uh uh. The mechanism of it in
terms of survival is like, oh, it's a coping mechanism,
and you will be you know, sort of soothed, presumably.
But instead what's happening is angry. Now used to be better,
real angry. It's not back then like it. It's there's
some problem going on where it's not soothing at all anymore.
(20:30):
It's just like the longing has superseded any sort of
benefit the pleasant memory had, and now it's sort of
like this weird anger Maker for a Lot of People
podcast co host Holly Fry and editor Christopher Hasiotis explore
the problem of imagining a past that wasn't If you
look at ed Greece when has written in the seventies
and the film that came out in the eighties, it's
(20:51):
looking at the fifties in a very very nostalgic rosie view.
Everything's great, everyone's dancing, and the dancing is great, but
it completely ignored as all the social upheaval about around
the corner. It ignores the poor living conditions for a
significant amount of the population. And so I wonder if
we take this thing, which on a personal, you know,
(21:13):
individual animal basis, is helpful, and if it's applied culturally,
it prevents us from I don't know, looking accurately at
our at our own past. Well, first of all, let's
get it straight, like clearly Greece as a documentary and
it's accurate. Now, I'm not like a big grease person.
I just I'm sure there are people that think that's
(21:35):
exactly what the fifties was. Like you, I know I
did when my sister watched that movie every two days
(21:56):
when she was a kid, and I thought, oh, that, well,
that's what it was like a long time ago, in
the past, years ago, at the time you were innocent
in that you were ignorant of the things going on
around you. So it feels like that time was wonderful
and delightful and full of nothing but glitter and breakfast cereal.
But in fact, really you're just longing for the time
(22:18):
when you didn't know better. The problem is that this
kind of rhetoric, this a simpler time, become such an
ingrained idea that it's taken as a universal truth, which
is what I think nostalgia does, at least when it's
like this sort of super crowdsourced and nostalgia, there was
(22:38):
one truth. It was great, we had good times all
the time. And it's like, no, it's there's so much
more texture to any given moment in history than that
times before you were even born. You look back on
these these things that must have been great back then.
But you know, if you gave me a time machine,
I could take you somewhere and show you that it
was much worse than you think it was. And when
(23:00):
it comes to childhood nostalgia, the memories created in the
nostalgia factories of the mind can be very different from
other family members experiences. I sort of experience that with
my siblings sometimes and my friends. I don't know if
it's just because I'm super cynical, but like, I mean,
like any family, we had complicated stuff and it sometimes
(23:23):
we're great and sometimes weren't. But as we've aged and
like my mom has passed, and when my siblings talk
about are growing up years and there's a big gap
between them and me, So there's there's a different childhood
experience as part of it. But like they'll just talk
about like this magical, wonderful thing, and I'm like, did
we grow up in the same house? Like sometimes it
(23:44):
was cool, but do you remember the Okay, okay, hey
you're happy. I'm not gonna mess it up. And it
is kind of an interesting I mean, that's it's like
nostalgia has driven the bus at that point, and it's
kind of like covering the puddles that were ad and
just whitewashing the yucky bits and everything's good. It's all happy.
(24:06):
Remember those amazing cakes that we got on our birthday,
So those we're pretty great, And maybe that's a you
know again, that's a cultural survival mechanism. It keeps your
family closer that if you actually had to talk about
all the things that were complicated all the time with
your family, families wouldn't stick together. The problem is when
nostalgia is used as a manipulating force, fomenting hyper nationalistic
(24:28):
pride that would have wide swaths of the population cast
aside in favor of an America that never really existed
in the first place. And I wonder how much of
that is at play with UM A lot of what's
going on around the world right now politically in terms
of I mean, it's so we're recording a couple of
days after the vote for the Brexit and the referendum
(24:49):
on that it seems like from a lot of the
data that was driven by the older electorate UM and
a lot of people who express that they are really
no check for lack of a better word, about the
way things used to be before the EU before you know,
there was before borders were as open, before labor markets
(25:09):
were as open. And I think we see that a
lot of that in the US too, in certain political movements,
people wanting things to be the way they were when
when they were younger, or when they understood things better
when there was more. Do you think they were exactly
To all Americans tonight, in all of our cities and
(25:31):
in all of our towns, I make this promise. We
will make America strong again. We will make America proud again,
we will make America safe again, and we will make
(25:54):
America great again. To be clear, nobody here is begrudging
anyone of their nostalgia used in its best form. It
can be something when you return to again and again,
propping us up when we need it. I um bathe
in it, do you know what I mean? Like our
entire house, my husband is the same, is filled with
(26:18):
Star Wars toys that we had when we were kids,
all the way up to new stuffs, kind of like this,
this hallway that's always open to you to like kind
of still remember and retain that childlike wonder at something.
(26:45):
Holly's idea of nostalgia is beautiful, even helpful, in thinking
of the past as a touchstone to something elemental about
our existence, something full of awe, a reminder that on
this planet, in this galaxy, in this universe, we somehow
get to exist. In the next episode, we look at
(27:25):
what happens when fear takes hold and desperation takes over.
In the United States, we are a very suspicious nation.
We'd like to thank Larry Singleton for sharing his work
with us, and we'd like to thank Clay Rutledge for
showing us the ways nostalgia can bolster us and our
(27:46):
times of need. And thank you to Holly Fry of
stuff you missed in history class and editor Christopher Hessiotis
for taking a seat at the table and discussing nostalgia.
The Stuff of Life is written an executive produced by
me Julie Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Original
(28:08):
music is by Noel Brown, and editorial oversight is provided
by contributing producer Dylan Fagin and Head of Production Jerry Rowland.
This episode also featured music by Tristan McNeil, Aaron Grubbs,
and Dylan Fagin. If you have a story you'd like
to share with us, you can call into our podcast
line at one eight four four h s W Stuff
(28:31):
That's Stuff. We'll be doing a wrap up episode at
the end of the season and we want to hear
your voice in it, so leave a message. You can
find The Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter. And
you can email us at the Stuff of Life at
how staff works dot com. If you're just looking at
(28:53):
your own life and your own sphere of existence, to
a lot of people, that was the way life was.
And you know, I think that's why it's a lot
of times vialable to be able to look beyond yourself
and connect with others. Are I don't know, Yeah, sorry,
that's another ship hippie
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