August 16, 2021 • 34 mins
Actor Rob Lowe LOVES the 1980s. And who can blame him? He was one of the most famous men on the planet. But, as he tells Dr Laurie Santos, he's careful not to wallow in nostalgia for the music, fashions and events of his youth too much - and happiness science backs him up on this.
Research suggests that our memories of the past can be very selective and highly unreliable - causing us to misremember events and cast them in a rosy glow. Sadly, this also causes us to make very bad decisions about what will make us happy in the future.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When you hear the word nostalgia, where do your
(00:37):
thoughts go? Oh boy? You know it gets triggered, you know,
usually by music or a smell like hot air and pines.
That combination and then if you throw in a little
bit of salt water reminds me of the very first
time I ever saw California in nineteen seventy six, when
(00:58):
I first set foot out here and started my journey
to where I am today. So that that really gets
me nostalgia. You're listening to one of the most surreal
conversations of my life. I'm talking about nostala with the
actor who personifies some of my fondest eighties memories, Roblow.
If you're a child of the eighties like me, Rob
is an icon. He was part of pretty much everything
(01:20):
I'm embarrassed to love about that decade. He was an
ABC after school specials. He started in classic eighties movies
like Saint, Almost Fire and The Outsiders. He was a
member of the infamous Brat Pack, who was on the
cover of Teenbeat magazine week after week. He dated all
my Team girl idols, from Demi Moore to Winona Ryder.
He played the saxophone or at least I thought he did.
(01:44):
Do you actually play the sacks or was that just
for the movie. Let me tell you something, I am
a longtime actor. I can fake do almost anything. I
can fake shoot a gun, I can fake repel, I
can fake play the saxophone like no other and I
have fooled many a person with it. And let's not
(02:04):
even get started on his hair. I used more hair
Moose than any human being should ever use. All this
goes to say that even though I was trying to
be my smoothest professional podcast Yale professor self when I
chatted with Rob, I was finding it really hard to
hold it together. When the Carpenters come on the radio
and you're like immediately next to your grandpa co driving
(02:28):
his station wagon and you're nine or eleven years old,
it's awesome, it's magic. You're in a time machine. You're
literally in a time machine. But I love the time
machine point because you know, in some sense, you've created
that time machine for other people, you know, even for me,
(02:49):
Like just talking with you on the zoom call, I
hear your voice, and I hear certain ways that you
express things, in certain parts of your smile, and I'm
taking back to you know, movies I watched in grade
school and with friends and fun times in college. And
you know, what does it feel like to be creating
the time machine for other people? That is amazing. That
makes me feel so good. It really does, because I
(03:09):
can put the shoe on the other foot so easily,
you know, when I meet my heroes or whatever and go, hey, man,
what that song you wrote? I played it at my
wedding to me hearing feedback like that. At the end
of the day, it's the real reason I think that
I became an actor and got into this business was
to move people and create memories for them, because memories
(03:33):
are all you got. That's all you got. Rob is
right here. When we look back at our lives, our
memories are all we've got, and reliving all those nostalgic
moments often feels really fun. But nostalgia can also cause pain.
Research shows that if we're not careful, our happiest memories
have a way of messing with our future well being,
(03:54):
making us downplay bad experiences or totally misremember the past,
which can set us up for some potentially damaging choices.
So how can we experience the benefits of nostalgia in
a way that doesn't hurt our happiness. How can we
relive our fond past memories in a way that doesn't
hurt our future selves. Our minds are constantly telling us
(04:21):
what to do to be happy. But what if our
minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can point us all back in the right direction.
You're listening to the Happiness Lap with doctor Laurie santos
(04:45):
So full disclosure. I am a nostalgia junkie. When I
have a tough day at work, I rewatch old movies
or play the classic songs that I loved in high school.
So you can imagine my total glee when I learned
that I share a fondness for all things old school
with my eighties Heartthrob Rob Low. I love nostalgia. I
love that I'm on this podcast right now because I'm
(05:05):
very big on it. The science shows that Rob and
I are not alone here. Nostalgia is an incredibly common experience.
In fact, one study found that around eighty percent of
participants reported feeling nostalgic at least once a week. If
you were to look over my shoulder at night when
I'm going down my YouTube wormhole, It's all nostalgia. It's
all history, nostalgia related behind the scenes of seventies music,
(05:31):
all of that stuff. Like me, Rob loves thinking back
to the songs of his youth and the concerts he
enjoyed when he was young. For him, a big one
was seeing his idol Bruce Springsteen live for the first time.
One of the things I remember that crazy time was
going to see him at Giants Stadium and it's the
Born in the USA tour. Talk about nostalgia, but Rob's
(05:53):
concert memories are also a bit different than many of ours.
Stadium's full. It's just before showtime and I walk in
and people start noticing and saying hello and running an autograph,
and the next thing I know, the entire stadium was
chanting my name. I get really like embarrassed. But the
(06:16):
good news is that led the Springsteen people to get
me the hell out of the stadium and backstage, and
that's how I finally met Bruce. The same is true
for his memories of eighties television. Rob also loves to
get nostalgic about bad old school TV. I told him
stories of how I used to run off the school
bus to catch my favorite afternoon shows. But Rob's childhood
TV watching stories are a bit more over the top
(06:38):
than mine, because Rob wasn't just watching those ABC afternoon specials,
he was also starring in them. And I used that
as an excuse to go up to the cutest girl
in the school and kind of try to chat her up.
And her name was Jennifer, and one thing led to another,
and she invited me to come to her house and
watched the after school special and she was like, you know,
my dad's in acting, so you know that'll be great.
(06:59):
So I roll up to her house. It's a mansion
in Beverly Hills, first time I've ever seen a mansion.
And I opened the door and it's Carrie Grant in
a bad thrope. And so we watched my little stupid
after school special with Carrie Grant, and afterwards he was like,
you remind me son of a young Warren baby, which
I took as a huge compliment. As I heard more
(07:24):
and more about Rob's incredible stories, I realized that he
might not be the best starting point for understanding the
average person's connection between nostalgia and happiness. I love the eighties,
but I had obviously a very very very unique seat
at the eighties. So to get a more scientific sense
of why we love thinking about the past, I decided
(07:45):
to turn to someone else I thought could help. My
friend and colleague, Phelippe did regard I'm an addict to nostalgia. Yes,
I love it. I relished that feeling. Phelipe is an
academic triple threat. He's a professor of psychology, cognitive neuroscience,
and philosophy at Duke University. Full disclosure, there are times
in which I feel that I was born the wrong time.
(08:06):
I loved the nineteen twenties of hats. I love like
dressing up nicely, you know, like chatting with Virginia Wall.
I have a very nostalgia feelic about that. But Philippa
isn't just a fan of nostalgia. He's also an academic
expert on the topic. The term nostalgia was coined in
the sixteen hundreds, and he was originally considered a neurological commission,
(08:28):
which is very interesting because neurology and psychiatry were well
there was no such a thing as psychiatric back then,
but it was very clearly considered a condition of the body,
and it was thought to mainly affect army personnel who
was described in Germany, and he was mostly thought off
to affect Swiss soldiers. And then there were all sorts
of very interesting origin stories as to why people felt nostalgia.
(08:52):
One of them had to do with ear drum damage
due to the incessant clunging of the cow bells in Switzerland.
There were stories about atmospheric pressure and so on and
so forth, but it was always considered a malady. It
was considered an illness of the body, mainly a neuralgically illness,
and also that it was associated with depression, anxiety, lack
(09:15):
of appetiteed Son. It wasn't until much later where people
have started to think that there might be something positive
about nostalgia. It's kind of amazing that it took hundreds
of years for scholars to realize that nostalgia actually felt good.
But these days scientists are learning that the effects of
this bitter sweet emotion are often more sweet than better.
(09:35):
In fact, psychologists have observed that thinking wistfully about the
past can make us feel really good. We use memories,
just as we use imagination to make us feel better now.
So nostalgia is a very good way of going on
a little mental vacation without leaving your home. And when
you cannot leave your home, that's the best way and
(09:56):
you can do it right. One of the times that
our brains especially seek out old memories is when we're
feeling more alone than usual. There's been a lot of
research on making people feel kind of lonely, isolated, and
stuff like that tends to elicit a little bit more
feelings of nostalgia. So it looks as though it is
when you're in a negative situation that you're more likely
(10:17):
to generate the senses of nostalgia. If you've listened to
other episodes of the Happiness Lab, you probably know that
feeling socially connected it's an important condition for happiness. But
it's not just the right now social connection we get
from seeing friends in the present that makes us happy.
Research shows we also get a happiness boost from merely
thinking about past social times, especially if we're feeling lonely
(10:40):
in the present. As one scientific paper nicely put it,
during nostalgic reverie, the mind is peopled but science has
found another way that nostalgia can boost our well being.
Re experiencing the paths can help us feel better about
how things went back in the day, which is important because,
let's face it, our past selves more always our best selves.
(11:02):
Past us is didn't always make those smartest choices, something
my eighties idol Roblow knows all too well. Look, there
are people who live through the eighties, and there are
people who live through the eighties. If you've wrote Rob's
memoir stories, I only tell my friends you know that
Rob had some pretty rough times early in his career,
and that's one of the reasons he personally loves nostalgia
(11:24):
so much. When we look back at some of the
bad choices of our youth, we often do so with
a bit more clarity than we had when we were
living through those events. And I don't think nostalgia is
nostalgia without that underpinning, you know. And also, looking back
on anything, you have twenty twenty hindsight. So if you're
(11:44):
being nostalgic and you're looking back, implicit in that is
what would I have done differently? This redemptive lens through
which we naturally view the past means that we remember
even the worst events with a positive spin. We recall
the good parts and neglect them not so good or
even embarrassing parts. It's like talking about the greatest beer
(12:05):
pong game you ever played. You're like, it's great. Vomit. Yeah,
I vomited, but but it was still great. Or like,
when we get back from the break, we'll look in
more detail at why we tend to distort the past
so badly, or, to paraphrase Rob, how it is that
our brains get all the great beer pong of the
past without any of the vomit. When the Happiness Lab returns,
(12:27):
we'll see that our rosy, redemptive view of the past
stems from an unfortunate design feature of our minds, one
that comes with a huge happiness cost that we don't
often recognize. We'll learn that what seems like a harmless
bit of rosy nostalgia can sometimes cause us to make
bad decisions in the present. The Happiness Lab will be
back in a moment. I mean, there's nothing like being
(12:59):
on a bike and suffering with people, rejoicing with people
you know. To me, it's a real shared experience. This
is Lee Thompson, a professor at Kellogg School of Management
at Northwestern University. She's an expert on the ways that
our memories can play tricks on us. But Lee is
also a world champion cyclist. She took up the sport
Latin Lay encouraged by a very devoted teacher, her fiance, Bob.
(13:24):
You know, he was a cyclist, and you know, my
response was like any normal person's response who doesn't ride
a bike, which is, well, anybody can ride a bike,
Like what's the big deal. But then he said, well,
do you know what it's like to go twenty five
miles an hour on a bike? And can you do
that for an hour? And it's like, okay, Well is
this a challenge or what? And Lee was up for
(13:44):
that challenge. After she and Bob got married, they headed
not for a beach vacation honeymoon, but for the San
Juan Islands and day long, grueling bike rides. I didn't
know that my husband's secret plan was to get me
to ride up Mount Constitution. If I would have read
anything about that, I think I would have freaked myself out,
(14:05):
said are you kidding me? There's no way we're doing this.
But it was only when we were like a quarter
of the way up that he said, this is going
to be a pretty serious climb, but by that time
I was already kind of one quarter into it. A
painful bike ride that's so steep you don't even think
you can finish it. That doesn't sound like most people's
(14:26):
idea of a good honeymoon. But Lee gets nostalgic whenever
she thinks about it. There was one time in my
life where I could go back to. It would probably
be that because it was just epic, epic fun. But
I know enough as a psychologist in my own research
to know that on any given day, there was a sunburn,
(14:47):
there wasn't enough food, somebody ran out of water, so
not every moment was glorious. Lee recognizes that our minds
lie to us, and one of our mind's biggest misconceptions
is that our recollections of the past are totally accurate.
Our memories are pretty fallible. That seems like a judgy word,
(15:10):
but our memories are not necessarily like a video recorder.
Human memory doesn't have the hard drive space to videotape
life in its entirety, so our brains play fast and
loose with the footage. The first thing we do is
delete most of the boring parts. The half hour of
your vacation that you spent in traffic, or the part
where you had to wait for dinner to show up,
(15:30):
or the ten minutes you spent going through airport security.
All those filler moments get dropped. But dropping those boring
bits means that our memories are skewed in a very
systematic way. The past seems to have a higher ratio
of interesting moments to boring stuff than real life does.
But that's not the only way our minds are biased.
Our brains also don't like to recall the bad stuff,
(15:51):
the sunburns and the rainy beach days and lost luggage,
and so our brains cook the data. Lee has argued
that we simply tend to forget the parts of an
event that weren't positive. For example, I know on my
honeymoon there was a day where both of us didn't
wear sunscreen and there were very, very uncomfortable burns. I
choose not to dwell on that. I choose not to
(16:14):
make the most important aspect. But anybody who's had a
pretty bad sunburn knows that can be a deal breaker
as far as your ability to enjoy the rest of
the vacation. Our minds are also want to be movie directors.
They really like a good story, the kind that has
(16:35):
a happy ending, and that means that our brains unconsciously
rewrite past events so that they seem more entertaining. That
sunset becomes even more beautiful, that fish we caught becomes
not just reasonably sized, but really really huge. That beer
pund game becomes more fun and less vomit filled. And
when we do manage to remember those annoying moments, they
(16:56):
somehow magically transform into life lessons that provide a nice
narrative arc. So what was an absolute disaster trip could
turn out to be a hilarious story or the fact
kind of like, oh look at me, I managed to survive.
That's kind of an extreme example of what we call
story construction or sense making. It becomes kind of a
(17:18):
funny story to tell. After all these edits, our memories
are no longer accurate recordings of real life events. They're
unconsciously spin doctored highlight reels. It's a bias that Lee
and her colleagues have referred to as Rosie retrospection, which
technically means that our memory for this bounded event in
time is a lot more favorable and positive and fulfilling
(17:43):
than was the actual experience of the event itself. But
rosie retrospections aren't just memories we think back on passively.
We also use them to predict what we will enjoy
and will enjoy in the future, and that leads to
a second bias, what Lee and her colleagues call rosie prospection.
When we think about a future event, like a dinner
(18:04):
with friends or a vacation, we predict that it's going
to be great, just like similar events are in our
biased positive memories. Anticipating that event, I probably wouldn't be
thinking about the stress of going through an international airport
and the stress of I don't know packing or not
getting my bag. I'd just be thinking about, Oh, the
(18:26):
arrival and the perfect weather. The idea of rosy prospection
and retrospection fit well with what Lee experienced in her
own honeymoon, But did Lee's hypothesis match what real people
actually experience. Lee wanted to test this empirically, but she
had to locate a pretty special population of subjects. She
had to find a group of people who were about
(18:46):
to undergo a positive experience in their lives, some sort
of event that would make for a good memory. But
those people also had to be willing to fill out
a bunch of boring surveys during the event. What Lee
didn't realize at the time was that her scientific solution
to these problems would come, oddly enough, from the biking world.
Her colleague Randy Kronk was organizing a bike trip down
(19:06):
the coast of California for his students. So we thought,
oh my gosh, this is fantastic. It's like our perfect
dream study. Lee first had the students predict how much
they'd enjoy the bike trip before it started. They were asked,
how much do you agree with these statements, I'm going
to enjoy this trip, I'm going to think this vacation
is fun, I'm going to feel good during this trip,
(19:28):
and so on. Subjects were also asked the same questions
again when they were on the trip itself and after
the trip when they were on their flight back home.
So what a Lee fine. Well, before the bike trip,
subjects thought their enjoyment would be at a twenty seven
out of twenty eight total points on Lee's measure. They
thought the trip was going to be awesome, but by
the second day, subject had dropped to only a twenty
(19:51):
out of twenty eight. The biker's enjoyment stayed lower than
they had initially predicted for the entire week. But what
happened a single day after the bike tour ended, subjects
remembered their trip much better than it was. They said
their experience was a twenty six out of twenty eight.
On average, the b ER's final post trip rating was
higher than their enjoyment had actually been at any single
(20:14):
point during the trip. Now that the trip was over,
it was awesome when you ask people, oh, you have
this event coming up, how are you feeling. Oh my gosh,
it's going to be fantastic. I'm so excited. This is
going to be so pleasureful. And then during the event, Uh,
my socks are wet. I forgot to bring mosquito repellent,
you know, like so yucky, you know, the food they
(20:37):
ran out of whatever. So there's a dampening as we
called it, during the event. And then after the event, boom,
all of a sudden, the rosy retrospection kicks in, where
people are remembering the event as much more pleasureful than
they reported during the event. Itself. Now. At first glance,
(21:01):
the positive biases Lee identified may seem like a great
design feature of the mind. Rosie retrospection allows our memory
banks to be filled with extra positive, less boring recordings
of the past, and remembering all those positively edited memories
makes us feel happier, less lonely, and even more redeemed
in the present. All good stuff, really, But Lee's research
(21:22):
also reveals a major dark side to these biases are
positively skewed. Recollections aren't just passive recordings that we go
back to when we're feeling nostalgic. We also use our
memories in the present to make predictions about how we
ought to be spending our time. So if our overly
rosy memories are getting our past realities really wrong, what
does that mean for the accuracy with which we're making
(21:44):
the decisions of today. I remember distinctly having the time
of my life at I don't know what kind of
small town kind of carnival things that you go to
at night, may have these like rides and you'd eat
cotton candy, and I just remember thinking, this is my thing.
I want to go do that. Even though she's a
world expert on memory biases. Lee still sometimes falls prey
(22:08):
to the problems her own nostalgia. Well, I made the
mistake of doing that not so long ago, and I
was dizzy. I got a migraine headache. The cotton candy
was terrible, Like, how does anybody eat that stuff? Lee
naturally assumed that her fond memories of carnivals would accurately
(22:28):
predict how positively her presence self would feel if she
jumped on a roller coaster or took that first bite
of cotton candy. She assumed all the great things she
remembered about fairs of the past would feel just as
good today as they seemed in her nostalgic memories. But
Lee's overly glossy memories of the past wound up reducing
her current happiness and making her a little nauseous. Constantly
(22:51):
rewriting the past in a favorable light may make us
happier when we look back, but it also means we
don't correctly adjust to the demands of the future. For instance,
focusing on the highlights of a marriage or a job
might cause us to stay in relationships or work environments
that aren't good for us, where the bad times in
reality weigh the good. But it's not just our personal
(23:11):
choices that are led astray by our biased memories. When
we get back from the break, we'll see that there
are also societal costs to all these rosy retrospections, ones
that can be used against us when we least expected
America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes,
together we will make America great again. We'll explore this
(23:37):
dark side of nostalgia when the Happiness lab returns in
a moment. And from Colombia, and that's where I grew
up until I moved to the States eighteen years ago.
(23:57):
Nostalgia expert Felippe de Bregard's immigrant experience explains why he
relates so much to one of his favorite literary heroes,
hoof an Al Orbino, a character in Gabriel Gussia Marcus's
famous book Love in the Time of Cholera. Like Philippe,
Jouvenal made the tough decision to leave Columbia to study abroad,
but unlike Philippe, Juvenal's ignorance of his own rosy retrospections
(24:21):
never let him properly process that decision. When he's in Paris,
keep Philips extraordinarily nostalgic about going back to his hometown,
and he wants to go back, doesn't enjoy Paris, and
then when he goes back, he's not happy, Like this
is not at all how I imagine it right. Our
rosy retrospections mean that we spend the present constantly wishing
we could go back to what it was like in
(24:42):
the past. But in the rare cases where those wishes
come true, as they did for juvenal, we usually find
that those past situations aren't as good as we Rosalie
remembered to steal the eloquent words of Garcia Marquez. We
become easy victims to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia. But
the fact that our nostalgic tendencies are so easily deceived
(25:03):
also makes us easy marks for people who might want
to exploit a rosier past. And minds are so prone
to rosy retrospection that it's really simple to feed us
a good story about what things were like back in
the day. So imagine utopia that was better then than
it is now, which is why so many political movements
are keen to convince us that everything in life would
(25:24):
be peachy if we could just return to the good
old days. That was the whole Trump campaign right make
America great again, and that again was clearly an indication
that it was good before and that we should strive
to do something like in the past. Philippe saw justice
pattern in his own country's right wing propaganda, but it
attempts to end decades of political violence. I left Columbia
(25:48):
very unhappy with the political situation. Some of the most
horrible acts ever committed by a government I think in
Colombia happened during that time. But what it is very
surprising to me is that, you know, many of the
people that voted against the peace process had an extraordinarily
distorted view of how the past was, so they were
hoping to sort of go by to a kind of
(26:10):
life that never occurred in Colombia, never. This is a
situation again in which nostalgia is a very bad motivator,
and that's because the science shows that we don't just
experience nostalgia for a past that we actually experienced. Our
memories are so biased that we sometimes experience nostalgia for
a past that never even occurred, for one that we
only imagined happening. You go, like, Holy Molly, I would
(26:33):
be so much better off if I was in that
imagined situation that I never leave. I never experienced, but
I am very capable of mentally simulating relative to this
state that I am in right now, is this is
the worst possible way you're going about making decisions. So
how can we protect ourselves from the nefarious parts of nostalgia?
(26:55):
How can we get the benefits of our rosy past
without all those biased memories hurting our current decisions. Philippe
thinks one path forward is to pay attention to why
we're turning to the past in the first place. What
to our memories tell us we're missing in the present.
You might think that what you want is to go
back to high school, but really what is going to
(27:18):
satisfy the sire is to get new friends. But there's
also a second way to avoid the problems of nostalgia.
The funny thing is that it seems kind of countrituitive,
because what I think we should do is to improve
our memory of the past. We need historians really helping
us dispel the delusions that nostalgia create. I think universities
(27:40):
should hire historians. I think podcasters should interview historians. The
best way to sort of minimize the distortions of nostalgia
is to actually improve our memory. As I heard more
fully based strategies for preventing the problems of rosy retrospection,
I realized I needed to talk to someone who had
special insight into how to use our fond memories productively.
(28:02):
Not a historian or scholar, but someone whose entire career
could have been defined by the past. But isn't my
eighties idol, Rob blow Listen. I love the eighties as
much as the next guy. But when people come up
to me, the thing that I'm most proud of in
all my career is that I never know what they're
(28:25):
going to want to talk about. I love that I'm
not anchored to any one era, or to any one
TV show, or to any one movie. The eighties is
merely a fantastic chapter that a lot of people like,
including me. Unlike many stars from the eighties, Rob managed
(28:46):
not to get stuck there. Despite the fact that Rob
is himself very nostalgic, and the fact that he is,
for me at least, the absolute epitome of eighties nostalgia,
He's seamlessly managed to move beyond that decade. Nearly all
of Rob's biggest successes in movies and TV as an author,
and now even in podcasting with his new show, Literally
(29:06):
with Rob Blow. They've all come since the eighties. For
a self proclaimed lover of nostalgia, Rob hasn't let his
rosy retrospection affect his present success or his current happiness.
One of my greatest fears was always being a one
hit wonder. Four decades in, I still wake up and go, so,
(29:26):
what's Rob's secret? Well, even though he's not a psychologist,
Rob seems to have an intuitive sense that our memories
are more fallible than we realize. His unique cultural seat
in the eighties has made him all too aware that
we sometimes celebrate parts of the past that were at
the time kind of sucky. So in the eighties, everybody
shit all over the music. It seems shocking now, but like,
(29:49):
when did Journeys can't stop believe in become the national anthem?
Because I remember the eighties and people laughed at Journey
they thought they were a cheesy, hack rock band. Now
that's every college campus frat party. Raise your beers, start
crying and dancing song. It's the end of the Sopranos.
(30:10):
If you'd have told me in nineteen eighty four that
that was the song. I would have said, no way. Well,
it's easy for all of us to misremember the past.
That's a luxury that people who've lived in the public
eye don't always have. Rob's problems with substance addiction and
sex scandals are common knowledge, and that means that Rob
has had to be honest with himself about the harmful
(30:31):
actions he engaged in as a young man. It's made
him penitent and more clear eyed about the past. Rob's
also gotten a newfound perspective on the challenges of teenage
life as a father to his own boys, Matthew and John.
Rob's kids never became huge teen movie stars like their dad.
Watching Matthew and John grew up with more run of
the mill adolescent milestones has made Rob realized just how
(30:55):
odd his own experience was. My son is eighteen, Okay,
so now he's world famous. That kid right there, eighteen
world famous, and it just takes my breath away. I'm like,
I wouldn't wish that on that eighteen year old kid.
He's never home, he's on the road, he's making tons
(31:16):
of money, and it's like, I can't believe it happened
to me. But Rob's biggest insight comes from something we
talk about a lot on this podcast. To be fully happy,
we need to get out of the past long enough
to make the most of the present moment. When you
think about happiness, do you think it's more about looking
back looking forward, a combination of both, Like how do
you think about it in your own life? It's not
(31:38):
looking forward and not looking back. Although we've been talking
about nostalgia, which doesn't make me happy, obviously, really happy,
true happiness is being present in this moment and your
mind's not telling you, hey, you know what you should
really be doing, you should be doing X, Y and Z,
or hey, you know you should really go back. None
(31:58):
of that monkey brain part of yourself is shut off,
and you are fully present in whatever you are doing
and content with that. That is the finition of true
happiness for me. This insight into the importance of making
sure he's living in the present moment came from one
of the hardest one battles of Rob's life. I I've
(32:19):
been sober now thirty years and it changed my life.
And one of the big tenets of recovery is learning
to live in the now and learning to be happy
with what's in front of you to the extent that
I'm able to do that on a daily basis, is
a direct correlation to how happy I am at any
given time. Nostalgia can be a pleasant experience, but our
(32:42):
memories of the past can also hurt our present selves
if we're not careful. But when we take a present focus,
when we learn to be content with what's in front
of us, when we recognize that we want to remember
what's going on in the here and now as happily
as possible, we can avoid the problems that come with
an extra rosy retrospection. Rob's living proof that understanding our
minds biases can help us appreciate our past and even
(33:05):
dig into all that yummy and psychologically beneficial nostalgia without
the drawbacks. When we notice what we're longing for in
the past, we can choose not to go backwards, but
decide how to move forward in the future. Rob taught
me that an accurate sense of the pros and cons
of the past can be a helpful way to enjoy
and make the most of the present, which was really
good news for me because I really really wasn't ready
(33:28):
to throw away my eighties playlist just yet. In fact,
after chatting with Rob, I think it's time for a
long classic eighties movie marathon and maybe some cheesy music
videos because I definitely still want my MTV. But not
(33:51):
to worry, because I'll be back from my retrofest just
in time for the next episode of The Happiness Lab
with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co
written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was
(34:11):
composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering
by Evan Biola. Joseph Friedman checked our facts, Sophie Crane
mckibbon edited our scripts, and Pete not and help with production.
Special thanks to mil LaBelle, Carlie mcgliori, Heather Faine, Julia Barton,
Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
(34:33):
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and NAT Doctor Laurie Santos.
Pushkin. When you hear the word nostalgia, where do your
(00:37):
thoughts go? Oh boy? You know it gets triggered, you know,
usually by music or a smell like hot air and pines.
That combination and then if you throw in a little
bit of salt water reminds me of the very first
time I ever saw California in nineteen seventy six, when
(00:58):
I first set foot out here and started my journey
to where I am today. So that that really gets
me nostalgia. You're listening to one of the most surreal
conversations of my life. I'm talking about nostala with the
actor who personifies some of my fondest eighties memories, Roblow.
If you're a child of the eighties like me, Rob
is an icon. He was part of pretty much everything
(01:20):
I'm embarrassed to love about that decade. He was an
ABC after school specials. He started in classic eighties movies
like Saint, Almost Fire and The Outsiders. He was a
member of the infamous Brat Pack, who was on the
cover of Teenbeat magazine week after week. He dated all
my Team girl idols, from Demi Moore to Winona Ryder.
He played the saxophone or at least I thought he did.
(01:44):
Do you actually play the sacks or was that just
for the movie. Let me tell you something, I am
a longtime actor. I can fake do almost anything. I
can fake shoot a gun, I can fake repel, I
can fake play the saxophone like no other and I
have fooled many a person with it. And let's not
(02:04):
even get started on his hair. I used more hair
Moose than any human being should ever use. All this
goes to say that even though I was trying to
be my smoothest professional podcast Yale professor self when I
chatted with Rob, I was finding it really hard to
hold it together. When the Carpenters come on the radio
and you're like immediately next to your grandpa co driving
(02:28):
his station wagon and you're nine or eleven years old,
it's awesome, it's magic. You're in a time machine. You're
literally in a time machine. But I love the time
machine point because you know, in some sense, you've created
that time machine for other people, you know, even for me,
(02:49):
Like just talking with you on the zoom call, I
hear your voice, and I hear certain ways that you
express things, in certain parts of your smile, and I'm
taking back to you know, movies I watched in grade
school and with friends and fun times in college. And
you know, what does it feel like to be creating
the time machine for other people? That is amazing. That
makes me feel so good. It really does, because I
(03:09):
can put the shoe on the other foot so easily,
you know, when I meet my heroes or whatever and go, hey, man,
what that song you wrote? I played it at my
wedding to me hearing feedback like that. At the end
of the day, it's the real reason I think that
I became an actor and got into this business was
to move people and create memories for them, because memories
(03:33):
are all you got. That's all you got. Rob is
right here. When we look back at our lives, our
memories are all we've got, and reliving all those nostalgic
moments often feels really fun. But nostalgia can also cause pain.
Research shows that if we're not careful, our happiest memories
have a way of messing with our future well being,
(03:54):
making us downplay bad experiences or totally misremember the past,
which can set us up for some potentially damaging choices.
So how can we experience the benefits of nostalgia in
a way that doesn't hurt our happiness. How can we
relive our fond past memories in a way that doesn't
hurt our future selves. Our minds are constantly telling us
(04:21):
what to do to be happy. But what if our
minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can point us all back in the right direction.
You're listening to the Happiness Lap with doctor Laurie santos
(04:45):
So full disclosure. I am a nostalgia junkie. When I
have a tough day at work, I rewatch old movies
or play the classic songs that I loved in high school.
So you can imagine my total glee when I learned
that I share a fondness for all things old school
with my eighties Heartthrob Rob Low. I love nostalgia. I
love that I'm on this podcast right now because I'm
(05:05):
very big on it. The science shows that Rob and
I are not alone here. Nostalgia is an incredibly common experience.
In fact, one study found that around eighty percent of
participants reported feeling nostalgic at least once a week. If
you were to look over my shoulder at night when
I'm going down my YouTube wormhole, It's all nostalgia. It's
all history, nostalgia related behind the scenes of seventies music,
(05:31):
all of that stuff. Like me, Rob loves thinking back
to the songs of his youth and the concerts he
enjoyed when he was young. For him, a big one
was seeing his idol Bruce Springsteen live for the first time.
One of the things I remember that crazy time was
going to see him at Giants Stadium and it's the
Born in the USA tour. Talk about nostalgia, but Rob's
(05:53):
concert memories are also a bit different than many of ours.
Stadium's full. It's just before showtime and I walk in
and people start noticing and saying hello and running an autograph,
and the next thing I know, the entire stadium was
chanting my name. I get really like embarrassed. But the
(06:16):
good news is that led the Springsteen people to get
me the hell out of the stadium and backstage, and
that's how I finally met Bruce. The same is true
for his memories of eighties television. Rob also loves to
get nostalgic about bad old school TV. I told him
stories of how I used to run off the school
bus to catch my favorite afternoon shows. But Rob's childhood
TV watching stories are a bit more over the top
(06:38):
than mine, because Rob wasn't just watching those ABC afternoon specials,
he was also starring in them. And I used that
as an excuse to go up to the cutest girl
in the school and kind of try to chat her up.
And her name was Jennifer, and one thing led to another,
and she invited me to come to her house and
watched the after school special and she was like, you know,
my dad's in acting, so you know that'll be great.
(06:59):
So I roll up to her house. It's a mansion
in Beverly Hills, first time I've ever seen a mansion.
And I opened the door and it's Carrie Grant in
a bad thrope. And so we watched my little stupid
after school special with Carrie Grant, and afterwards he was like,
you remind me son of a young Warren baby, which
I took as a huge compliment. As I heard more
(07:24):
and more about Rob's incredible stories, I realized that he
might not be the best starting point for understanding the
average person's connection between nostalgia and happiness. I love the eighties,
but I had obviously a very very very unique seat
at the eighties. So to get a more scientific sense
of why we love thinking about the past, I decided
(07:45):
to turn to someone else I thought could help. My
friend and colleague, Phelippe did regard I'm an addict to nostalgia. Yes,
I love it. I relished that feeling. Phelipe is an
academic triple threat. He's a professor of psychology, cognitive neuroscience,
and philosophy at Duke University. Full disclosure, there are times
in which I feel that I was born the wrong time.
(08:06):
I loved the nineteen twenties of hats. I love like
dressing up nicely, you know, like chatting with Virginia Wall.
I have a very nostalgia feelic about that. But Philippa
isn't just a fan of nostalgia. He's also an academic
expert on the topic. The term nostalgia was coined in
the sixteen hundreds, and he was originally considered a neurological commission,
(08:28):
which is very interesting because neurology and psychiatry were well
there was no such a thing as psychiatric back then,
but it was very clearly considered a condition of the body,
and it was thought to mainly affect army personnel who
was described in Germany, and he was mostly thought off
to affect Swiss soldiers. And then there were all sorts
of very interesting origin stories as to why people felt nostalgia.
(08:52):
One of them had to do with ear drum damage
due to the incessant clunging of the cow bells in Switzerland.
There were stories about atmospheric pressure and so on and
so forth, but it was always considered a malady. It
was considered an illness of the body, mainly a neuralgically illness,
and also that it was associated with depression, anxiety, lack
(09:15):
of appetiteed Son. It wasn't until much later where people
have started to think that there might be something positive
about nostalgia. It's kind of amazing that it took hundreds
of years for scholars to realize that nostalgia actually felt good.
But these days scientists are learning that the effects of
this bitter sweet emotion are often more sweet than better.
(09:35):
In fact, psychologists have observed that thinking wistfully about the
past can make us feel really good. We use memories,
just as we use imagination to make us feel better now.
So nostalgia is a very good way of going on
a little mental vacation without leaving your home. And when
you cannot leave your home, that's the best way and
(09:56):
you can do it right. One of the times that
our brains especially seek out old memories is when we're
feeling more alone than usual. There's been a lot of
research on making people feel kind of lonely, isolated, and
stuff like that tends to elicit a little bit more
feelings of nostalgia. So it looks as though it is
when you're in a negative situation that you're more likely
(10:17):
to generate the senses of nostalgia. If you've listened to
other episodes of the Happiness Lab, you probably know that
feeling socially connected it's an important condition for happiness. But
it's not just the right now social connection we get
from seeing friends in the present that makes us happy.
Research shows we also get a happiness boost from merely
thinking about past social times, especially if we're feeling lonely
(10:40):
in the present. As one scientific paper nicely put it,
during nostalgic reverie, the mind is peopled but science has
found another way that nostalgia can boost our well being.
Re experiencing the paths can help us feel better about
how things went back in the day, which is important because,
let's face it, our past selves more always our best selves.
(11:02):
Past us is didn't always make those smartest choices, something
my eighties idol Roblow knows all too well. Look, there
are people who live through the eighties, and there are
people who live through the eighties. If you've wrote Rob's
memoir stories, I only tell my friends you know that
Rob had some pretty rough times early in his career,
and that's one of the reasons he personally loves nostalgia
(11:24):
so much. When we look back at some of the
bad choices of our youth, we often do so with
a bit more clarity than we had when we were
living through those events. And I don't think nostalgia is
nostalgia without that underpinning, you know. And also, looking back
on anything, you have twenty twenty hindsight. So if you're
(11:44):
being nostalgic and you're looking back, implicit in that is
what would I have done differently? This redemptive lens through
which we naturally view the past means that we remember
even the worst events with a positive spin. We recall
the good parts and neglect them not so good or
even embarrassing parts. It's like talking about the greatest beer
(12:05):
pong game you ever played. You're like, it's great. Vomit. Yeah,
I vomited, but but it was still great. Or like,
when we get back from the break, we'll look in
more detail at why we tend to distort the past
so badly, or, to paraphrase Rob, how it is that
our brains get all the great beer pong of the
past without any of the vomit. When the Happiness Lab returns,
(12:27):
we'll see that our rosy, redemptive view of the past
stems from an unfortunate design feature of our minds, one
that comes with a huge happiness cost that we don't
often recognize. We'll learn that what seems like a harmless
bit of rosy nostalgia can sometimes cause us to make
bad decisions in the present. The Happiness Lab will be
back in a moment. I mean, there's nothing like being
(12:59):
on a bike and suffering with people, rejoicing with people
you know. To me, it's a real shared experience. This
is Lee Thompson, a professor at Kellogg School of Management
at Northwestern University. She's an expert on the ways that
our memories can play tricks on us. But Lee is
also a world champion cyclist. She took up the sport
Latin Lay encouraged by a very devoted teacher, her fiance, Bob.
(13:24):
You know, he was a cyclist, and you know, my
response was like any normal person's response who doesn't ride
a bike, which is, well, anybody can ride a bike,
Like what's the big deal. But then he said, well,
do you know what it's like to go twenty five
miles an hour on a bike? And can you do
that for an hour? And it's like, okay, Well is
this a challenge or what? And Lee was up for
(13:44):
that challenge. After she and Bob got married, they headed
not for a beach vacation honeymoon, but for the San
Juan Islands and day long, grueling bike rides. I didn't
know that my husband's secret plan was to get me
to ride up Mount Constitution. If I would have read
anything about that, I think I would have freaked myself out,
(14:05):
said are you kidding me? There's no way we're doing this.
But it was only when we were like a quarter
of the way up that he said, this is going
to be a pretty serious climb, but by that time
I was already kind of one quarter into it. A
painful bike ride that's so steep you don't even think
you can finish it. That doesn't sound like most people's
(14:26):
idea of a good honeymoon. But Lee gets nostalgic whenever
she thinks about it. There was one time in my
life where I could go back to. It would probably
be that because it was just epic, epic fun. But
I know enough as a psychologist in my own research
to know that on any given day, there was a sunburn,
(14:47):
there wasn't enough food, somebody ran out of water, so
not every moment was glorious. Lee recognizes that our minds
lie to us, and one of our mind's biggest misconceptions
is that our recollections of the past are totally accurate.
Our memories are pretty fallible. That seems like a judgy word,
(15:10):
but our memories are not necessarily like a video recorder.
Human memory doesn't have the hard drive space to videotape
life in its entirety, so our brains play fast and
loose with the footage. The first thing we do is
delete most of the boring parts. The half hour of
your vacation that you spent in traffic, or the part
where you had to wait for dinner to show up,
(15:30):
or the ten minutes you spent going through airport security.
All those filler moments get dropped. But dropping those boring
bits means that our memories are skewed in a very
systematic way. The past seems to have a higher ratio
of interesting moments to boring stuff than real life does.
But that's not the only way our minds are biased.
Our brains also don't like to recall the bad stuff,
(15:51):
the sunburns and the rainy beach days and lost luggage,
and so our brains cook the data. Lee has argued
that we simply tend to forget the parts of an
event that weren't positive. For example, I know on my
honeymoon there was a day where both of us didn't
wear sunscreen and there were very, very uncomfortable burns. I
choose not to dwell on that. I choose not to
(16:14):
make the most important aspect. But anybody who's had a
pretty bad sunburn knows that can be a deal breaker
as far as your ability to enjoy the rest of
the vacation. Our minds are also want to be movie directors.
They really like a good story, the kind that has
(16:35):
a happy ending, and that means that our brains unconsciously
rewrite past events so that they seem more entertaining. That
sunset becomes even more beautiful, that fish we caught becomes
not just reasonably sized, but really really huge. That beer
pund game becomes more fun and less vomit filled. And
when we do manage to remember those annoying moments, they
(16:56):
somehow magically transform into life lessons that provide a nice
narrative arc. So what was an absolute disaster trip could
turn out to be a hilarious story or the fact
kind of like, oh look at me, I managed to survive.
That's kind of an extreme example of what we call
story construction or sense making. It becomes kind of a
(17:18):
funny story to tell. After all these edits, our memories
are no longer accurate recordings of real life events. They're
unconsciously spin doctored highlight reels. It's a bias that Lee
and her colleagues have referred to as Rosie retrospection, which
technically means that our memory for this bounded event in
time is a lot more favorable and positive and fulfilling
(17:43):
than was the actual experience of the event itself. But
rosie retrospections aren't just memories we think back on passively.
We also use them to predict what we will enjoy
and will enjoy in the future, and that leads to
a second bias, what Lee and her colleagues call rosie prospection.
When we think about a future event, like a dinner
(18:04):
with friends or a vacation, we predict that it's going
to be great, just like similar events are in our
biased positive memories. Anticipating that event, I probably wouldn't be
thinking about the stress of going through an international airport
and the stress of I don't know packing or not
getting my bag. I'd just be thinking about, Oh, the
(18:26):
arrival and the perfect weather. The idea of rosy prospection
and retrospection fit well with what Lee experienced in her
own honeymoon, But did Lee's hypothesis match what real people
actually experience. Lee wanted to test this empirically, but she
had to locate a pretty special population of subjects. She
had to find a group of people who were about
(18:46):
to undergo a positive experience in their lives, some sort
of event that would make for a good memory. But
those people also had to be willing to fill out
a bunch of boring surveys during the event. What Lee
didn't realize at the time was that her scientific solution
to these problems would come, oddly enough, from the biking world.
Her colleague Randy Kronk was organizing a bike trip down
(19:06):
the coast of California for his students. So we thought,
oh my gosh, this is fantastic. It's like our perfect
dream study. Lee first had the students predict how much
they'd enjoy the bike trip before it started. They were asked,
how much do you agree with these statements, I'm going
to enjoy this trip, I'm going to think this vacation
is fun, I'm going to feel good during this trip,
(19:28):
and so on. Subjects were also asked the same questions
again when they were on the trip itself and after
the trip when they were on their flight back home.
So what a Lee fine. Well, before the bike trip,
subjects thought their enjoyment would be at a twenty seven
out of twenty eight total points on Lee's measure. They
thought the trip was going to be awesome, but by
the second day, subject had dropped to only a twenty
(19:51):
out of twenty eight. The biker's enjoyment stayed lower than
they had initially predicted for the entire week. But what
happened a single day after the bike tour ended, subjects
remembered their trip much better than it was. They said
their experience was a twenty six out of twenty eight.
On average, the b ER's final post trip rating was
higher than their enjoyment had actually been at any single
(20:14):
point during the trip. Now that the trip was over,
it was awesome when you ask people, oh, you have
this event coming up, how are you feeling. Oh my gosh,
it's going to be fantastic. I'm so excited. This is
going to be so pleasureful. And then during the event, Uh,
my socks are wet. I forgot to bring mosquito repellent,
you know, like so yucky, you know, the food they
(20:37):
ran out of whatever. So there's a dampening as we
called it, during the event. And then after the event, boom,
all of a sudden, the rosy retrospection kicks in, where
people are remembering the event as much more pleasureful than
they reported during the event. Itself. Now. At first glance,
(21:01):
the positive biases Lee identified may seem like a great
design feature of the mind. Rosie retrospection allows our memory
banks to be filled with extra positive, less boring recordings
of the past, and remembering all those positively edited memories
makes us feel happier, less lonely, and even more redeemed
in the present. All good stuff, really, But Lee's research
(21:22):
also reveals a major dark side to these biases are
positively skewed. Recollections aren't just passive recordings that we go
back to when we're feeling nostalgic. We also use our
memories in the present to make predictions about how we
ought to be spending our time. So if our overly
rosy memories are getting our past realities really wrong, what
does that mean for the accuracy with which we're making
(21:44):
the decisions of today. I remember distinctly having the time
of my life at I don't know what kind of
small town kind of carnival things that you go to
at night, may have these like rides and you'd eat
cotton candy, and I just remember thinking, this is my thing.
I want to go do that. Even though she's a
world expert on memory biases. Lee still sometimes falls prey
(22:08):
to the problems her own nostalgia. Well, I made the
mistake of doing that not so long ago, and I
was dizzy. I got a migraine headache. The cotton candy
was terrible, Like, how does anybody eat that stuff? Lee
naturally assumed that her fond memories of carnivals would accurately
(22:28):
predict how positively her presence self would feel if she
jumped on a roller coaster or took that first bite
of cotton candy. She assumed all the great things she
remembered about fairs of the past would feel just as
good today as they seemed in her nostalgic memories. But
Lee's overly glossy memories of the past wound up reducing
her current happiness and making her a little nauseous. Constantly
(22:51):
rewriting the past in a favorable light may make us
happier when we look back, but it also means we
don't correctly adjust to the demands of the future. For instance,
focusing on the highlights of a marriage or a job
might cause us to stay in relationships or work environments
that aren't good for us, where the bad times in
reality weigh the good. But it's not just our personal
(23:11):
choices that are led astray by our biased memories. When
we get back from the break, we'll see that there
are also societal costs to all these rosy retrospections, ones
that can be used against us when we least expected
America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes,
together we will make America great again. We'll explore this
(23:37):
dark side of nostalgia when the Happiness lab returns in
a moment. And from Colombia, and that's where I grew
up until I moved to the States eighteen years ago.
(23:57):
Nostalgia expert Felippe de Bregard's immigrant experience explains why he
relates so much to one of his favorite literary heroes,
hoof an Al Orbino, a character in Gabriel Gussia Marcus's
famous book Love in the Time of Cholera. Like Philippe,
Jouvenal made the tough decision to leave Columbia to study abroad,
but unlike Philippe, Juvenal's ignorance of his own rosy retrospections
(24:21):
never let him properly process that decision. When he's in Paris,
keep Philips extraordinarily nostalgic about going back to his hometown,
and he wants to go back, doesn't enjoy Paris, and
then when he goes back, he's not happy, Like this
is not at all how I imagine it right. Our
rosy retrospections mean that we spend the present constantly wishing
we could go back to what it was like in
(24:42):
the past. But in the rare cases where those wishes
come true, as they did for juvenal, we usually find
that those past situations aren't as good as we Rosalie
remembered to steal the eloquent words of Garcia Marquez. We
become easy victims to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia. But
the fact that our nostalgic tendencies are so easily deceived
(25:03):
also makes us easy marks for people who might want
to exploit a rosier past. And minds are so prone
to rosy retrospection that it's really simple to feed us
a good story about what things were like back in
the day. So imagine utopia that was better then than
it is now, which is why so many political movements
are keen to convince us that everything in life would
(25:24):
be peachy if we could just return to the good
old days. That was the whole Trump campaign right make
America great again, and that again was clearly an indication
that it was good before and that we should strive
to do something like in the past. Philippe saw justice
pattern in his own country's right wing propaganda, but it
attempts to end decades of political violence. I left Columbia
(25:48):
very unhappy with the political situation. Some of the most
horrible acts ever committed by a government I think in
Colombia happened during that time. But what it is very
surprising to me is that, you know, many of the
people that voted against the peace process had an extraordinarily
distorted view of how the past was, so they were
hoping to sort of go by to a kind of
(26:10):
life that never occurred in Colombia, never. This is a
situation again in which nostalgia is a very bad motivator,
and that's because the science shows that we don't just
experience nostalgia for a past that we actually experienced. Our
memories are so biased that we sometimes experience nostalgia for
a past that never even occurred, for one that we
only imagined happening. You go, like, Holy Molly, I would
(26:33):
be so much better off if I was in that
imagined situation that I never leave. I never experienced, but
I am very capable of mentally simulating relative to this
state that I am in right now, is this is
the worst possible way you're going about making decisions. So
how can we protect ourselves from the nefarious parts of nostalgia?
(26:55):
How can we get the benefits of our rosy past
without all those biased memories hurting our current decisions. Philippe
thinks one path forward is to pay attention to why
we're turning to the past in the first place. What
to our memories tell us we're missing in the present.
You might think that what you want is to go
back to high school, but really what is going to
(27:18):
satisfy the sire is to get new friends. But there's
also a second way to avoid the problems of nostalgia.
The funny thing is that it seems kind of countrituitive,
because what I think we should do is to improve
our memory of the past. We need historians really helping
us dispel the delusions that nostalgia create. I think universities
(27:40):
should hire historians. I think podcasters should interview historians. The
best way to sort of minimize the distortions of nostalgia
is to actually improve our memory. As I heard more
fully based strategies for preventing the problems of rosy retrospection,
I realized I needed to talk to someone who had
special insight into how to use our fond memories productively.
(28:02):
Not a historian or scholar, but someone whose entire career
could have been defined by the past. But isn't my
eighties idol, Rob blow Listen. I love the eighties as
much as the next guy. But when people come up
to me, the thing that I'm most proud of in
all my career is that I never know what they're
(28:25):
going to want to talk about. I love that I'm
not anchored to any one era, or to any one
TV show, or to any one movie. The eighties is
merely a fantastic chapter that a lot of people like,
including me. Unlike many stars from the eighties, Rob managed
(28:46):
not to get stuck there. Despite the fact that Rob
is himself very nostalgic, and the fact that he is,
for me at least, the absolute epitome of eighties nostalgia,
He's seamlessly managed to move beyond that decade. Nearly all
of Rob's biggest successes in movies and TV as an author,
and now even in podcasting with his new show, Literally
(29:06):
with Rob Blow. They've all come since the eighties. For
a self proclaimed lover of nostalgia, Rob hasn't let his
rosy retrospection affect his present success or his current happiness.
One of my greatest fears was always being a one
hit wonder. Four decades in, I still wake up and go, so,
(29:26):
what's Rob's secret? Well, even though he's not a psychologist,
Rob seems to have an intuitive sense that our memories
are more fallible than we realize. His unique cultural seat
in the eighties has made him all too aware that
we sometimes celebrate parts of the past that were at
the time kind of sucky. So in the eighties, everybody
shit all over the music. It seems shocking now, but like,
(29:49):
when did Journeys can't stop believe in become the national anthem?
Because I remember the eighties and people laughed at Journey
they thought they were a cheesy, hack rock band. Now
that's every college campus frat party. Raise your beers, start
crying and dancing song. It's the end of the Sopranos.
(30:10):
If you'd have told me in nineteen eighty four that
that was the song. I would have said, no way. Well,
it's easy for all of us to misremember the past.
That's a luxury that people who've lived in the public
eye don't always have. Rob's problems with substance addiction and
sex scandals are common knowledge, and that means that Rob
has had to be honest with himself about the harmful
(30:31):
actions he engaged in as a young man. It's made
him penitent and more clear eyed about the past. Rob's
also gotten a newfound perspective on the challenges of teenage
life as a father to his own boys, Matthew and John.
Rob's kids never became huge teen movie stars like their dad.
Watching Matthew and John grew up with more run of
the mill adolescent milestones has made Rob realized just how
(30:55):
odd his own experience was. My son is eighteen, Okay,
so now he's world famous. That kid right there, eighteen
world famous, and it just takes my breath away. I'm like,
I wouldn't wish that on that eighteen year old kid.
He's never home, he's on the road, he's making tons
(31:16):
of money, and it's like, I can't believe it happened
to me. But Rob's biggest insight comes from something we
talk about a lot on this podcast. To be fully happy,
we need to get out of the past long enough
to make the most of the present moment. When you
think about happiness, do you think it's more about looking
back looking forward, a combination of both, Like how do
you think about it in your own life? It's not
(31:38):
looking forward and not looking back. Although we've been talking
about nostalgia, which doesn't make me happy, obviously, really happy,
true happiness is being present in this moment and your
mind's not telling you, hey, you know what you should
really be doing, you should be doing X, Y and Z,
or hey, you know you should really go back. None
(31:58):
of that monkey brain part of yourself is shut off,
and you are fully present in whatever you are doing
and content with that. That is the finition of true
happiness for me. This insight into the importance of making
sure he's living in the present moment came from one
of the hardest one battles of Rob's life. I I've
(32:19):
been sober now thirty years and it changed my life.
And one of the big tenets of recovery is learning
to live in the now and learning to be happy
with what's in front of you to the extent that
I'm able to do that on a daily basis, is
a direct correlation to how happy I am at any
given time. Nostalgia can be a pleasant experience, but our
(32:42):
memories of the past can also hurt our present selves
if we're not careful. But when we take a present focus,
when we learn to be content with what's in front
of us, when we recognize that we want to remember
what's going on in the here and now as happily
as possible, we can avoid the problems that come with
an extra rosy retrospection. Rob's living proof that understanding our
minds biases can help us appreciate our past and even
(33:05):
dig into all that yummy and psychologically beneficial nostalgia without
the drawbacks. When we notice what we're longing for in
the past, we can choose not to go backwards, but
decide how to move forward in the future. Rob taught
me that an accurate sense of the pros and cons
of the past can be a helpful way to enjoy
and make the most of the present, which was really
good news for me because I really really wasn't ready
(33:28):
to throw away my eighties playlist just yet. In fact,
after chatting with Rob, I think it's time for a
long classic eighties movie marathon and maybe some cheesy music
videos because I definitely still want my MTV. But not
(33:51):
to worry, because I'll be back from my retrofest just
in time for the next episode of The Happiness Lab
with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co
written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was
(34:11):
composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering
by Evan Biola. Joseph Friedman checked our facts, Sophie Crane
mckibbon edited our scripts, and Pete not and help with production.
Special thanks to mil LaBelle, Carlie mcgliori, Heather Faine, Julia Barton,
Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
(34:33):
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
and NAT Doctor Laurie Santos.
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