#353： Nostalgia — Its Benefits and Downsides
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Clay Rutledge takes us deep into the psychology of nostalgia and discusses the benefits and drawbacks of nostalgia, as well as the potential dangers of trying to feel nostalgic for time periods we didn't even experience ourselves.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast now picture this
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you're sitting in your car mindlessly staring off in the distance when a memory from your
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childhood pops into your mind could be anything christmas playing catch with your dad whatever
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initially thinking about this memory makes you feel pretty happy but then you start
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feeling kind of sad if you experience that feeling of happiness tinged with sadness when remembering
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something you've experienced nostalgia my guest today is a psychologist who has spent his career
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researching this oft overlooked emotion his name is clay rutledge and he's professor of psychology at
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the north dakota state university and today on the show clay takes us deep into the psychology of
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nostalgia we begin by discussing what exactly nostalgia is what it feels like and what induces
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nostalgic feelings clay then delves into the benefits of nostalgia such as alleviating depression
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and loneliness and providing meaning in your life we then get into the downsides of nostalgia trying
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to feel nostalgic too much and how to avoid that we end our conversation discussing why we can feel
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nostalgic for time periods we didn't even experience ourselves and the possible benefits of that type of
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nostalgia after the show's over you'll be wanting to bust out old photo albums to take a trip down
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memory lane and after you've done that check out our show notes at aom.is slash nostalgia
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clay rutledge welcome to the show thanks for having me so you are a psychologist who has spent a lot of time
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researching nostalgia which is you know you don't see a lot of papers about nostalgia you see a lot
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about like the big five right or things like that but so what got you researching the psychology of
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nostalgia so when i was in graduate school i was really more broadly interested in how humans navigate
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time but what i mean by that is compared to other animals we have this unique capacity for temporal
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thoughts so we can think about the past we can think about the future we can run different sorts
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of simulations about these different points in time and so i was just broadly interested in you know
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the implications of being an animal that has to grapple with the awareness of time and in fact most of my
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work or a lot of it i should say has focused on the ability to think about the future and the
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implications of that especially the existential implications of being able to think about
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future mortality and so when i was in graduate school doing this work i was actually working on
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a chapter for a book on temporal consciousness with my phd advisor and we started toying around with
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how people use the past you know how they reflect on the past which we do in many ways of course but
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what seemed really interesting to us was this possibility that people have this ability to think
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about the future and that can be exciting of course because we can think about goals and things we're
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looking forward to but it can also be threatening because it's a reminder of our vulnerability and
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frailty and so then we started thinking well maybe people actually turn to the past as a way
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to combat some of their insecurities and worries about the future and and particularly that they
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you know they might bring to mind nostalgic memories that make them feel warm and safe and meaningful
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as a way to cope with some of their anxieties about future concerns and so really that you know that's
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how i got into it was not just a fixation on nostalgia but just more broadly how people
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kind of deal with being um temporal and and ultimately existential animals yeah i'd love to
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talk about that idea of thinking about our temporal future but let's talk about this nostalgia all right
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so i think we've we all can describe nostalgia we've all experienced it so in your research how
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how do you guys describe nostalgia because with with psychology i think it really you have to get
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more precise besides just oh i have this like fond memory so what exactly how do you describe
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nostalgia and how is it different from say just remembering any other memory from your past
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that's an excellent distinction because when we first started doing this you know we actually
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wanted to see if our you know kind of more theoretical or scholarly conception of nostalgia did in fact
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align with more lay you know conceptions of nostalgia you know and this becomes important for a number of
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reasons but you know the dictionary definition to start is that nostalgia is a sentimental or wistful
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longing for the past and when we look at nostalgia we often define it in that way so in some of the
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studies we've done for example we provide if we're going to ask people to bring to mind and detail and
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nostalgic memory we often provide them with that dictionary definition beforehand just to get you know just
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to get a sense that you know everyone kind of knows where we're coming from but we've also you know you
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know done a number of studies looking at lay or you know just more common conceptions of nostalgia and they
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converge quite nicely with this more scholarly approach and in a nutshell i would say the consensus
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seems to be that nostalgic memories are these are these memories that people find particularly
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meaningful or sentimental and what distinguishes them from from more ordinary memories seems to be
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that that potency of meaning so you can ask people for example to say hey think about a happy memory or
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positive memory or sad memory or an ordinary memory from your past and sometimes they'll bring to mind a
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memory that would also you know constitute nostalgia they can distinguish the two and you can find
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distinctions when you have when you more surgically tell people to specifically think of a nostalgic
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memory it does something a little bit different than if you just say hey think about a happy or
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pleasant memory yeah i think one of the ways you found a lot of people describing is like it's feeling
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both sad and happy about the memory yeah yeah yeah so that's a good point because if you say just think
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of a happy memory or a positive memory a lot of times that'll be somewhat superficially positive so you
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can imagine you know lots of things just being positive memories like oh i went to the movies or ate a piece
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cake um but what seems to distinguish nostalgia in part is this more what we call emotional ambivalence
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memories which is there's this tinge of sadness or loss and that's part of what i think makes nostalgia
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memories special is they're not just ordinary everyday happy events right there might be little things
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that you enjoy every day but nostalgia seems to be more of those momentous or meaningful memories and
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oftentimes you know the people you know don't don't really think about this a lot of times these more meaningful
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memories have this this tinge of uh of negative affect or negative emotion in them because they're
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so special um because you know meaningful memories are often complex and because you know when we think
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about them where we're aware of that you know that sense of how these are these are rare it's kind of
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special events right and then also i mean the word nostalgia it comes from greek which meant homesickness so
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you're kind of feeling like this longing for home which could be the past in this case yeah definitely
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i mean there is this there is this sense of you know something that you're that you're longing or you
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know that you're longing for as opposed to just something that is just more kind of superficially
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like transiently pleasurable right you know you talked to about the history of nostalgia there was a time
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and sort of the history of psychology where nostalgia was seen as a sickness like that's not a good thing
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to have was it because they didn't really fine-tune nostalgia and they were just they were you know
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conflating it with some other like just like a sadness i mean what was going why did they think
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nostalgia was bad at some point in the history of psychology so there's a couple of possibilities i mean
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you know to start it's a little bit difficult often to do these sort of historical
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analyses because you know we're not there and we don't know exactly so we're you're doing almost like
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a forensic sort of analysis of text and you know writing and what we think you know people were
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were thinking at the time but there seems to be a couple possibilities that you touched on one
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and that is that you know they were just an oversimplification of this idea of homesickness
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and so what people were doing is they were conflating the these negative emotional and distressing
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you know feelings that people were having that might have actually you know i'm sure we'll touch on
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this later might have actually triggered or instigated nostalgia as a coping resource you know
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conflating that with the actual nostalgia memory which might actually have been the response to
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those to those negative states so that's you know that's one possibility is you know in modern
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science we would you know we use words like the difference between correlation and causation for
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instance are these negative feelings correlated with nostalgia um and is that why we you know that's why
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they conflated the two in addition to that you know a second possibility is that over time we have
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started to change the definition of what nostalgia is and that we started to ourselves distinguish it
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from homesickness now what i you know even if that's true and you know that could be part of the picture
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i would i would just note that that doesn't mean nostalgia is a new or recent phenomenon it just
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means that we have developed new language or we are we are approaching it conceptually differently i mean
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i think there's there's no reason to believe that nostalgia as we commonly think of it now is
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something that's emerged in you know in recent decades you know as long as our species has been an
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animal that grapples with with the awareness of time and and concerns about meaning i suspect we've
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always been nostalgic so nostalgia is sort of a wistfulness of happy memories meaningful memories
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what is like what is the content of nostalgic thoughts i mean is it pretty much the same uh in
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your that you've seen things pop up over and over again in your relation in your in your research
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yes it is so and and in fact there's been some you know some studies in recent years really looking
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cross-culturally at different nations and age groups different parts of the world suggesting that
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there is a common theme of nostalgia or common characteristics that you know populate nostalgic
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memories and they include um a heavy emphasis on social bonds or relationships so certainly you
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could have nostalgic memories that are more solitary that are you doing you know something completely by
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yourself but that would be more atypical than than a social memory that involves close others friends
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family romantic partners um so the sociality of nostalgia seems really really big also we find that
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nostalgia often contains what you know people refer to as momentous life events so you can be
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nostalgic for anything of course even very you know even things that other people might find trivial you
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might find momentous but you do see these common cultural themes about rites of passage like graduation
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you know kind of religious traditions and getting married for instance having children and you also see
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themes related to holidays or you know these kind of cultural rituals are are big and of course a lot of
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these things also implicate the social nature that i just touched on so momentous life events seem to be a big part
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of it and also a self-focus and and what i mean by that is nostalgic memories at least when we talk about
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personal nostalgia um are are seen through the lens of you as the protagonist right these are your memories
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right so you the self plays a central role in them which doesn't take away from the social aspect i mean
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people tend to see social versus self as being in opposition but that's not true at all because a lot of the
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a lot of the things we do in life of course involve us thinking about our primary role in them but they
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still implicate relationships and finally i would say nostalgic memories are sort of populated by
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this what we call a redemptive sequence you know events that have a redemptive sequence and so that
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where the negative and positive elements come in a little bit more is that a lot of times nostalgic
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memories involve some sort of hardship or loss or pain or difficulty or uncertainty that is subsequently
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that you subsequently triumph over and so they're really kind of these redemptive stories which
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again kind of distinguishes them from other other memories so you said you mentioned that uh the content
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of our nostalgic thoughts are or there's a lot of relationships and the self but like what happened
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what's going on when people are nostalgic for a period of time that they didn't even exist right like
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people like i watch you know it's a wonderful life and you're like oh i wish i could go back to
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then and when i live in fictional bedford falls when everything was great um and if you it's the same
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sort of nostalgic feeling that i have when i think about my own childhood so what's going on there when
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you're nostalgic for a era that you didn't even experience yourself so one thing to you know to start
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with is that i think it's important to distinguish um a lot of what i've been talking about which we
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would call personal nostalgia from what you're now referencing which we would call historical
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nostalgia and the two can have some some overlap and and and we can get into that but you know a lot
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of the research we've done has been on these like personal memories that are from your own life
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experiences so there is this other phenomenon of historical nostalgia which is exactly what you know
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which is an affinity towards some aspects or periods of the past that you know may have been long
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before you were ever born and i you know and i certainly think there is some something about that
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that's that's distinct but i also think it sort of builds on the same psychological scaffolding
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as personal nostalgia for you know just for uh you know a quick example you can imagine um you know
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like you said being nostalgic for for the for certain movies or ideas that were long before you were born
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but if you extract the themes out of out of that they might connect in meaningful ways to your own
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to your own life experiences and the way you became introduced to those historical ideas might have
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important personal connections as well so i know that i have some nostalgia for for older movies
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that i experienced for the first time with either you know older relatives or or my father and so
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there is still this connection to my own personal life experiences but they were introduced to me
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these older ideas were introduced to me by people that i you know people from my own life and you know
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an interesting possibility is that these forms of historical nostalgia are part of what connect us culturally
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across time and our ability to weave these into our own personal memories and personal life narratives
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might help be you know part of what connects us to to older generations i think you know another good
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example if this seems a little a little abstract is like my son who wasn't born until 2001
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has a lot of interest in movies from the 1980s and so we've you know particularly kind of action you know the action movie genre so i've
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shown him everything from rambo to terminator to you know to aliens to to rocky to the rocky movies and all
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these action movies predator you know all these action movies from the 80s that were way before he was born
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and he really really likes them and there are themes that are just enduring that you know a lot of
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teenage boys like violent action movies but i have no doubt too that part of that will be a connection
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with me as he gets older you know he'll be thinking well i gotta watch that stuff with my dad and that was
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and that was really cool so i do think there is this blending between the historical and the personal if
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if that makes sense no it makes perfect sense because like i i'm i don't think it nostalgic for
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like the world war ii era and it's probably because both my grandfathers fought in world war ii and so
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as a kid they showed me their pictures from the war that was my so that's my connection to that era
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yeah yeah no definitely and you know and also a lot of you know just kind of fashion either fashion
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trends or certain um certain ideas that you might you might like the the the peak time of those ideas
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might have been you know in times past before you're aborted so you know that can be part of it
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too is you just happen to have a particular hobby or a particular area of interest like say you're
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interested in muscle cars for whatever reason you might say well there was a period that was sort of
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the peak for that time but my guess is a lot of times certainly not always i'm sure but my guess
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is a lot of times if you dug a little bit deeper you would find a personal link so maybe you your dad
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had a muscle car and you just thought that was really cool like he was the greatest like or he showed
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like you said he showed you picture you know your grandparents or somebody showed you pictures from
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they were from when they were young so i think a lot of times even though we feel sort of
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disconnected personally from historical events there is a real family or social connection
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somewhere you know somewhere beneath beneath the surface so you've done research and found that
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nostalgia is something that's not just unique to people living in western industrialized countries
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it's it's cross-cultural you also did research on sort of trying to figure out how we feel
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nostalgically at different times in our life i'm curious are there certain points in our life where we feel
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more nostalgic or less nostalgic so this is a question that certainly needs a lot more data to be
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appropriately answered we do have you know one you know one data set that provides some suggestive
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hits now let me start by saying the differences between age groups aren't large so what we find is in
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in general across across age people are nostalgic there are individual differences you know which i'm
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sure we'll talk about that because there is kind of a personality trait related to nostalgia but people of all
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ages seem to regularly engage in nostalgia now that being said you know you know i was hinting at this
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potential interesting small difference we have some preliminary evidence that
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nostalgia may you know nostalgia may be higher among um young adults and then you know some people in
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their 20s for instance and then kind of start to decrease slightly in middle age and then begin to
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increase in again as people get older and in one possibility and i you know i say this with caution because
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we don't know for sure one possibility is that this is somehow mapping on to you know kind of normal
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trends um across the life kind of lifespan trends and so what i mean by that is when you're a young adult you
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have a lot of uncertainty right you're trying to figure out what to do you're trying to you know
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potentially find a mate become more of an adult and you know be independent and with that uncertainty
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might provoke a more longing for nostalgia as a way to you know kind of regulate these you know these
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experiences now once you settle into middle age and again this is just a simplification people differ
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obviously you might expect more of a period of stability right you have a job you have a career
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you're doing your thing you have a family you're you know you're just plugging away and so you might
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need nostalgia less and then as you start to get a little bit older you're starting to have life
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transitions again either it's retirement or you know of course eventually people start to you start to
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lose family members and parents and and friends um there are other experiences in life as you as you
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get old in terms of declining declining health so that's just one possibility is that trends and
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nostalgia across age somehow follow trend general lifespan trends and just what we would call
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discontinuity yeah i can see that like in my own this is anecdotal this is i'm throwing in some
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anecdotal evidence into the the mix here but like yeah i read as a young adult i'd get really
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like the christmas spirit right it's very nostalgic uh now as like i'm a 30 something dad of kids like
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i don't like i don't feel that much at the holidays and you're like i just got to get through this
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because there's a lot to do yeah um and i always try to like i'm gonna like i'm gonna i'm gonna
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recapture that feeling somehow and i never can um so i guess i have to wait until i'm in my 60s or 70s
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well you know again that's a good anecdote um and i you know i think there's truth to that but what i
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would also add is and the reason i think these trends might be really really small of is because of
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course anytime you just look broadly and say something as broad as across the lifespan
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within that is a whole host of different experiences that are you know completely
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diverse and so just as you might say well these are general general cohort trends you would also
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predict using that same um that same reasoning that as any individual personally experiences
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distress or discontinuity or change in life they you know might um ratchet up their own
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nostalgia so for instance you can imagine you know being 40 and saying hey you know i'm actually
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a lot more nostalgic than maybe i would have been because i just got a divorce or i just you know or
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i just lost a parent or something like that and it's triggered this this compensatory effort to
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revisit meaningful past memories and you know to reflect on these things that give me some sense of
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stability that i know who i am so i think it's definitely more surgical to focus on the individual
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level than it is the broader cohort level but still at that that lifespan piece i think is is
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interesting and there's some and it might help us understand some general trends you know across age
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so you've kind of been referencing this throughout while you were talking explain giving your answers
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but like why do we experience nostalgia right like there's you know we know kind of have an idea of why
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we experience happiness why we experience sadness so why do we have this feeling a sort of mixed
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sadness and happiness for the past what do you think's going on there based on your research
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based on my research well first i'll say that you know nostalgia is compared to happiness and sadness
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it's what we call a complex self-relevant emotion so it's not just a simple you know simple
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positive or negative affect that's you know as we've discussed it has this more
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you know ambivalent and complex signature emotional signature and what you know what we found is there
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there seems to be at least two general classes of what we'd call triggers of nostalgia or
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reasons that people become nostalgic one is just kind of simple sense what we call sensory inputs
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which and these are just the reminders of the past that you experience so certain times of year you
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might get that you know experience the sensation of all the weather's changing and i'm starting and
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all that reminds me of when i was a kid right or i smell you know there's a certain food you know a
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certain type of smell that you know that reminds me of things from my childhood or in music would be a
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big sensory input right i heard this song on the radio from when i that was you know one of my favorite
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songs in high school and it brings me back so those are what we call very direct you know triggers of
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nostalgia and you know that seems totally obvious what i find more fascinating is the second class
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of triggers which we call psychological threats and i think that's more interesting because one it's
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less obvious and two it really starts to reveal nostalgia's psychological functions and and so what
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we find is people are more likely to feel nostalgic in times in which they're experiencing negative
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emotions particularly uh emotions relevant to social to social issues and issues of meaning so when
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people feel lonely they become more nostalgic and you know before i mentioned the correlation versus
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causation angle and this is one of the things that we've tried to address is to distinguish
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you know correlation from causation so we've now done a number of experiments to and demonstrated that
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it is in fact negative emotions that trigger nostalgia as opposed to nostalgia triggering
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negative emotions so when you induce sadness in the laboratory or you induce negative affect in the
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laboratory you find that people subsequently feel more nostalgic when you induce a feeling of social
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exclusion or ostracism or loneliness in the laboratory you find that people subsequently feel more
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nostalgic when you induce some sense of meaninglessness or you know provoke people to question the meaningfulness
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of their life they they subsequently respond with a heightened sense of nostalgia so the second class
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of triggers seems to be these negative psychological states that people are turning nostalgia to as a way to
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regulate you know negative emotions and experiences so on the psychological triggers is the nostalgia just serving as a
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balm right just like helping you feel better because you're sad or does it actually cause people to
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take action to improve their situation right so like you feel lonely okay i feel nostalgic for the time in high
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school and i had friends and everything was great that can that can just you could just settle there like i feel
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better you don't do anything about it or does nostalgia actually okay let me do something now so i can have
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friends now that's actually been one of the most surprising and interesting developments in the
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research i think because originally to be honest i thought it was the former that nostalgia just kind
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of made you feel good so and that and that has value in itself right so you feel you're experiencing
00:28:15.740
loneliness or a feeling of rejection or meaninglessness and so you you kind of retreat to these memories in
00:28:21.320
the past that make you feel good and it just and that's an and that and that might be beneficial
00:28:26.860
right because if you feel good then you might be then there might be something else that comes
00:28:33.340
into play that you're you know you're sort of more motivated to to pursue as just as a function of
00:28:40.000
getting a mood boost and that's what you know that was kind of the original thinking is nostalgia just
00:28:44.600
restores these these positive feelings or reduces these negative feelings but then what we found
00:28:51.020
more recently and i think is is is very fascinating is that nostalgia didn't just make people feel good
00:28:58.860
it actually mobilizes them or motivates them and so it's kind of changed my my thinking on nostalgia
00:29:07.020
because i used to see nostalgia as this very past focused experience right after all you're thinking
00:29:13.300
about thinking about the past so it seems like you're kind of retreating backwards into the past to feel
00:29:18.720
better about the present but i think a better description based on some of our recent research
00:29:23.920
is nostalgia is you pulling the past to the present not you retreating to the past like you you're
00:29:29.740
pulling the past to the present as a way to energize or mobilize yourself and so we've now you know
00:29:35.540
published a number of studies showing that when people feel nostalgic they actually indicate and
00:29:41.700
behaviorally demonstrate a greater interest in meeting new people of trying new things of being
00:29:48.660
more helpful to others feeling more energetic feeling more youthful and so there does it does seem to
00:29:55.780
be the case that nostalgia isn't just a way to sort of kind of restore your feelings it does seem to have
00:30:04.160
motivational power so you mentioned earlier this idea of self-continuity what is that first and then how
00:30:11.700
does nostalgia help with that so self-continuity is the sense that even though i of course change
00:30:19.540
over time right i have different life experiences and i grow and develop that i have some sense of i'm
00:30:26.020
i have a state you know i have some stable sense itself that i'm you know at some deeper level i'm the
00:30:30.940
same person i've always been as opposed to i don't have any like stable sense itself and i'm all over the place
00:30:38.640
there seems to be you know some positive psychological benefits to having some sense
00:30:44.980
of this sort of stability of self across time or kind of connection to self across time and so the
00:30:51.360
way nostalgia boosts this the self continuity is it seems to be a way that people can bring to mind
00:30:58.080
these experiences in life and weave them into a meaningful personal self-story or self-narrative
00:31:03.720
that help that helps them feel like they have some kind of authentic or enduring you know
00:31:08.640
sense of self regardless of what what happens or regardless of what happens to them in life
00:31:15.440
gotcha and i thought the really interesting section this is what kick-started your your entire research
00:31:20.760
about nostalgia is that nostalgia and sort of existential meaning right um so what is it about
00:31:28.620
you know feeling that existential angst right like my life is meaningless that you know makes people
00:31:35.460
nostalgic or and what causes people to you know some people to be nostalgic while others like they
00:31:40.480
go into the void like they look into the abyss and they never come back so what's the difference
00:31:45.800
between those two types of people yeah that that second question is is really is really interesting so
00:31:52.120
first you know i'll you know i'll say that life is full of experiences that you know kind of challenge
00:32:00.020
or our sense of of meaning i mean you know uh we all experience loss and suffering and the world feels
00:32:09.040
unfair and ultimately regardless of all the things we do to navigate the you know life even if we have
00:32:17.320
even best case scenario we know that ultimately we're going to get older frailer weaker
00:32:22.100
everyone we love is going to die and so are we um and so at the general level nostalgia
00:32:27.780
seems to be a way that people you know can kind of build the storehouse of meaning a warehouse of
00:32:33.940
meaning and you know our bank of meaning and when people are experiencing these states that you know
00:32:40.220
these are these life events that sort of question the meaningfulness or cause them to you know to
00:32:46.460
think about the potential meaninglessness of their existence they can withdraw from the bank
00:32:52.000
these meaningful memories and be like oh yeah but i've had these events in life and and so i know
00:32:57.260
i've despite what's going on now or despite what what's going to happen to me i've had good experiences i've
00:33:03.720
had my you know i've had my my meaning um and so that seems to be that seems to be important not just
00:33:11.460
for allowing people to take some perspective about what's meaningful in their life but also you know
00:33:17.300
touching on a previous point about motivation it seems to be kind of an experience that that
00:33:24.520
instigates the you know kind of further efforts for meaning and what i mean by that is you can imagine
00:33:30.540
say well like life feels meaningless right now and that challenges your sense of confidence right
00:33:37.140
and then you think back nostalgically and you're like yeah but i've had all these successes and
00:33:42.760
great experiences in my life that made me feel meaningful and if i had them back then even
00:33:48.360
though i'm going through a hard time right now maybe i can have them again so nostalgia seems to
00:33:53.020
boost your existential confidence too that you can you know that you what you might be going through
00:33:59.940
right now is tough but there's there's going to be future opportunities um for meaning we you know
00:34:06.040
sometimes we refer to this as as anticipatory nostalgia which is a lot of times we plan we
00:34:13.180
have goals and ideas that we're we're hoping for in the future because we know that we had meaningful
00:34:19.360
versions of them in the past i think vacations is a is a very good example so you might be there
00:34:24.800
might be things on your bucket list that you really really want to do right and you want to do them in
00:34:29.600
part because you think they'll be meaningful like oh i've always wanted to you know to go to
00:34:34.780
yellowstone or to you know go to alaska or whatever it is that you that you that you want to do
00:34:40.860
but part of the reason you think that might be meaningful is because at some level you can you have
00:34:47.460
memories from your past that you had you know you might have not done those exact same things but
00:34:51.560
you remember hey i remember when my parents took us here and that was really awesome and that was
00:34:56.280
really special and now i want to recreate that or make a new version of that and so i think that
00:35:01.460
that's how nostalgia helps us deal with the existential meaninglessness uh issue that's
00:35:07.280
like that's why i stress myself out every christmas because i'm like i'm creating memories here people
00:35:12.020
that is the but you're touching on an important i think an important issue that we need we need to
00:35:18.360
think about which is you can overdo it right or you can fixate too much on the importance of something
00:35:25.960
that robs you of just living and enjoying the more experiential component of it so i do think there
00:35:33.460
are some you know it's not just the case that this is always positive right we have to we have to think
00:35:38.360
about that that's the that's the message of christmas vacation with jerry chase right try too hard so
00:35:44.760
yeah so what causes some people to you know go to nostalgia as a as a way to as a reservoir for this
00:35:51.980
existential void while others don't do that and they you know might go to a really really bad place
00:35:57.480
yeah so i think there's a few a few possibilities one is we know that their nostalgia does have trait
00:36:05.240
like characteristics and what i mean about that is just like some people are more neurotic than others
00:36:10.500
and some people are more extroverted than others um some people are more nostalgic than others so there
00:36:16.080
is just kind of a stable personality characteristic of nostalgia that people vary on like
00:36:21.500
all of us can experience nostalgia and have some understanding of it but some of us are more
00:36:28.160
nostalgic than others and so that seems to be um one dimension which is some people just um and it's
00:36:35.380
not to say that the people who aren't nostalgic are gonna just retreat to the void experience you know
00:36:39.520
embrace the void um but but it might indicate um that nostalgia is not is not as likely of a strategy
00:36:48.240
for them when they're grappling with meaning they might turn to other things for meaning but maybe
00:36:52.420
not as much nostalgia so that's one part of it um another part of it is i think just individual
00:36:58.700
differences and and people's um personal comfort with you know the the void so to speak so there does
00:37:06.480
seem to you know one of the other areas of research i'm i'm involved in right now is looking at
00:37:11.940
individual differences in the need for meaning now at some level like just like the need to belong
00:37:18.880
or you know our social needs everyone has some you know some level of need for meaning everyone needs
00:37:25.360
to feel important and that their life has some kind of value or purpose at some level but that people
00:37:30.640
also seem to differ differ on this some people are really really high in this need some of the research
00:37:36.260
that you know some of the recent research we've done on this suggests for instance that people that are
00:37:40.740
high in need for meaning tend to be more religious and how and hold more supernatural beliefs for example
00:37:47.260
and so one possibility is that you know there are just some people that are more comfortable with the
00:37:54.520
idea that there is no ultimate meaning or there is no true true meaning beyond the meaning that i might
00:38:02.240
make and so some people just might be more comfortable um you know or might be find it less distressing
00:38:08.340
to look into the void now the third thing that you know third and final thing i'd note which you
00:38:13.600
touched on a little bit too is that's distinct from from meaningless that might be um bad for people's
00:38:23.180
mental health as you know as you kind of hinted at because some people might stare into the void and be
00:38:27.740
like hey my life is meaningless whatever i there's still a new star wars movie coming out i still like
00:38:34.920
you know i still like starbucks and you know then you know some people just might be a little bit more
00:38:40.240
comfortable with that right right but i think the problem is a lot of people aren't and if they don't
00:38:45.860
have you know i'd say the majority of people aren't you know in fact i think it's a very small percentage
00:38:51.400
of the population that's probably fully able to embrace without any real um psychological distress the you know
00:39:02.140
the the total potential and significance of their existence um so for everyone else who who um who
00:39:11.140
isn't like that who wants meaning if you know if not nostalgia or if not something else i mean there
00:39:15.240
are people do experience one of the predictors of the depression is a lack of meaning one of the
00:39:21.280
predictors of suicide is a lack of meaning one of the predictors of addiction and other forms of
00:39:27.760
of risky and problematic behavior is the feeling that life is life is um meaningless so there does
00:39:35.140
seem to be this kind of pathological component of a lack of meaning um and i don't know you know i don't
00:39:40.840
know what the answer is um for those people um because we largely haven't studied nostalgia from that kind
00:39:50.860
of more clinical perspective we've studied that as more just a normal life experience and and that
00:39:55.440
actually touches on an important issue um that i like to bring up a lot and i think we need to do a
00:40:00.980
better job of of of being transparent about in psychology which is it's a lot easier to identify
00:40:07.560
and study phenomena or people or experiences as they naturally exist and and then to kind of
00:40:15.420
experimentally move that around a little bit just to understand a phenomena like nostalgia it's a lot
00:40:21.240
harder to develop interventions that can dramatically change people if that makes sense yeah that makes
00:40:28.980
sense um you also highlight research that nostalgia can actually have physiological response i mean i've
00:40:35.240
seen this research before where they'll go to a nursing home and they'll make the nursing home pretty
00:40:40.060
much look like how it looked when the residents were in their prime in their 20s and like instead of
00:40:46.600
shuffling the old people like they get a little pep in their step so i mean that's another benefit but
00:40:50.980
i'm curious in your research have you found any like is there a dark side to nostalgia like we've been
00:40:55.720
talking about the benefits are there any downsides to experiencing nostalgia so i think there certainly
00:41:00.360
are possible downsides one would be an over use of nostalgia now we don't really we haven't really
00:41:08.820
figured this out in terms of research but it you know it seems to be you know pretty obvious
00:41:16.100
at some level that almost anything that's good for you or can be bad for you or almost anything
00:41:22.560
that's good for you can be bad for you right so you know use the parallel use the parallel example
00:41:27.540
of exercise like everyone would say hey exercise is good for you but we know you know that people
00:41:32.260
some people over exercise or compulsively exercise and so you know i'd say similarly if you are
00:41:39.700
if you're so fixated on nostalgia that it's preventing you from living in you know the present or engaging in
00:41:51.240
other future-oriented opportunities or experiences then that would be you know that would be a problem
00:41:59.260
in addition to that you know there is some some recent research on what we would call group or
00:42:06.940
collective nostalgia which you know which seems to have some positive and negative benefits and what
00:42:13.060
i mean by that is you can imagine nostalgia for a group you're part of right so um you can say hey
00:42:20.460
i have nostalgia for i have nostalgia for being an american and nostalgia for um being you know when i was in
00:42:27.560
college or something like that and that has you know that has many benefits because group level
00:42:33.620
nostalgia makes you feel connected and part of something bigger than yourself right it gives you
00:42:39.680
some commitment to your in group but the problem of course is that it also runs the risk of um
00:42:49.140
making you less um focused or less open to out groups or to you know people that aren't part of that
00:42:57.880
group and so i think one of the things that you know that warrants further investigation is the
00:43:03.980
extent to which a nostalgia can while increasing some kind of group harmony perhaps a collective
00:43:11.040
nostalgia could also um contribute to to intergroup conflict and there just isn't a lot of you know
00:43:19.060
like i said there's research on the benefits of of group nostalgia but there isn't a there isn't
00:43:23.540
really much research on the potential consequences so as i was reading your book i was thinking okay
00:43:28.760
there's a lot of these great benefits nostalgia i want i want some more nostalgia in my life have you
00:43:34.200
all found like are there ways you can i mean you've been able to induce nostalgia in the lab by making
00:43:39.360
people feel sad it's so funny that that's what you guys do we're gonna make you feel lonely and
00:43:45.960
excluded and sad so we can test this thing but are there i mean you mentioned the sort of the direct
00:43:52.060
triggers right music pictures etc i mean are there ones that you find that you know without fail
00:43:58.540
typically induce some sort of nostalgic feeling in people music seems to be really big it seemed and
00:44:04.300
you know there there might be different reasons why just from an experimental or laboratory point of
00:44:10.860
view music might be a really good induction just because people like it and it's engaging i mean a lot
00:44:16.340
of times when you do these studies in the lab you're bringing people in and you know it's not the
00:44:20.880
most interesting thing for them to do but you give them a chance to listen to music that makes them
00:44:28.720
nostalgic or oftentimes in our you know to make sure we have good controls in our control conditions
00:44:33.600
we also have them listen to music that they really really like or enjoy so it's equally engaging but
00:44:40.200
it's music that they've only recently only recently heard and so that way it's not you know it's not
00:44:45.860
associated with the past for them but that seems to be powerful you know so that just from the
00:44:50.700
engagement part of it but even beyond the laboratory i would i would propose that music is a particularly
00:44:57.540
powerful um source of nostalgia because it seems to be that all of us have or many of us have a
00:45:05.820
almost like a soundtrack to our lives um right we can think about the times from our youth in particular
00:45:13.500
where there were certain bands we liked in fact that you know there's some research on this that
00:45:19.100
people tend to favor products consumer products whether it's movies or musics that um that came
00:45:26.200
or even fashion um that came from their from their youth and that seems to be the time in which you
00:45:32.760
really start to develop these because you start to become an independent person right that's the time
00:45:37.380
when you're when you're adolescent teen and young adult that's when your identity is really forming and
00:45:42.200
you're distinguishing yourself from just being some kid in your family um you're becoming an you know
00:45:47.180
kind of an autonomous person and there's there's music associated with that right um and so for me it
00:45:53.200
would be the the you know the early 1990s right that's when i was in you know in high school and college
00:46:01.580
and so i might have a particular i like new music of uh of course but i have a particular you know
00:46:08.000
affinity towards music from the 90s who were your favorite bands from the 90s oh man you wouldn't
00:46:12.620
believe it because this is just an audio show so you can't even see it but i'm wearing a nine inch
00:46:17.400
nails shirt as we as as we speak i was a big i was a big nine inch nails man i was but i was a big um
00:46:25.420
i guess what they would what we called back then grunge and and you know alternative music so
00:46:30.940
pearl jam um sound garden allison you know i was a big allison chains fan um all those all those sorts
00:46:39.020
of band kind of rock alternative bands um you know i actually liked some and i still like um you know
00:46:45.660
kind of punk music but that was you know that kind of hit its prime um before a little bit before my
00:46:52.180
time but when i was in high school when i had you know a little bit of cash and could buy you know
00:46:58.420
cds my you know and develop my own music taste it was that you know that grunge alternative
00:47:04.600
sort of moment that's funny yeah for me it was like i listened to like ska and punk the thing is
00:47:11.480
though i don't enjoy listening to that music now as a 30 year old like i'm just like i can't no i
00:47:16.740
can't do it i've tried it i'm like i'm gonna feel nostalgic i'm gonna put in some less than jake
00:47:20.580
or some real big fish and i'm like okay no i can only do one song yeah it's so weird what do you
00:47:26.320
so what's your what do you listen to just more contemporary stuff yeah i mean the contemporary
00:47:30.520
stuff i listen to uh you know i like frank i like the pop standards like i like frank sinatra i like
00:47:35.700
i've always liked swing music sort of jazz from the 30s and 40s that's been sort of consistent from
00:47:41.620
when i was a kid until today i still like that but and then today i i do enjoy just poppy poppy pop
00:47:49.760
music pop rock music so you really are a historic when you say you're you have historical nostalgia
00:47:54.780
yeah you really do it's really weird i think and i i don't know why i think my mom might had a lot to
00:48:00.340
do with it she was you know she loved watching old movies and of course i had to watch old movies too
00:48:05.580
so it's probably because i'm nostalgic for that stuff because like that's what i grew up with
00:48:09.440
it's not because i yeah i mean i did experience it directly in an indirect way if that makes sense
00:48:14.080
yeah no i think that and you know i think that will that is an area of research that i haven't fully
00:48:19.700
jumped into but i think that that's i think that's a really really cool area i've talked about this
00:48:25.120
with some of my graduate students actually of trying to figure out this um the content the
00:48:30.260
historical continuity of nostalgia like trying to figure out a way to identify
00:48:33.960
if some of our tastes and preferences um and our nostalgia for them are linked to things that were
00:48:42.480
passed down to us from you know so if your parents listened to the beetles or the rolling stones for
00:48:49.560
instance like did that how did that influence um influence your taste i think and and and what's the
00:48:55.980
and what's the function of that i mean we're talking about music but you can imagine this in
00:48:59.980
all sorts of cultural contexts like you could imagine saying and cooking for instance we hear people
00:49:05.160
say well this is my grandma's recipe right and so i think that and oftentimes if you watch cooking
00:49:10.180
you know cooking shows or cooking documentaries which you know my wife always makes me watch
00:49:14.500
these cooking documentaries on netflix you'll see these famous chefs and they'll oh and they'll often
00:49:19.820
say yeah well when i was growing up my grandma made this or my mom made this and they might have a new
00:49:25.200
version of it but there is that um core of it and you know i think that's actually a that's actually an
00:49:31.720
important part of nostalgia that we don't think about in terms of entertainment and and and consumer
00:49:39.780
products and trends and and things like that is that a lot of times nostalgia works the best it seems
00:49:47.160
or it's the most creative when people aren't just perfectly trying to replicate something from the
00:49:52.540
past but are able to extract its core its core themes and then do something new take a new spin to it and
00:50:00.900
this happens all the time in music you can identify elements that are that are influenced by um by the
00:50:07.680
past but then they go in a new direction and i think this where you can really see this is in
00:50:11.760
in movies a lot of times in movies the difference between a nostalgia a movie that just is trying to
00:50:20.880
like bank on nostalgia in the most superficial ways oftentimes totally criticized and panned and people
00:50:27.220
hate it because they love the original so much and they just see it as a total you know people just
00:50:32.420
trying to cash in on nostalgia the movies that seem to really be able to be successful and pay
00:50:38.580
tribute or you know to the past are the ones that pull the you know pull the themes out of it that are
00:50:44.460
important and that honor and honor the past but then do something you know do something totally new
00:50:50.720
or move in a new direction right i feel like with the western genre does that really well
00:50:54.640
yeah a lot of the good modern westerns are still really good they hold up to the other one
00:50:59.240
yeah i think about you know my kids are probably going to be nostalgic for the killers because
00:51:03.060
that's what we pretty much listen to no yeah killers are great yeah i love love the killers and
00:51:07.260
they're actually doing some nostalgia like you hear some like you're listening like that's a
00:51:11.420
little bit of bruce springsteen 19 you know 80 right so it's uh they're doing the same thing
00:51:16.420
well i mean there's so much more we could talk about where can people learn more about your work
00:51:21.680
not just on nostalgia but also just the psychology of being animals that have to grapple with temporal
00:51:28.340
existence yeah so uh if you i have a website it's just clay rutledge.com so it's pretty simple
00:51:34.380
and you know i have descriptions and links to a lot of my research and and also i'm links to i've done
00:51:42.780
you know writing for you know from a number of different outlets ranging from scientific america
00:51:48.780
to the new york times to wall street journal you can see all that on my website and i i i wrote a ted ed
00:51:56.300
lesson so if you're if you want something that's like five or six minutes and you like cartoons um
00:52:02.660
i you know there's a little there's a little ted ed video i mean i think it's linked on my website so i
00:52:08.380
think that's probably the the best place to find me um i'm also on on twitter i don't you know
00:52:14.140
necessarily tweet about nostalgia per se but a lot of times about the areas of research and issues i'm
00:52:20.940
interested in fantastic well clay rutledge thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
00:52:24.160
yeah thank you it's been a pleasure for me as well i guess it was clay rutledge he is a psychology
00:52:28.800
professor at north dakota state university the author of the book nostalgia it's available on
00:52:32.680
amazon.com you can also find out more information about his work at clay rutledge.com also check out
00:52:38.560
our show notes at aom.is nostalgia where you can find links to resources we can delve deeper into this
00:52:43.740
topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and
00:52:59.780
advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy the show
00:53:03.640
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00:53:06.480
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00:53:14.020
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