Yearning for beautiful memories

As a child, George Lucas was captivated by the Flash Gordon serials he watched on TV. Those early influences continued to inspire Lucas when he ventured into filmmaking. The poor production quality of the originals frustrated him, so he longed to recreate their magic using the techniques and technology of his time.

But Lucas failed to secure the rights, and decided to create something unique that nevertheless retained the core elements of the shows that enchanted him as a child. Thus was born Star Wars: a space opera infused with the same sense of adventure, exotic worlds, and heroic battles that had enchanted him as a boy – a blend of nostalgia and innovation that came to revolutionize cinema, and that has itself become a source of nostalgia for millions.

Nostalgia is a particularly apt topic to begin Season 3 of the Beauty at Work podcast, which will be focused on the theme of yearning. We often consider nostalgia as a simple yearning for the past, an escape into comforting memories. But my latest podcast guest challenges this notion.

Dr. Clay Routledge is the Vice President of Research and Director of the Human Flourishing Lab at Archbridge Institute. He is also co-editor-in-chief of Profectus, a magazine on human progress and flourishing. Clay spent nearly two decades in academia as a professor of psychology, professor of management, and distinguished professor of business. As a leading expert in existential psychology and human motivation, Clay's work focuses on helping people reach their full potential and build meaningful lives. He is a highly cited researcher who has published more than 100 scholarly papers, co-edited three academic books, authored three books, and received numerous awards for his research and mentorship. Clay regularly advises a range of organizations, from small startups to large companies, helping them use existential psychology and behavioral science more broadly to improve their products, services, and workplace culture. His latest book is Past Forward: How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life.

In our conversation, Clay dispels misconceptions about nostalgia. He highlights how it can enhance creativity, foster social bonds, provide a deeper understanding of our past and present, and serve as a powerful tool for personal growth and innovation.

Here are five key highlights from our conversation:

1. Nostalgia is a complex emotion; it is "a cocktail of cognition, emotion, and motivation."
2. "Nostalgia pushes people towards others." It drives us towards connection.
3. Reflecting on nostalgic moments can provide valuable insights and inspiration for the future.
4. Nostalgia offers a stable sense of self, especially during times of change.
5. Nostalgia is a spiritual resource. It connects us to something larger than ourselves.

You can watch or listen to our conversation below. The audio episodes are in two parts and you can download them wherever you get your podcasts. An unedited transcript follows.

Transcript:

Brandon: Clay, thanks for joining us on the podcast. It's great to have you here.

Clay: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Brandon: Yeah, great. Well, listen, to get started — I had sent you a question to think about, which I think ties in very well to your work on nostalgia — can you think of an experience of profound beauty that comes to your mind from your childhood and something that lingers with you till today, something you might perhaps go back to from time to time?

Clay: Yeah, that's a great question because it got me thinking about kind of my lifestyle now, which is, I live out in the woods and I'm very, very — I wouldn't consider myself like a hardcore outdoors person. I don't do like a ton of camping and things like that, for instance. But I really, really value just daily walks on trails and then nature. That's just a big, that's a big part of lifestyle experience that's meaningful to me compared to — I love cities. I love urban environments too, but my preference is kind of to be out in nature as much as I can. And so that provoked me thinking about, well, I didn't really grow up doing that kind of stuff. I grew up in a fairly small city or kind of a more urban environment. Then I remembered my parents took us on this trip to Colorado when we were kids. That doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Like, you took this road trip to Colorado. So what? Well, my family didn't have a lot of money. We didn't go on a lot of vacations. Most of the vacations we did were very local or very regional. They were just what we could get to in a couple hours. And so it was kind of a big deal to pack up in the car and go on this, you know. Like, I don't know. It's probably like a 10- or 11-hour drive to Colorado from Missouri where we lived. I just remember going to, like, Pikes Peak, Garden of the Gods, these places and just being like, "Oh, I've never seen anything like this." The topography was so different than where I lived in kind of a flat area. I think that kind of stuck with me. It's like, oh, you can have these beautiful spaces, these beautiful outdoor spaces.

Then when I was really thinking about that memory more — I think this is a little bit of a hint as to maybe what we'll talk about with nostalgia — what I realized was, at the time, I didn't really care that much. Like, I was a kid. I was like, oh, this is fun. My parents were making a big production about it, but I didn't care that much. But looking back on it, now I've layered in all of my experience growing up, being an adult, having children myself, getting to choose my own lifestyle preferences, then I really started to think, oftentimes, the way nostalgia works is, it's not that moment in time itself was super impactful in the moment. It's the making sense of it, realizing that was a big deal for my parents. That actually was a big financial sacrifice. We didn't have a lot of money. And so that social component, how that connects me to people, all of that, it comes from my retrospection and making sense of it and sort of injecting it with meaning. And so, yeah, that's the memory that I think has probably influenced a lot of my current preferences, even though I hadn't really put a lot of thought up until you gave me that reason to think about it. So thank you.

Brandon: Okay. Sure, sure, yeah. Well, it's a really fascinating connection you make to that experience with your family. Because often, when people talk about connection to nature, it seems like an intrinsic relationship with just the beauty of nature and feeling maybe a sense of awe or just a sense of unity with the natural world. I think of people who maybe took that a little little too far, the Transcendentalists, people like Thoreau and Emerson. You have this sense of wanting to maybe reject urban life and really sort of value this connection to nature. And there's a kind of nostalgia there, right, to wanting a simpler way of life that maybe reflects something true about the human condition, truer than what we find in our artificially-created environments perhaps.

Clay: Yeah, so last year at the Human Flourishing Lab, we conducted this survey looking at what Americans think about the past. What was interesting about this is, we were asking people of all different generations. So the young adults, Gen Z, all the way up to older Americans. We were specifically interested in their relationship with technology. We asked them to what extent they would like to go back to a time before everyone was so plugged in to social media, for instance. And if you ask people in advance, like to make a prediction, most of us would probably say, "Well, the older people are going to be cranky and be like, oh, we need to go back and get rid of this stuff. Younger people are going to be more enthusiastic about modernity." Actually, what we found is, Gen Z was very highly nostalgic for that simpler time, before everyone was plugged in. So even though they're digital natives and it was before their own lives that they remember, there was a sense of nostalgia for a time before we were so plugged in. So I think you're absolutely right. There's something about this yearning for a simpler life where maybe people were doing more face to face, more hands on, more analog things. That seems to transcend to generations. It's not just something that older people feel. It turns out that a lot of younger people feel that way. In fact, if you look at some consumer trends, it's Gen Z that's driving a lot of the consumption of analog products, including collecting vinyl records and CDs and buying other sorts of things that maybe seem a little bit outdated now.

Brandon: Yeah, wow. I want to double click on this a little bit and get a better sense of what you think is going on. Well, let's start with maybe tell us a little bit about your own journey into the field of psychology and what drew you to that, existential psychology in particular, and then the study of nostalgia.

Clay: When I was in college, I didn't even know, I'd never even heard of existential psychology. But I became very interested in the idea of mental time travel. Even as an undergrad, I was fascinated with this idea that time is something that you can measure objectively. In fact, we have extremely precise clocks now, right? But it's also a subjective experience. We've all had this experience where time flies or time drags on. We've all had the experience of, like, we look back on our lives and we're like, "Oh, where did the time go?" And so I became fascinated with that idea, like the subjective experience of time. And really, what I was interested in is that more practical level, what are the sort of data inputs into our brain maybe that give us our sense of time? So it's very different than anything existential.

Then I went to grad school, and I kind of started doing something else. But then I came back around to this idea of time when I discovered existential psychology, particularly the writings of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. What Becker proposed is, one of the advanced cognitive capacities that distinguishes our species is our ability to introspect or their high levels of self-awareness. It's not that other organisms aren't self-aware. But we're extremely self-aware, right? Well, on top of that, we have this ability to move the self through time. So we can think about our futures, and we can think about our past. This is important for the advancement of civilization. This is key to human progress. You're a college professor. I'm sure you've had experiences where there's students in your classes that, you know. I'm sure your lectures are enthralling, and students just love to be there intrinsically. But as you know, a lot of them are there because they're able to think about the future and they're like, "I don't want to go to class at 9 AM. But in four years, I would like to have a college degree." So that's just so critical to personal growth but also human progress, the ability to think about and plan for the future.

But what Becker pointed out is that benefit, that blessing, so to speak, comes at a cost, which is our awareness of our inevitable demise. We're existentially aware that one day, we're going to die. That's really what I was interested in when I got into grad school and started thinking about time. It's our relationship with our own destiny of physical mortality and what that does to a person. I'm a psychologist, and so I was really interested in the psychological effects, like anxiety. And it's true. Some people have extreme existential anxiety because of these concerns. Most of us don't though. Most of us get up every day. We move forward. We even take risks and do all sorts of bold things despite the fact that we know that we could be killed at any moment for any reason, for reasons we can't predict or control. And so how do we navigate that space? Well, according to Becker and then a bunch of other researchers following that, we invest in systems of meaning. Right? It helps us to feel like, "Well, yeah, I'm just a speck of dust in the cosmos, but I can be part of something bigger. I can have a meaningful impact on the world." So my initial exploration into existential psychology started very much focused on time but on what are the implications of being an organism capable of imagining the future. Then that kind of led to, oh, well, if we can imagine, if we think about the future, we also think about the past. Maybe those two things are connected. Maybe the fears and uncertainties and anxieties we have about the future provoked us to look to the past for comfort and perhaps even guidance.

Brandon: Yeah, that's great. And so, yes, that makes sense that you would look at nostalgia, I suppose, as looking to the past perhaps to pacify our anxieties in the present. Yeah, I was really surprised to see one of your findings on how it's not simply a matter of, you know, a kind of coping mechanism for the present but even a planning resource for the future. Before we go there though, could you talk a little bit about how you as a psychologist conceptualize nostalgia? Because a lot of people think of nostalgia as just sort of, like kind of a wistful longing, right? You're yearning for times past, often pleasant experiences from the past. How is that different from what you're looking at, or how is it similar to what you're looking at?

Clay: So the concept of nostalgia, you can actually think about it in a lot of different ways. Most of my work as a psychologist is focused on what we'd call autobiographical nostalgia or personal nostalgia. These are your personal memories and your relationship with them. We can get into the yearning and the affective component of that. But just real quick, you can also think about nostalgia beyond the individual self. So there's a concept that we call collective nostalgia, which is, I have my own personal memories, but I'm also a social and cultural organism that's part of a larger world. And to that extent, there are things that happen that we share collectively that we might have a yearning for even. And this is what I think it gets really cool. That can even lead into what's referred to as historical nostalgia, which you can feel nostalgic for a time before you were born. And you see this a lot, of course, with aesthetic preferences. People like certain fashions or architecture, music even for times before they were around. So there's all sorts of different ways to take nostalgia outside of this, beyond the self, and connect it to the broader world in our history.

But really, what most of my research has focused on is the personal nostalgia. The way we conceptualize that is, you can think of nostalgia as really a cocktail of cognition, emotion, and then I would add motivation. And so cognition. Nostalgia involves our memories. These are our autobiographical memories. And so when we feel nostalgic, we often bring to mind certain types of experiences. We've cataloged these. Now we've done probably — we've actually probably had tens of thousands, if not more, narrative collections from people all over the world. We're just asking them to share with us their nostalgic memories. And so we have kind of a sense of what the prototypical types of memories are, what types of memories people tend to be nostalgic about. Of course, there's great variability as a function of culture, age, gender, all those things. But there is a common sort of understanding of nostalgia, which I can get into that. So that's the cognitive.

But then there's the emotional part which is like nostalgia is a bittersweet, emotional experience. So it is happy memory. We do tend to think about things that were good times. Just like humans like stories of drama. Like if you go to a movie, for instance. If the movie was just two hours of pure, going from strength to strength, like pure hours, two hours of joy and just people winning, it's actually not a very good movie. A good movie is one where there's triumph over tragedy, where maybe people or things are going well but they have a major barrier or setback. They get knocked down. Then you get to see their character. You get to see their resilience. You get to see them grow, learn from mistakes. So our nostalgic memories are often like that. They can even be things that at the time were really stressful, but later we look back on and we're like, "Oh, well, yeah, even though at that Thanksgiving dinner we were fighting, my mom was really stressed out because there's something got burned or whatever, we also laughed. That was a really meaningful time together. Actually, it turns out that was the last time I got to see grandpa," or something like that. So there's this cocktail of sadness, loss, but also with appreciation, gratitude, joy. So there's that emotional complexity.

Then I would add a motivational component, which gets to that yearning point that you're talking about. It's like we don't just bring to mind the cognitions, the memories and reflect on them neutrally. They're emotional. In addition to that, we don't just passively do it. Oftentimes, we're provoked to be nostalgic because we're unsatisfied with something, or we feel lonely, distressed, uncertain about what path to take in life. And so what we're doing is, we're yearning for guidance really is what I think. We're yearning for inspiration. We're trying to reconnect with what we cherish. And so when we're trying to make decisions about how to go forward in our lives — should I take this job? Should I move to the city? I have all of these competing possibilities. What should I privilege — nostalgic memories can remind us that, oh, these were the things that actually matter to us. These are the cherished memories, and it's worth bringing that to mind when we're trying to figure out how to go forward.

That was not something I always thought about. Like when we first started doing nostalgia research, we very much conceptualized that as a psychological defense mechanism that largely functioned to regulate our emotions. So when we feel sad or lonely, nostalgia comforts us. Then we can move forward, and that's great. So we thought nostalgia was healthy, but we thought of it as like a coping — you would think of it as a coping resource. But then collecting all these narratives, running experiments, what we started to notice is, when people shared nostalgic memories, they didn't just say, "Oh, looking back on this memory makes me feel good." They said things like, "It makes me optimistic about the future. It reminds me what I'm fighting for. It gives me hope." So we started to see these more motivated affective components in people's narratives. And we're like, "Oh, we should study that." Of course, you're only going to discover — in an experimental research, you're only going to discover what you measure. We hadn't been measuring motivational tendencies. We had just been measuring well-being.

And so then we said, okay, well, maybe if you induce nostalgia in the lab, for instance, maybe it doesn't just increase positive mood. Maybe it doesn't just increase a sense of meaning in life. Maybe it makes people more motivated to pursue their goals. Maybe it makes them actually want to go out in the world and do things. And so we started to discover, for instance, that nostalgia makes people feel more connected. Because it reminds them that, "Oh, yeah, even though I'm going through a difficult time now, there's people that loved me. And I have all these memories with these people." That's true. But it also turns out, it makes people want to connect. We engineered these studies where we gave people the opportunity. Like after doing the nostalgia manipulation and then doing some other tasks, we gave them the opportunity, or we led them to believe that they had the opportunity to participate in other studies. We gave them choices. There weren't even other studies. But what we said is like, "Oh, here's a study where you'll have to go. It's a social study. You'll have to interact with people. Here's a study where you'll go do things by yourself." What we found is, inducing nostalgia made people more likely to choose to participate in the study where they got to interact with other people. So that's just one example.

Nostalgia pushes people towards others. So it very much has a motivational component that really is counter to the stereotype of being nostalgic as just sitting by yourself and like ruminating or reflecting on the past. Really, it's a more energizing experience that makes you want to — think about even if you watch a nostalgic movie or something, that might trigger like, "Oh, I should call up this person. We watched that together back in the day." You see this kind of thing a lot in nostalgic entertainment. It creates a moment, like a social media kind of moment or something, where people want to share that experience. So that's why I'd say, in addition to the cognition and emotion, there is this energetic or motivational component.

Brandon: Could you say a bit more about the relationship between nostalgia and yearning? You mentioned the affective component as well. So is nostalgia a type of yearning, or is there kind of a partial overlap with that concept of yearning or longing? What's that relationship like?

Clay: Yeah, I would say yearning or longing is a feature, is a component of nostalgia. Nostalgia is like a complex experience, and yearning is part of it. It's not the whole story. You can yearn for things and not necessarily feel nostalgic for them. But I think a big part of what's going on in nostalgia is, there is that yearning. There is that longing component. But one thing that I think that often people get wrong about that, like people who are very, very critical of nostalgia. Understandably, there are some reasons to be critical of certain forms of nostalgia. But I think people overestimate the idea that when people are yearning for the past, they want to return to the past. Those are not the same. Those are not the same thing. People might want to revisit the past or pull wisdom, or knowledge, or experience from the past even if they have no desire to actually go back to the way things were. Most people don't. Despite what they say, if you actually dig a little bit deeper, most people don't really want to go back and don't want to live like they did 50 years ago. Even though you can do these surveys that show Americans think life was better in the past, they don't want to give up modern medicine or technology. They don't want to give up the certain advances.

What that yearning is saying is, there is something they feel is missing. I mean, as you know, one of the challenges with being humans is, we're never satisfied with anything. That's good in a sense because it means we keep tinkering, and we keep trying to make the world better. We like progress. We want things to look — even silly things. We watch TV and we'll be like, "Oh, imagine if the picture was a little bit better, the TV was a little bit larger." We're always kind of wondering what could be. But that's related to the yearning too, right, in that past-oriented yearning. It's like we look back and like, "Well, maybe it was nice when kids could just ride their bike around the neighborhood, and they weren't all on cell phones. There was a little bit more youth. There was a little bit more freedom. I had that in my childhood. I kind of wish kids could have that now."

I remember my grandmother telling me stories when I was growing up about how she rode a horse to school. And I was like, well, I don't know that I want to ride a horse to school. But we like these kinds of stories that connect us to or give us the opportunity to yearn for something. Then what I think is neat about nostalgia is the creative component. It's like people don't want to ride a horse to school. But what they might want is more trails in their neighborhoods that there's not cars on. They might want some modern version of like, "Oh, it is nice not to have to deal with these certain modern inconveniences." So we want those things, but we want to figure out a way to pull in, to borrow from the past as well.

Brandon: What's the mechanism then that you see that drives this ability of nostalgia to connect us to each other? Why is it not just sort of enclosing us within ourselves?

Clay: We have this phrase we say. In the nostalgic mind, the mind is 'peopled.' And for some reason, nostalgia is really about meaningful memories. If you ask people what gives their life meaning, they almost always say other people or their connection to others, family, close friends, the transcendent. Even like spiritual meaning is very much about a relationship with the divine. And so meaning is about others and about connecting to others. Nostalgia kind of reminds us of that. There's all sorts of distractions in life. We have all sorts of competing motives. And what nostalgia does is like, oh, yeah, but these were the special times. These are the things that are really meaningful. What's the common theme of those? This gets to the cognitive component of nostalgia. When we looked across all these different memories from people all over the world, most nostalgic memories involve other people, particularly loved ones.

People can have nostalgic memories for solitary experiences, but they're fairly rare actually. I mean, people can't say, "Oh, I climbed that mountain myself, and that really revealed something about me. I was training for this for a long time." That can happen, but it's fairly rare. Most of the time, even in nostalgic memories of personal accomplishments, people bring their attention towards others. "These are the people that helped me accomplish this. This is my support system. These are the people that helped me accomplish this triumph." And so I think a big part of why it pushes us towards others is because it reminds us that others are where meaning is. Then it's like, oh, okay, so I should go out and do things. In fact, from a research point of view, we've done studies showing that when people reflect on a nostalgic memory, they bring to mind experiences of social success which boosts their confidence, their social efficacy. They feel like, "Oh, okay. I'm going through a tough time right now. I'm lonely right now. I moved to a new city. I started university on the other side of the country. I don't know anyone. But I've had all these social successes in the past, which means I can do it. I can do it." That kind of energizes people to have the confidence to be like, "Okay. Well, I can go meet new people. I can start relationships." And so I think that it provides us with that kind of confidence.

Brandon: Yeah, I'm trying to get some of my kids to make new friends, and they're resisting it. I'm like, this will help you in the future.

Clay: You're planting the seed.

Brandon: Yeah, I'm always trying to. I don't know if I'll succeed. So say a little bit about, just on a conceptual point, I mean, are all memories nostalgic? Are there certain memories that are not nostalgic? And is there any kind of time scope? Can I be nostalgic for something from this morning? Is it time-bounded in some way?

Clay: Great questions. So not all memories are nostalgic. We have different types of memories. And so, for instance, when we've done these experiments, oftentimes, as controlled conditions, we'll have people bring to mind or we'd say, "Think about a memory that makes you feel nostalgic." Or in another condition, "Think about a memory that you would describe as ordinary or mundane." Then even in another condition, we'll say, "Think about a memory of a pleasant or happy memory from the past." Even happy memories aren't the same as nostalgic. When you look at the effects of these, having them think about something that's cherished or a nostalgic memory, this has more powerful effects than just having them think about a happy memory. So there's something about nostalgic memories that seem to be distinct from other type of autobiographical memories.

As far as the time question, it's really interesting because there are no rules. You can be nostalgic about anything. But it's true that you tend to be more nostalgic by things the further separated you are, both in temporal and physical distance. And so you're more likely to be nostalgic if you move for a place, if you don't see it, if you're not there a lot. I think a lot of this has to do with that specialness. Like if it's routine, even routine, things that you like, you don't need to feel nostalgic about the gym if you go there everyday. You're like, "I'm going to go there. I'm going there." Right? So the most powerful nostalgic memories tend to be the ones that are distal. That's time too. The further time that separates it, the more you feel like, oh, there's something special about accessing that.

I think another part of the time, you know — I don't know this for sure because this is hard to test. But I think another element of the time component is, you've had more time to sit with it, to make sense of it, to reflect on it multiple times, and to draw different lessons from it. That's one of the things that I found interesting. It's like you can have a nostalgic memory from 30 years ago, something that happened 30 years ago. And maybe five years after it happened, you do feel nostalgic for it. It was a really important thing. Then 10 years after, you're in a different point in your life and you're like, "Oh, I didn't realize that." I gave the example of Thanksgiving. "Now that I have kids, I realized, oh, this means something different." And so, as we age and we go through different life experiences, the same memory can take on new meaning. You might have this experience with a really good book or a great film where it's like you liked it, and then you go back and watch it later, and you're like, "Oh, I didn't even pick up on that because I didn't know. I wasn't at a place in my life to really appreciate that theme." Our own stories are like that, I think. And so you can kind of have this ongoing relationship with nostalgia.

In addition to that, one of the things that I've thought about more recently is how nostalgia for people that we've lost, for people that are gone, similarly allows us to keep that relationship going in new ways. My dad died several years ago. Now I look back on different memories, even memories as a kid where I was probably an annoying kid who didn't appreciate the lessons my dad was trying to teach me. I can look back now and say, "Oh, okay. I get it." And so I have this ongoing dialog with my dad even though he's deceased. It's because he left me all those memories. And so I think that that's a neat feature, too. It's like we can kind of, even when something's gone, even when a place is gone, a person is gone, some part of our life is gone, we have it. We can. That's one reason why we're terrified of cognitive decline, right? It's a very, very existentially threatening idea that we might lose our memories, our sense of self. Because we want those. We long to keep those stories, those memories, as part of us not just because it's nice to look back on them, but we use them. It's an ongoing dialog with our past.

Brandon: There are a couple of stories in your book that really struck me, that I suppose surprised me, that nostalgia is not just related to memories that we cherish. And so the example of, I think there was one with you maybe mowing the lawn when you were a kid. It wasn't pleasant at the time, but it has nostalgic connotations. And the other one, maybe more drastic, is of this group of folks you interviewed in Southampton, I think, who lived through the Second World War, which sounds like it would have been a horrible experience. Why does nostalgia feature in both these kinds of negative experiences?

Clay: Those are good examples of how meaning is different than positive affect or just positive emotions. One of the things that I really enjoyed about — I spent a couple of years at the University of Southampton after finishing graduate school. Because there was a research team there. This is in UK, just south of London. So there's a research team there that was also starting to do some work on nostalgia, which is what I was doing in grad school. We learned about each other and they said, "Hey, when you finish your PhD, come over for a little while and we'll collaborate." One of the things that was neat there is, Southampton is a city on the southern coast of England that 90% of was destroyed during World War Two bombings. And at the time when I was over there, which was the early 2000s, there were older British adults that remember those experiences from their childhood.

We were going around door to door to collect, to get community data, knocking on doors and asking people to fill out these nostalgia questionnaires for us. One of the things we're doing is having them share a nostalgic memory with us. We'd have them write it, or we'd record it. What's neat about doing research with older people is, they tend to be good research participants. They're happy to share their experiences with you. And so they often get very, very rich data. What surprised us, or I guess I should say what surprised me, was the number of people who shared a memory — we didn't ask them to think about any particular. We just said, "You tell us. Give us a memory that makes you—" we'd give them a definition nostalgia. "Nostalgia is defined as a sentimental or wistful longing for the past. Please spend a few minutes writing down a memory that makes you feel nostalgic." What surprised me is the number of people that talked about the time during the war, during World War Two. There was a lot of tragedy in these narratives. They weren't sugarcoating it. They weren't saying this was an awesome time, or this was a fun time. They were saying it was a very difficult time. It was a tragic time. Families were separated. Fathers were sent over to continent to fight war. Kids were separated from their mothers or sent with their grandparents out to the country. So there was all of this.

But the reason they shared these stories is, in those stories was an appreciation for how events like that remind you of what's important in life: family, togetherness, being part of something. And all the sort of things we get distracted by and get worked up about, that kind of fades away when things get bleak like that. And so there's a lot of nostalgic memories like that even that aren't as dramatic as going through a war where your city is being bombed but that are just difficult times that you felt like have created your character, have cultivated who you are, that have made you grow personally, that have given you an appreciation for life. So I think it's as meaningful. These are like significant memories. Now, it doesn't mean every nostalgic memory is like that. Some nostalgic memories are, "Hey, me and my buddies went on a road trip." Like anything. There can be like a, there's like a continuum. Some memories are just kind of light-hearted, fun, and some are very, very deep. But when you ask people to share a nostalgic memory with you, they often kind of go to something that's really, really important: a cultural rite of passage, an important family event, something that really changed the course of their life or something like that.

Brandon: Right. I suppose with your example of mowing the lawn when you were a kid with your dad, would that be sort of maybe a less intense version of something where, at the time, it was not pleasant, but to go back to that memory—

Clay: Absolutely. Yeah, so my dad used to make me go mow lawns, and I hated it. I was just like, this isn't great. I remember always trying to wash that gasoline smell off of my hands. It's just like I just smell like gasoline all the time. It's weird because it was very aversive. Now if I get that, even that little hint of gasoline smell, it triggers the nostalgia. Smell is a powerful sensory input that kind of triggers nostalgia. Typically, it's things we want to smell like food, things that are attached to memories. The reason I think that kind of stands out as a nostalgic memory is, again, I only came to that, I only started thinking of that as a nostalgic memory after my dad died. I think what it was is, I was looking for experiences I had that my dad taught me something. He was trying to teach me work as a kid. A lot of teenagers don't work now, actually. But starting from like 12 or 13, I had a paper out. My dad made me mow lawns. I mean, he was very much like, "This is how you learn to grow up and be a man. It's like you have to work, and you had to be responsible and save." So he was trying to teach me all this stuff, like financial responsibility, work ethic. And so at the time, I was like, it's summer. I'm out of school. I don't want being dragged out of bed early in the morning to go mow lawns. But then I look back on it and I was like, yeah, that was really good. That contributed to sort of my work ethic today. So I think that's that example of, yes, it was kind of a negative memory but it was a valuable one. It helped me. And now I can kind of look back and revisit that memory with a new appreciation. Yeah, not as traumatic as surviving a war or anything like that. But these little life experiences that we think, even if they are unpleasant or difficult that we think, somehow helped us define our sense of self.

Brandon: Yeah, thank you. One of the things I've been thinking about through reading your book too is the relationship between nostalgia and beauty, especially in relation to memory. So the past year, I've been organizing a bunch of events, dinners and other kinds of conversations. And often we start with the question like the one I posed to you, and people share their experiences of beauty from their past. I wonder. Would you say that all of those encounters with beauty from our past are nostalgic memories? Because there is an affective component to it. You're recalling something that was — it varies on some spectrum of being moderately pleasant to intensely sort of awe provoking. But often, it connects to some experience of moral beauty, maybe a grandparent or someone who you recall fondly, some yearning for an experience of being protected, of peace, et cetera. Would all of those memories of beauty be nostalgic? How would you see that?

Clay: It's a good question. I think that that makes sense. Another way of framing it might be, nostalgia is about what makes life beautiful. Our nostalgic memories are part of what makes life beautiful. And so we have a bunch of, as I noted, we have a bunch of mundane memories. It's not like these are useless memories. It's good to know. It's good, for instance, that I know how to drive to the grocery store and what aisle things are on. It's like it's good to habituate and to be able to know to have that kind of level of memory. But that's not what really enriches life and adds that layer of color to life. So I think, yeah, I think nostalgia memories are beautiful memories. I think that's a good way to say it.

Brandon: One of the things I was struck by in your book work, I mean, a couple of findings. I think you noted that 80% of people, weekly, seem to experience nostalgia. But also, I think you noted that people turn to nostalgic memories when they experience negative challenges to their sense of self-continuity. I wonder if there's any relationship. I mean, do you feel that, or do you see any research at all that there's any kind of increase? Are people becoming more nostalgic today? Are people struggling more with their sense of continuity? What is provoking this turn to nostalgia? Is it just a normal human operation that would sort of you would expect to find this distribution at all times in places, or is there something about our time today that is driving people a bit more in this direction?

Clay: Yeah, I think both are true. For one, it is a normal part of the human experience. So you can think of nostalgia as actually having two classes of triggers. And so a lot of triggers are like what we just call sensory input. So you hear that old song. You see an advertisement. I mean, this is what a lot of marketing, like nostalgic marketing, is about. It's like directly triggering nostalgic feelings. And so just because we live in a world full of these types of experiences — especially now, people spend a lot of time online, and it's a lot easier to access nostalgic content and to promote nostalgic content, the world does seem to be increasingly populated with nostalgic material which has the effect of maybe increasing nostalgia.

In addition to those kinds of triggers, there's also what we call internal psychological triggers. Those tend to be experiences of dissatisfaction or distress. So anxiety, loneliness, a lack of meaning, a sense of discontinuity, financial insecurity. Anything that's going on your life that's distressing to you tends to increase nostalgia. So to your question, it is true that in times of broad-scale distress, like during the covid-19 pandemic, for instance, nostalgia at the society level increases. So for instance, in Spotify, during the pandemic, people were listening to more music in general. But they were especially listening to older music, to nostalgia music. So nostalgia does increase as a function of when society is going through difficult times. So not surprisingly, I do think we are in a time period where there's a great amount of nostalgia. Because there's so much political polarization. There's so much worry about artificial intelligence, social media, how the world is changing. It seems like the faster the world changes, the more we have that discontinuity. The more we felt disconnected, unstable in some way from who we are and how we've tried to build our lives, which inspires us to pull from the past and be like, "No. Okay. I can stabilize myself. I can find some sense of continuity." So I do think it's true that in times that are perhaps more disruptive, you might say nostalgia increases.

But at the more granular level, everyone's personal lives at various points in time are going to different amounts of discontinuity. In our research, we found, for instance, the more people experiencing things like job loss, the loss of a loved one, a relationship separation, or anything like that in their own lives, nostalgia increases, which helps explain why nostalgia sometimes fluctuates as a function of age. So there are periods. People go through different things at different times, of course. But in general, you could say there are periods in development, like the transition from childhood to adulthood, that are disruptive. You're going away to university. You're moving out of your family home. You're starting a job. You have a vocation. You're doing something new where you're not just a kid in your parent's house anymore. Nostalgia tends to go up during that period, because you're going through a new experience. And it's like you're pulling from the past as a way to stabilize yourself and to find that confidence and motivation. Perhaps then, you get things sort of figured out. You figured out your career. You partner up. You move through this period of stability. Then nostalgia seems to settle down. Then it starts to go back up again probably in your 40s. And so it's like your kids are getting older. You're starting to think about them going away, empty nesting. You're starting to go through midlife. Like, if you're me, your vision is getting worse. You're losing your hair. Your life is changing again. And so this is another period of disruption, and you're turning to the past for comfort. And of course, as you get older, you start to lose loved ones and so forth.

Again, any of these things can happen at any point in your life. But we do see a small but significant quadratic effect of lifetime nostalgia where it goes up in young adulthood. It kind of settles a little and then starts to go back up as you get older. That's important. Because if you just look at a simple correlation, you don't really see the effect of nostalgia in age is fairly small. And I think it's because it's not linear which, again, there's a lot of variability within that, of course. Because at any point in time, life can throw you a big challenge and a big hurdle which might trigger and increase nostalgia for you personally. But when you scale out across the lifespan and across societies, you can kind of see these broader trends of nostalgia going up or down as a function of chaos, distress, uncertainty versus stability and so forth.

Brandon: It seems like around the world, a lot of populist movements, and we're saying here in the US as well would sort of make America great again and in other countries as well. It seems to be harkening back to almost like a golden era where things were better. Do you think that the world is somehow getting maybe more — is this a reflection of some kind of growing anxiety around the world? Not just in the US. But what's happening that's driving movements that seem to want to, I guess, provoke a sense of nostalgia or that might be responding to a growing sense of nostalgia around the world? What's happening there?

Clay: So to be clear, sure, there's a lot of causes for these types of trends. I'm not a political scientist. I'm sure there's all sorts of other things going on. But I do think that where the nostalgia component comes in or the psychological component comes in is, yes, you're seeing a lot of societal change in disruption, and that's triggering this sense of like, who are we? The desire to solidify some sort of societal or national identity, some collective sense of self and looking backwards. The tricky part about this type of nostalgia is, it's not always healthy and it can be manipulated in ways. So for instance, I'm not saying politicians are reading our research on nostalgia. But notice how it seems like there's an implicit understanding of this relationship between distress and nostalgia. Because politicians don't come out and say, "Oh, look how awesome everything is right now. You should go back to the way things were." They try to provoke a sense of anxiety or fear, right? They tell you how the world is falling apart. And so they manipulate it in that way. Even if things are going relatively well, generally, the goal is to be like, no, things aren't going well for me. Then it's like they understand that, well, things aren't going well. How do we make them better? Well, we look to the past.

I mean, there is some wisdom there. I'm not dismissing that. But a lot of times, it's done in a sort of prejudiced or unproductive way. It's not just like the right-wing populist. It's like you see this on the left too. You see, like in the environmentalist movement, you see kind of this glamorizing of a past before industrialization. Of course, there was mass starvation and disease and all sorts of problems. But you see this on both sides. It's not just a purely right-wing thing. You see it in a lot of kind of left-wing movements too. But again, the idea behind it if you want to — the way I try to approach it is, instead of just criticizing it, try to understand, well, maybe they're misguided. But there's something going on here, and I think they're identifying challenges. Maybe some of these are exaggerated, but they're identifying real problems. They're saying, "Oh, we are concerned about climate change. We are concerned about growing violence, or we are concerned about these different challenges. We are concerned about the potential for people to lose jobs to machines." And again, these aren't always rational fears. A lot of times, they are. A lot of times, it's a combination of there's something there, but then they exaggerate.

But then I think what's useful is to then say, okay, they're looking for something. They're looking for some guidance. And as I noted before, it's not the case that people really want to go back to the past. What they want is certain elements from the past to influence how we design the future. We're moving forward no matter what. We don't actually have time machines. We can't go back. We're moving forward in time. That's the only direction we can go. And so what we're saying is, the world I want tomorrow, maybe there's something I can borrow from this. Like I said, sometimes it's not always healthy. But I think even in contexts where we might not like historical nostalgia, it's better to recognize that this is a real thing. Then how can you help shape it in a more productive way.

I've done a lot of work at the Archbridge Institute and the Human Flourishing Lab on the concept of patriotism. Now, a lot of people, if you talk about patriotism, they get a little bit weird. They're like, "Oh, that's some far right thing." It's like, no, there's a lot of good evidence in social psychology that's actually really important for people to feel like they're part of a group that's larger than themselves. It promotes cooperation. It promotes collaboration. It helps people sacrifice kind of hedonic goals to participate in something bigger than themselves. It increases social trust. There's lots of good reasons to support a healthy form of patriotism around some kind of shared national identity. And you can do that in a non-prejudicial — you can do that in a very productive, healthy way that's not xenophobic, that's not prejudicial. And so I think there are ways to recognize. People want to feel like they're part of a country, and they're proud of their country. They belong to something, and they're working towards something. Not to mock or dismiss that. No, that's important. But how do we avoid where this goes off of the rails, or how do we avoid where this becomes prejudicial or harmful in some way? And so I think that that's an important way of addressing some of these concerns that people have about. That looking back, the past is better.

Brandon: Yeah, it also seems like it's worth interrogating the kinds of things we're nostalgic about, right? Because I think it's hard to not smuggle them. I mean, I'm even thinking of Marx's writings. They're very nostalgic in many ways. And so all these calls for revolution are embedded in some kind of nostalgia for a primitive state of nature that is a kind of fiction, right? I think scrutinizing some of that can be really helpful to sort of think about, well, is this the kind of future that's realistic, or possible, or worth desiring? I'm curious though as to what you see as the potential for nostalgia to help us innovate. So is it a driver of innovation then?

Clay: I think so. When I was working on that book, I was talking to different artists, filmmakers, business leaders, entrepreneurs. Basically, all of them have a nostalgic story of what made them passionate about what they're doing. So you can talk to a filmmaker, and they'll talk about the movies that they saw as a kid in that movie that really is, like, I want to do this. And so at one basic level, I think nostalgia fuels that passion, that desire to do something. And so that in itself is important. But then if you look at the content on what they're doing, look at somebody who's trying to make really cutting-edge music, trying to do something really different. Watch interviews with them, and they'll talk about, "Well, I'm trying to do this. But I grew up listening to this, and I wanted to give a nod to the — I work in this kind of beat or do this kind of—" So you'll see people mixing genres from the past, adding a modern element to it, sampling things, coming up with a new version of it. You see this in fashion, right? A lot of fashion is about using new materials but then doing some kind of cut or something that's a nod to the past.

So I think the creative spaces where people are trying to do the freshest stuff are extremely nostalgic. If you look at car designs, they're trying to make them as state of the art as possible. Because people want new technology. They want fuel efficiency. They want electric vehicles. They want everything hyper connected on there. But it's like there's some kind of aesthetic or something, a retro aesthetic or something that they like, or there's some kind of inspiration behind it. So I think nostalgia is definitely a big part of both the motivational, the passion kind of component of innovation, and also in terms of getting ideas. Like taking some of the most innovative ideas are the ones where they've really figured out something that's been done before and then put a new spin on it, giving it a new direction that no one else thought of taking it in. And so I think that's very much part of innovation.

Brandon: Yeah, great. That's really it for the questions I had for you. But I'm curious if you might have any tips or recommendations for our listeners about how to harness the positive powers of nostalgia, and perhaps also anticipate some of its negative potential. Right? Because it seems like it does have the power to both draw us away from others or draw us simply to the past but also draw us into social connection and towards innovation, towards a healthier self-concept and so on. So what might be ways in which people could leverage its potential?

Clay: Yeah, I think what I call intentional nostalgia is, we can all get benefits from just a very passive nostalgia. You don't have to be real deep about it. People find it nice just to listen to old music. It pumps them up to go to the gym. But intentional nostalgia is what I describe as really trying to revisit a memory. The more engaging you can make it, the better. So if you want to journal or do some type of creative activity that allows you to really set with the memory and reflect on it. Then ask yourself, like, why is this memory nostalgic to me? Why do I feel this way about this memory? What challenges or issues am I going through today that this can help me with and why? So I think that, really, that deeper inspection. Then it can also help prevent it going in a bad direction. Because I think sometimes if you just do kind of a really glossy version of nostalgic music, "Oh, things are so much better before all of this." It's like, now, if you sit there for a minute and you really dig into it, you'll be like, oh, okay, this is why it wasn't necessarily all better. But then you can say, well, what is it? What was special about the time? And does that have any relevance for today? I think it's an especially helpful way to really get that more intentionality of it. It's to do it socially, I mean, conversationally, to talk to people that you shared these memories with. It's great to sit around and talk about old memories. Then you can kind of push each other a little bit in ways to really unearth something that you maybe didn't remember about, that somebody else might say actually, I guess you forgot about this part that wasn't so great. Or you wouldn't give up what you have now for that. So I think that conversational nostalgia can be really helpful.

But all that being said, I think most of the time, the way we interact with nostalgia isn't this sort of deep reflection. But we just passively make contact with it. We get that photograph on our desk of our favorite vacation, or even we — I brought it before. We create that playlist on our Spotify that we like to have at the gym because it pumps us up, our minds. It makes us feel youthful and young again. Oftentimes, those things are treated as like they're kind of pointless, or they're just silly fun. I think those things are actually pretty useful for helping kind of energize us and inspire us. So it can be really, really good to do a deeper dive into nostalgia. But it's also perfectly fine and healthy and productive just to kind of populate your life with a little bit of nostalgia here and there. I don't know if you noticed. But behind me, I have this arcade.

Brandon: I was going to ask you about, yeah, most definitely. Yeah, so our listeners may not be able to — they have to tune in to the YouTube video. But maybe you could just describe a little bit of what the arcade machine is behind you.

Clay: Yeah, absolutely. So I've got this old arcade machine in my office, in the background that you can see on the camera if you watch the video. It's a Robotron. It's a game. It's an old game. Probably, no one has heard of it. But I have a friend who goes around and buys old arcades that are banged up, not working anymore, and then he rehabilitates them. I asked him, why do you do this? And he said, "Because these were things that brought people a lot of joy, and they're dead. They're just being cast aside. I want to bring them back. I think there's still more joy." So I think that in itself is kind of a cool thing. Then he offered to do this for me. And like a good nostalgia, what it is, it's got the old cabinet and the old art and everything, but it's actually a PC in there with a modern LCD screen. There's hundreds of games on this. So I think that's a good example of how to make nostalgia more forward looking. It's just like, yeah, it's got the retro aesthetic in the controls. It's kind of fun. It reminds me of arcades from back in the '80s. But it's actually got a modern PC unit. I'm kind of surprised. In some ways, my wife let me drag that into the house and put that in my office. Well, I wanted to have some art in my home office. I was like, well, why not have a more interactive art? I don't even really play the thing that much. I turn it on every day when I'm working. It's just in the background. It kind of cycles through different backgrounds of games. I kind of just see it. I occasionally look at it. It's just a nice, little aesthetic flair that I find, for someone who does a lot of work in nostalgia, I find useful. And it's not because an arcade machine itself is personally meaningful, but it reminds me of, yeah, I used to go, I used to walk down to the convenience store with my buddies, and we'd put quarters in the arcade. We'd play and we'd hang out.

It turns out in our research, we find, even nostalgic objects, consumer products, things that people tend to think of as superficial or like materialistic, the reason we're so nostalgic for them isn't for them themselves; it's because they're symbolic reminders of who we spent that time with. And so like sports memorabilia, things like that, they remind. They're cues for what's really about relationships, I think. So even the things that seem like they're the most consumeristic or materialistic often have a deeper story that involves who you engaged that activity with.

Brandon: It seems like then maybe this is my final question. It's that, there seems to be almost a redemptive quality too to nostalgia and to nostalgic objects. Do you see nostalgia as a spiritual resource, perhaps?

Clay: Yes, and in fact, this isn't my research, but there are some research that people who are higher in spirituality are higher in dispositional nostalgia. So all of us are nostalgic at some level. As you noted before, people tend to be nostalgic multiple times a week in fact. But that does like a lot, just like everyone has a need to belong, with some people are way more social than others, nostalgia is like that. There is an individual difference component of nostalgia that we refer to as nostalgia proneness. There's a number of things that it's correlated with that makes sense in terms of sociality. Because nostalgia is so social. But one of these is spirituality. So people who are more spiritual tend to be more nostalgic. But, yeah, broadly speaking, I think nostalgia. Because so much of it is about even the example provided of an ongoing relationship with a deceased. There's so many things about cherished memories that are transcendent in some ways that I think there's a very, very spiritual component to them, even for people who would maybe not describe it, that don't see themselves as very spiritual. Maybe they wouldn't describe it that way. I think it captures some of those same psychological functions.

And in addition to that, if you think about nostalgia at a more collective level, a lot of the religious practices and traditions and rites of passage and rituals have this historical nostalgic component. That gives us some sense of transcendent. That I'm part of something that was here before me. I'm getting plugged into it. I'm learning about it. I'm carrying forward these traditions. They will continue when I'm gone. There's something very powerful about self-continuity that's not just, I want some stable sense of self in my own life but this broader collective continuity that I want to feel like I'm part of something that was here before me and that will be here after me. And so, yeah, I would definitely say that spiritual dimension and nostalgia is very much there. And also, I would say, very underappreciated, understudied, undervalued, minus a few studies here and there, like I mentioned, looking at it as a disposition that's correlated with nostalgia.

Brandon: Clay, it's been super insightful. I've learned a lot. Anything else you want to add before we close?

Clay: No, I don't think so. I think we kind of hit the points. You had great questions. And yeah, like I always tell people, it took me, I don't know, 15. Yeah, I've been studying nostalgia for not quite 25 years but close. We're approaching that. It probably took me 15 years before I fully realized that nostalgia is, I think, really a future-oriented experience. Yeah, it's about the past. It's about memories. But really, it's about how we go forward in our life. And so that kind of flipped a switch in me. That's why I called the book Pass Forward. That flipped the switch in my thinking, from seeing nostalgia as like a defense mechanism or coping resource that's healthy for us to seeing them as more than that. As no, like it's a source of inspiration. It's a source of guidance. It's a source of creative energy and motivation. And so when people tell you, oh, nostalgia is like getting stuck in the past or looking backwards, it's like no, nostalgia is about moving forward. And when you want to move forward, you don't want to just do it aimlessly, right? You don't want it to just get random, right? You want to move forward with intention and with purpose. And nostalgia is a treasure chest of cherished memories that can help you do that.

Brandon: Yeah, fantastic. The book is really great. I recommend it. And I love your exercises too, which I think can guide people to some important self-reflection on nostalgic experiences in their lives. And so we'll put a link in the show notes. Anywhere else you want us to direct listeners and viewers to, so they can learn more about your work?

Clay: So I recently started. I joined the Substack world, and so I have a weekly newsletter called Flourishing Friday that you can find. I don't just talk about nostalgia. I talk about lots of things related to progress, psychology progress, existential psychology, and nostalgia and things like that. Otherwise, you can find all this at — my website is just clayroutledge.com. My employer is Archbridge Institute, where I do a lot of my research. You can find that at humanflourishinglab.org.

Brandon: Great. All right. We'll throw a bunch of those links into the show notes. Thanks, Clay. This has been fantastic.

Clay: Thank you so much, Brandon. It's been a joy.

Brandon: All right, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.

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