Nostalgia: The Kryptonite of Existential Angst?

there were talkies. No talkies ruined everything. Oh but I mean, I mean, it's entirely possible that you could feel nostalgic for that, say, if you were old, if you were introduced to a lot of say old timey movies when you were younger, you could You're nostalgia could conceivably sort of, um, skip back through time, and you could have sort of an artificial nostalgia of the time from before you existed.

I do have an affinity for that time period. But I will say that having a kid, I definitely have experien areous nostalgia more deeply than I probably have ever in my life. Because you're you're you're observing the child at a certain age, and you're thinking back on your own existence at that time, just because time seems to

pass so quickly and there's so many beautiful moments. And then there's this idea actually we're sort of defining nostalgia right now, but it's that idea that you have a resurrection of a memory or a feeling that carries with it sort of a bitter sweet feeling because you know that time has passed and you can never retrieve that moment again, and it was a beautiful moment, right. Yeah.

As a lot of people point out, in nostalgia tends to hit you in a way where it it feels it feels a little good, but not like whoa amazing, It feels a little sad, but not in a like a deeply depressive way. It's kind of this ambiguous, overall positive feeling, but it's it's it's kind of all over

the place, you know. Like, I'll I found myself experiencing nostalgia. Um, probably a lot more recently, and uh and I'll and we'll talk about that as we we go here, but like I'll find myself like thinking back to music that I listened to when I was in high school, Like, I find myself re exploring Tool albums and I still like Tool to this day, but I was really into them back in back in high school, back around the

time Annuma came out, and uh. And so I'm listening to that, I'm feeling and I'm enjoying the songs, and I'm feeling nostalgia and I'm thinking about uh, reading Lovecraft for the first time and discovering this music and and so on one hand, it's like a celebration of these things that I still love. I still love Lovecraft, I still love this music. But then I'm also thinking it also makes me think or even subconsciously go back to

that time and uh. And it's weird because on one hand, it's like I don't really wish I was a high schooler again, Like that was a weird time and there are so many things were out of place and uh, and and yet there's something in me that's kind of reaching back there or something from the past feels like it's it's it's phantom limbs or are coming after me

in the present. Well, we're gonna it to that, We're gonna get to this idea that this this idea of first and in nostalgia, because they seem to be pretty well connected and perhaps the reason why we continue to dwell in this realm of nostalgia. John Tyrny, writing for The New York Times, says that most people report experiencing nostalgia at least once a week, and nearly half experience

at three or four times a week. Um Erica Hepper, she's a psychologist at the University of Surrey and England, found that nostalgia levels tend to be high among young adults. This is really interesting too will get into this and then dip in middle age and rise again during old age, and that nostalgia begins as early as age seven. Well, what do you have to nostalgic about an age seven? You do, because I think that you have this awareness

that you're getting older. You're like, oh, man, I was just thinking the other day about poop and my pants and it was like, well, you know, like even uh, my four year old will sometimes say I don't want to I don't want to get older. I don't want to grow up. Because she has the sense that she's moving beyond time and she's moving beyond phases and that there are other things in front of her. So it doesn't surprise me that it's as young as seven that kids start to look back and pine for some sort

of warm and cozy memory. You know. It's it's interesting that we are talking about in nostalgia after just recording an episode on the Oral boris the world consuming serpent, the eternity snake, uh, the eternity dragon, because that is a creature that is curving around and consuming its beginnings and in and in doing so, creating this the cyclical nature of itself. And in a sense, nostalgia is that we are reaching back into the past and feasting on our beginnings and it seems to uh to fill us

with us with some sort of energy. Well, and we're recycling our memories. That's interesting because I was thinking about this in terms of materialism like that when this is one of the reasons I think that nostalgia has taken such a hold in the United States, at least in the US fifty years or something. You never since Coke started serving up this idea of Santa Claus and all these sort of classic warm memories post World War two, because that's that's a way that you can easily access

that nostalgia, right, the music, it could be merchandise. And I was starting to think about how, in some ways our existence for each of us, it's almost like we're living on a movie lot and we just kind of roll in all these props that kind of make us feel more connected to whatever it was or is important to us in our lives. And a lot of that

has to do with nostalgia. Yeah, certainly. I mean, like you said, the advertisements constantly changing the culture, at least the visuals of it and to us, and also the technology of it constantly changing, and and therefore we have all of these obtainable physical, uh and or visual symbols that we can call to to to feed that nostalgic hunger in us. Yeah. I was thinking about the new

iPhone commercial. Have you seen this? It's basically just people hanging out with their phones and going through um old texts or conversations or um pictures and feeling nostalgic. And I thought, well, this is interesting because they've they've taken this phone and sort of made it a stand in for the repository of your memories or nostalgia and connected it that way. It sounds like a horrifying episode of Black Mirror. It's it's supposed to be poignant, Well, it

sounds dark. Um. In fact, you might even say that it sounds a little sick, and you would You wouldn't be the first person to think that nostalgia sounds a little bit like some variant of mental illness. So yeah, I didn't realize this until I started doing research that nostalgia was actually considered a psychiastric disorder at one time.

According to Dr Clay Rutledge writing for Scientific American, there's a Swiss physician named Johannes Hoefer who coined the term nostalgia in to describe what he considered a cerebral disease you need to Swiss mercenaries fighting wars far from home. He thought that nostalgia caused anxiety, insomnia, irregular heartbeat, and disordered eating. And he also thought it was caused by continuous vibrations of animal spirits through fibers in the middle brain. Yeah,

and it was like this big mystery. I mean, people were like, oh, this this nostalogy. You've gotta be careful here. Let's let's not play in ay these tunes because our soldiers are going to go into a deep depression or find what's the matter with these guys. Something must be wrong that they're not enjoying fighting this war and risking life and death far away from home. Why did they keep getting all sentimental about a simpler time back in a place that they know and loved. Yes, sick, this

was this is really interesting. This is New York Times article UM called nostalgia? What is it good for? It says that military physicians thought that it had to do with the soldiers ear drums and brain cells being damaged by the unremitting clanging of cow bells in the Alps. So it was you know, obviously this was not a well studied area. UM. I like to imagine the study that might have happened, though, where you have two test groups, one exposed to alpine cow bells and the other not. Right,

I know, So was it the cow bells? No, it's not at all. Um in this persisted this idea really into the twentieth century and professor of history at Weber State University, her name is Susan J. Matt. She said that this disease of nostalgia was known about in the United States during the Civil War and there were seventy four deaths from it on the Union side, in more than cases in the Surgeon General's records, and it became such a problem that they banned army bands from playing

Home Sweet Home. Now. Now here's one of the something that occurs to me out of these examples for starters. Okay, nostalgia the things I feel nostalgic about, like, and I think a lot of people do. Like nostalge atends to apply to things that by and large don't matter in and of themselves, Like you like the feeling you feel for, say a departed loved one that has died, like that. It's not nostalgia that is, that's like a deeper, more close emotion, you know. But but nostalgia is a little

harder to classific. It seems like two things need to happen for you to feel nostalgia. Either your your physical surroundings have to change. You have have to travel somewhere and and in in olden times, whine would you travel a long distance, especially if you were not particularly into the idea you would do so because you were engaged in the military conquest of some kind. Or what has to happen is the world around you has to change. It has to the music changes, the advertisements change, the

technology changes, etcetera. And then and then you you feel this nostalgic link to a place that doesn't really exist anymore. So, I wonder to what extent in previous ages it was harder to feel nostalgia because you weren't necessarily going to ever leave the area in which you lived. You know, you'd be more or less surrounded by the same places and uh, and the the level of technology, the level you know, the basic aesthetics of the world around you

would more or less remain intact. Now that's interesting, especially for a grarian based societies. Right, so ten thousand years on, we primarily have just been in the same place, except for when you begin to think about place like the United States of America, which is a very young country and in a country that many people immigrated to and

people continue to move around. And that's sort of an American thing, is that you, um, you find your survival by sort of picking up and going and uh doing something for yourself that's new in a new area, new possibilities, right, the gold Rush, so on and so forth. We encountered that on Facebook all the time we all have that have that friend who's had a tough time. They're like, I said, I'm moving, leaving to a different city, going to start over somewhere new. And that's that's the the

idea in itself. You know, I'm going to change my physical surroundings and in doing so, I will change who

I am. Well the Susan J. Matt, the professor of history UM, she was actually saying in that way that nostalgia became a very un American emotion because not only did it have this association with the psychiatric disorder of people who had come back from war, but it was this idea that was opposed this whole like manifest destiny, that you need to not feel homesick, that you need to pick up and move and begin your life and new.

And so she was saying that it was very interesting to see the ways that it's represented in American culture, and really in American culture that, uh, nostalgia doesn't truly get embraced until after World War Two, and she says that much of that can be attributed to the fact that during World War One they began to better understand nostalgia and they began to better understand that people who came home who were depressed and who had anxiety had

signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock, not nostalgia. You know, in a sense, the idea of nostalgia as a negative force, it does make a lot of sense because in a sense, it is looking back to the past, clinging to the past, instead of moving forward and uh and welcoming new things. So I can I can easily see where it could it could be interpreted as a

negative force. And if you were nostalgic for things that are harmful, either like say, hey man, I really miss cocaine or something, you know, like that would be bad nostalgia.

Or when you see like people who are really in to say, images of sort of an imagined anti Bellum South, you know that that can be kind of disturbing as well, Like you're kind of nostalgic for a thing that didn't quite exist the way you think it did and was really kind of a horrific time, right, which kind of gives you that whole idea that again, memory and the way that we construct our world is unique to every single person, right, we just sort of all agree on

a set of conditions to say, hey, this is how we're defining the world. But everything else is up for interpretation. But it does turn out, and we'll talk about this after the break, but it does for now that nostalgia actually is a good thing by and large because it helps to regulate our emotions. That being said, I'm gonna go get nostalgic for for some talkies and the carton cigarettes. Kids.

All right, we're back. We've been talking about nostalgia. We talked a little bit about the toxic nostalgia, but for the most part, this is a positive force in our lives. It is, and we should probably scratch at what exactly actually characterizes the experiences of nostalgia. Dr Clay Rutledge, who I talked about before, his research focuses on how they need to perceive life as meaningful, impacts mental and physical health,

close relationships, and intergroup relations. So of course he's very interested in nostalgia, and he says that these memories tend to be focused on momentous or perly meaningful life events that prominently feature close others, so friends, family, romantic partners, family vacations, road trips with friends, weddings, graduation, uh birthday, parties, gatherings for the holidays, all these sorts of things are

these cherished experiences. Yeah, I can see that, like just thinking about family trips, Like I instantly think of family trips to the beach, and like oysters, like raw oysters with cocktail sauce and salting crackers. There you go. See. So, now, if you are one of the participants in one of his studies, that's probably what you are. One of the

things that you might have written about. And one of the things that were Ledge found with the participants is that when they were writing about their nostalgic experiences, um, and when someone went through and sort of weeded out everything else, they found that there were many more positive emotion related words used than negative emotion from related words, which I thought was interesting because it's come up before that we tend to have better recall and use of

negative words than positive ones in general. But here's this case where you have just a outflowing of positive words. UM. Kind of giving you a hint as to where this is going in terms of your mindset. Yeah. So, researchers have looked at the causes of nostalgia and they found that there are a number of things that can kick

it off. Social interactions, So like you're getting together with an old friend and you're talking, hey, remember that that teacher we had in college, And the next thing, you know, an nostalgic or some either a particular experience or some sort of fragment of that time. UM sensory inputs music, you hear an old song and you're like, oh, man, I haven't listened to this in forever. Nostalgia or a smell, And we talked before about how would smell that kind

of undercuts our conscious labeling of experiences. So we'll smell something and will suddenly be so nostalgic for something, and we don't even necessarily remember what we're being nostalgic for, but that smell will take us back to sort of a general time frame. Tangible objects of course, old photographs, you know, somebody's old watch, somebody's old wedding ring. You handle that and it'll take you back. And the iPhone.

I mean, people do get nostalgic about their technology. Like one of the nostalgic trips that um I have found a musing I interviewed a guy who is really into it for the blogs and uh and I've gotten into it a bit too. Is VHS nostalgia, Like we know, when when we were done with VHS is and we moved to two DVDs, like we couldn't have most people just couldn't get rid of those VHS tapes soon enough,

just dump that we have a better technology around. But now people were really filling this, uh, this flood of nostalgia for and in my case is a lot of it is the films of that time and the kind of looking sound that they had the digital film scores. But then some people are like really hardcore nostalgic and

and even obsessive about the technology itself. They're like they're they're buying old VCRs, fixing them up, They're collecting tapes sometimes spending uh kind of crazy amounts of money on on what to any other I would be a just a beat up piece of discarded technology. Well you you hear the same sort of thing in the recordings of music sometimes, like people prefer to hear the scratchiness or just that the imperfections as opposed to everything that's eded

out and so clean. Um, you know, I think that was one of the chief complaints of going from a record player to a cassette player. Yeah, the distortions and the imperfections of the sound become a part of what we loved about them. Uh. Two artists, in particular musical artists. There's a musical artist named Tycho. And then of course

Boards of Canada. Both of these groups, especially Boards of Canada, really employ uh, this nostalgic, audible nostalgia for for sounds that are sort of distorted, old electronic soundtracks, this kind of thing. And uh, and they weave all these things together, like take the things we're nostaluted for and boil them down to their basics and then reassemble them into two a new um sonic form. And then so you're you're taking it in. It's a it's a new thing, but

at the same time it is is heavily nostalgic. You have to stay with an accordion. I just feel that, I mean and growing a theremin and I'm just a puddle. You're before this is through, you will tell us something you're actually nostalgic for. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding about that at all. All right, maybe you are a time traveler, time lord, even everybody, all right, So those

are some of the things that cause of nostalgia. But in these studies, a negative mood was the most commonly reported cause of nostalgia and uh and and generally loneliness was the most frequently listed negative emotion that led to nostalgia yeah, which led to the researchers positing that psychological threat was the culprit for digging into the past and using nostalgia as a kind of bomb. And of course, how did they do this or bear this out? They

triggered a sense of loneliness in their participants. They had one group who, after completing a questionnaire, were told that they scored high on loneliness. And then they had a second control group which they said that you don't rate very high on loneliness. And then they asked all the participants to complete a measure of nostalgia. And it turns out the participants in loneliness condition reported being significantly more

nostalgic than participants in the control group. And then, just just to make sure that this was really going on, they had another study in which some volunteers read a story by a supposed Oxford philosopher who wrote that life is meaningless because any single person's contribution to the world is quote paltry, pathetic, and pointless. And of course the idea here is that there's a theme that threatens perceived meaning in our lives. And then they had another group

read a neutral story. Again, it was those people who read about life being meaningless who indulged in nostalgic thoughts and feelings. Well, you know, I I compared this to my own experiences because right now I'm not I'm not in a lonely state of mind or a depressed state of mind. But um, tomorrow evening on, my wife and are flying to China. We're gonna pick up our son, and it's gonna we're gonna be there for two weeks, and it's gonna be kind of stressful, and it's gonna

be like a life changing event. Uh. And so I feel a certain amount of anxiety about that, and I feel a lot of intense excitement about it. And then and then also just like you know, seven siultaneous heart attacks here and there, as I as I think about it, and so I can only assume that a lot of my recent nostalgia, as opposed to do sort of general in nostalgia, has maybe risen out of that. It's possible.

I mean, do you find yourself kind of not that now, not that we need to get you on the psychologists couch here or anything, but do you find yourself kind of accessing childhood memories? And yeah, definitely. I mean when especially when it comes to purchasing books for the child and looking at toys, and then you know, I'll say, oh, I have this book. He's like, oh my goodness, I don't have a copy of the star Belt Sneeches in

the house. Yeah. I had that as a kid. And and then and maybe that's why the Starbid Sneeches have come up in like three different podcasts recently, because I keep thinking back to the things that influenced me as a child as I consider this child coming into my life. Yeah, it's possible. Your son is very lucky. By the way, Sorry, well try Yeah alright, Um, No, I didn't mean to

get all of a clemp fish. Um. So, I mean, as you we can tell, there are definitely benefits here to indulging in nostalgia because it does kind of make you feel as though perhaps you are re centering your universe of meaning just by accessing this information and reframing what's going on in your current life? Right? Um? Now from the journal Current Directions and Psychological Science, paper by Clay Rutledge again says that nostalgist serves at least four

key psychological functions. I'm talking about generating positive effect, elevating actual self esteem, which I was sort of surprised to me, fostering social connectedness, and alleviating that existential threat that there's no meaning in life. Right. Indeed, the social connectedness thing really interests me because of course you think about nostalgias, and other people are inevitably going to share your nostalgia.

And I mean, I dare anyone to give me an example of something they're nostalgic for that nobody else on the planet feels that pull towards like uh, you know, I mentioned like the VHS thing. Uh, people feel nostalgia for that, and so their whole communities where they talk about trading these tapes, they talk about the technology. Uh. And certainly with any kind of music or media or art,

people are going to gather around it. They're going to draw these uh, sometimes forgotten artists back from obscurity and celebrate them again. So no matter what your nostalgia is you're gonna find a community of people, especially online that share it, and you're going to feel this intense connection with people like, hey, weird team VHS or weird team. Um, I don't know old Beatles albums, I don't know. Whatever you're nostalgia is, it's true, right, Yeah, you're you're right.

There's sort of a more universal we all feel this way and we're all connected in that way. But there's also like, you know, maybe someone was involved, uh in watching this movie, this particular of VHS movie with you, and then you think back about your connectedness to that person as well. But I thought it was interesting too

that self esteem was involved in that relige. Did a number of studies that bore out that self esteem again, perhaps this connectedness or the sense of accomplishment was underlying reason for that self esteem. And it again brings me back to this idea that we no longer reside in like the same community in the same place and share

the same uh sort of general social group anymore. We move out, we moved to new places that are in those places themselves are constantly changing, so you you reach to things like like old VHS tapes or old music, and those become sort of the social connection with a surrounding that the earlier people would have had just by being in the place that they call home. That they

were right, which makes me think about embodied cognition. We talked about this embodied cognition UM, this idea that things, or even um putting on a certain kind of clothes would affect the way that your your brain behaves and the way that you think. And so then I was reminded of the study that we came upon about feeling warm when you indulge in nostalgic thoughts. And this was a study or rather an experiment in the Netherlands by J. J. M.

Winger Hoots of Tilburg University. Uh. He and his colleagues found that listening to songs made people feel not only nostalgic, but warmer physically. And then this is this is where it gets kind of even crazier. Uh The New Zoo of sun yat Sen University tracks students over the course of a month and found that feelings of nostalgia were

more common on cold days. And they found that people in a cool room around sixty eight degrees fahrenheit were more likely to engage in nostalgia than people in warmer rooms, and of course as a result, they felt warmer. Well. I wonder if that has anything to do with the

fact that every time October rolls around. I also I often feel like a lot of nostalgia because I'm getting the Halloween season, So I'm getting nostalgic about Halloween, uh, celebrations of the past and all bits of Halloween themed media. But also the temperature is changing, so yeah, and I and I actually start to think about certain foods and experience as too, thinking about fall foods and winter foods

and all that. This is an interesting perspective. Psychologist Tim Wilsheit says that if you can recruit a memory to maintain physiological comfort, this idea that you would feel warm through this memory. Um. He said that at least subjectively, that could be an amazing and complex adaptation. It could contribute to survival by making look for food and shelter that much longer. So presumably he's talking about in an

evolutionary sense. So one might be out in the wilderness trying to find a place that can sustain them, and they are in the process sustained by nostalgia. For a place that sustained them, or even just a thing that sustained You're right. It doesn't even have to be like O, our our ancestors needed, you know, they were out in

the wild. It could just be that you were on say a long hiking trip, and he didn't pack as much water as you needed to our food, and you needed to go back into your memories to to get that sort of warmth and again that idea that there is rhyme and reason for what you're doing. There's some sort of grand master plan, and nostalgia helps to recenter that reason for living and meaning. And it's so crazy

how some of the things we feel nostalgic for. I mean, there are things that we're nostalgic for that at the time we were kind of been different to like VHS distortion disorted sound or distorted uh you know imagery that was just part of watching a VHS tape. No, we known't not anything special about it. You might think, oh, that's kind of weird or neat, but now it's the

thing we feel the pool towards. Or I think back to going to church, going to a Baptist church when I was a kid, and we were seeing all these hymns, and I hated the most of the hymns. I means have some of them are fun to sing, I guess, but but for the most part, I did not have a lot of love for Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. But now I hear it and I get kind of

nostalgic for it. And even even though it's not something that I like consciously had had a lot or any love for at the time, so we had it's and I think there are a lot of examples of that in people's lives. You're suddenly nostalgic for something that really didn't matter all that much back in the day. So I have an example of that too, and it's hearing

football on a Sunday. I hated hearing it around was little because it usually meant that my dad was going to be sort of like tents and like perhaps even yelling at the screen sometimes. But now I hear it and it just makes me feel again like fall is upon us. There's gonna be popcorn, you know, there's there's comforts and security there and all these delicious foods too, like cocktail leanings in the Red Side. Oh yeah, that's

what made me become agittarian. Yeah. So along those lines, there is of course the nostalgic bump, the reminiscence bump, to consider an kind of a cultural sense. Yeah, this is an interesting article by Katie Walden writing for Slate magazine.

The article is called The Mysterious Memorable Twenties, and it's an interesting article because it talks about a person's twenties being a no man's land between childhood and stable adulthood and perhaps the reason why there is something called that reminiscence bump where you have a ton of these memories and nostalgia packed into that time period. Okay, so as you as you move forward, you think back to that, that your twenties, and that's an area that's just rich

in influences. Yeah, because it turns out that we we just remember more events from late adolescents in early adulthood than from any other stage of our lives. So there

are a couple of theories about that. There's a nineteen study by Cohen and Faulkner that found that of vivid life memories concern unique or first time events, and between the ages of ten and thirty there are a lot of first right, So that's that buys into this idea that you're encountering the first time that you wrote a bike, the first time that you drove a car, that you kissed a girl, that kissed a boy, that you had pizza,

that you know, all these are first. But then after age thirty, it all kind of gets a bit wrote, right, like, kind of you still have experienced you didn't check off the list during that first period. I guess it's true, but most things that you encounter just in living become wrote, So you really do have to go after those new experiences after that certain age. Right, and you're thirty, you've kind of done most of what everybody else is done.

But the idea there is that you just chock full of first and that perhaps is the reason why, uh, we have so many memories or nostalgia available to us. Then, but then you have this guy David C. Rubin who comes along in his book Remembering Our Past, and he says on a small portion of the memories that constitute the bump, this reminiscence bump, relate to novel experiences. So

that gets you to this idea. Another theory that jumps in here that it's identity based, and that there's a narrative perspective here, and that it's kind of all flowing into the story that we make of ourselves. And this story is really right between those ages because that's when we are becoming who we are becoming, right, and we're thinking about the person we're going to become. We're looking back in the roof of a mirror on the person

we've been. Yes. Yeah, And in fact, Katie Walden, the writer of that article, sites and study by Judith Gluck and Susan Bluck. Yeah, and they have proposed that there's a convergence of three qualities that make an event invalliable in our minds. So the first one is that it has to be joyous. Two is that it allows us to exert control. So again, this identity making this is the thing that makes me who I am. This is

like a part of me. Yes. In three we perceive it to be highly influential over the course of our lives. So that kind of fits into this narrative identity, a based account of ourselves. Right, Like on some level, like when I'm thinking back on these different things of nostotic for I'm saying, hey, I'm a tool guy, i am a VHS guy, I am a leaning on the everlasting arms.

I mean in a sense. I mean, I guess I'm nostalgic for it because I do look back on the things about being raised in a Baptist church that have shaped me and and some of the aspects of that

that remain with me to this day. See. And I think that that theory really does kind of line up really well with why we concentrate so many of our memories and nostalgia during that time period, because there's you know, I have some friends who could have cared less about high school, but I have other friends who are like, oh, that's great, and for them during that time, there were certain things that really helped to identify who they were as a person. Yeah, so it kind of makes sense. Well,

I guess that's it. I'm already feeling nostalgic. Yeah, we only just finished it. And then that's the way it is with nostalgia. Something happens and then before you know what, you're nostalgic about it. It seems like just the other day. It was a new experience, that's right, one that built our identities and made us feel a worm and cozy and gave us little uptick in our self esteem. Yeah, and again, it's like the Aora bors it's the snake.

It's moving forward in time, and then at some point it turns back around and it goes back to its point of beginning, and in that sense, becomes eternal. Here's here's my little outro question to you. Do you think on a generation ship? And I think I've seen this depicted somewhere, says this is not an original thought. I'm on a spaceship that's we're headed off to a distant planet. It's going to take generations of generations of generation lives

to get there. How how much nostalgia and what types of nostalgia. Let's say the generation ship leaves tomorrow, do you think we'll be on board? Just Beyonce may it? Well? Beyonce is easy to bring, either in musical form or frozen. She will have her own generation ship, thank you very much. I could see, I mean a sense, some of these cultural figures they would kind of become like gods. And I mean you could argue they already are or modern gods in our modern, modern avatars. So I could see

them being important. But I wonder if you're on a generation ship, particularly if it was a generation ship that wasn't particularly earthy in its design, we would quickly become far more nostalgic for the many details of of life here on Earth, some of the simple things you know, um, and not necessarily the big things like you know, mountains and gravity, but the smaller things like you know, pigs,

I don't know. Yeah, And would you start would it become just completely ridiculous, like instead of just going to the coffee maker on the generationship, like there was such a nostalgia for coffee that you'd have your own beings that you would grind, that you would pick out of civic cats poop. Yeah, possibly so, or would become maybe nostalgic for things like pencils. You know, why would you have a pencil in a generation ship? Would be something

you could never have again? Like when would you get around to recreating pencils on another world? You wouldn't. I think you're right, and I think there would be this whole like pencil economy on that ship. You know, it would be like people would have them in class cases because yeah, you have to make them from scratch. That would be it would require a crazy amount of effort

or just print them out or print them out. But that's the thing too, if you had three D printing and nostalgia coming together, that would be almost a dangerous combination because every little nostalgia trip you'd be like, oh my man, I remember, I remember pencils and pens. I'm going to print out every possible variation of pencil and

pen and I encounter. Gotta do the mechanical, I got to do the normal that do the thick one, got to do the color pencils, Gotta do the the ink pen that had three different heads in it and you would click them, the one with a flashlight in the rear. Well,

what else are you gonna do on a generations ship anyway? Right, And which means that that generation ship, I see how this is going, is going to be completely weighted down with junk and it's not even gonna make its destination because we've all turned into a bunch of hoarders or we're having to jettison nostalgia junk like every like every week or so. So the flight from Earth to a planet X becomes just this trail, this rat trail of droppings like nostalgia drop pics, just floating in space to

mark our passage. Yeah, that would be more likely. I see that. Well, there you go. Nostalgia, What it is, what drives it, some of the science behind it. Obviously everyone out there listening to this episode has something to contribute on this. What what are you missed doubting for? Particularly? Is it? What's what is the nostalgic force that is either most interesting to us or most sort of weird

to you? Like, what's something you're nostalgic for that you again didn't even really like all that much back in the day, but now you've identified as a part of who you are. Let us know about all that. You can find us in all the general places. We're on Facebook, We're on tumbler on Twitter. Our homepage is stuffed tobow your mind dot com and there you'll find our blog posts, our videos are audio podcast as well as links out

to all of our social media uh embodiments. And you can always drop his line at below the mind at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.