The Nostalgia Factory

us personally, politically, and culturally. And this way, nostalgia is a time machine, stringing together memories to give meaning to the present and framing our expectations for the future. I my fring was so cold for relicing. That's Curtis. We met him in a Washington, d C. Park on the evening of President Trump's inauguration, a moment in time when

many in the US were taking time to reflect. Some were jubilant with nostalgia and the idea that we're returning to another era, Like Dan, who was on his way back from inauguration festivities, We're going to return to the constitutional status where people can work to be free, where they can work for merit, where they can work for their future. And I honestly believe we're in the rising tide that will lift all boats if you let it. Some people like Curtis Wax nostalgic about in America that

he thinks no longer exists. The biggest thing in all these ways is everybody out here protesting. I spent the same amount of time protesting volunteering. We wouldn't have anything to protest over. We wouldn't they be anything of protest over everyone the beginning, everybody like we used to Nolden America helping your neighbors. In this episode Our House Stuff Works, coworkers Holly Fry and Christopher Hesiotus discussed the pitfalls of nostalgia.

I think if you're grasping at the way things used to be and imagine that they're better, um, even if they were better in certain measurable ways, it can prevent you from looking at the world around you as it is. And we talked to psychologist Clay Rutledge about how nostalgia may just be one of the most potent survival tools in our psychological tool kits. The people who are naturally using nostalgia as the age seem to be doing pretty well in terms of psychological health. But first we talked

to a professional antique picker, Larry Singleton. He's the decor manager of Cracker Barrel and he curates a kind of nostalgic nuity for sixty two Cracker Barrel stores in the United States, complete with a warehouse full of artifacts at the ready for new store openings. I can walk out in our warehouse every day and and see something that brings back, brings that back to me. It brings back that memory of my dad, you know, teaching me how

to drive a T Model truck. I remember, you know, him telling me the stories of his adventures growing up and taking a trip in a T Model to Indiana with a friend, you know, to pick up rabbits. They were going to go into the raising rabbit business. You know that. You know, it just kind of when I see something like that here or you know, it just it brings back family. It brings back, you know, that

connection to my history three and my family's history. It just you know, and it and it's it's always a good feeling, you know, it's always that connection to him. You know, Dan w. Evans opened that first Cracker Barrel in Lebanon, Tennessee. Danny decided to you know, he'd come up with the idea, you know, him and some folks about doing a little place out on the interstate for families to stop and uh, you know, serve them food

and serve some gasoline. He got mom and dad to come in and set up the first first restaurant, uh, and that was in September nineteen. Each Cracker Barrel has a kind of old tiny general store looked to it with rocking chairs on the front porch, creating that old atmosphere in that field that he he had remembered. He brought that to uh, you know, to a place out on the interstates that other people could you know, set set in and enjoy. Slow down, you know, slow down

and take it easy. The retail area has all kinds of wears, from sweets and candles to quilts and old fashioned toys. Inside the restaurant, trays of chicken and dumplings emerged from the kitchen. Everywhere you look, there's an admixture of antiques and objects that evoke by gone days. Talking black and white family photos, butter churn a fiddle hanging above that. Oh, I look at the things we hail and the tools and the you know, I mean it is what you know, these are the things that forged

and made our country. You know, these these farms, these rural communities, these you know, as they were building industries and making things, you know, these are all the things they used to make that. A lot of the pieces are you know, from when you know, America was really really growing and and you know, uh, we're establishing you know, I don't know about pioneers, but I mean I think they were established in industry and community, you know, so

I think they they do have a connection. The antiques differ from store to store, but among the five thousand items, each store has the same. Five types of antiques can be found. An ox yoke and a horseshoe hang above each front door, a traffic light over the entrance to the restrooms, a wall telephone next to the mantel, a cracker barrel with a checkerboard in front of the fireplace, and a deer head and a rifle over the mantel.

We just kind of follow that tradition, you know, the deer head and the gun that mantle that fireplace is just a central focus when you come into the dining room. So you know, it's it's kind of it's kind of from memory. It's kind of from you know, our you know, we've seen our places and stores and cabins and houses, and that's you know a lot of times that's that's

what they use. So we've just kind of followed that tradition. Larry, who has purchased more than six hundred thousand original artifacts over the years for Cracker Barrel, comes from a family of antique pickers, and in some ways, the warehouse that contains Cracker Barrel antiques also contains Larry's memories. I mean a lot of it's, you know, the memory of my my family and mom and dad, and a lot of it is today it's it's about the memories of the guys that I uh, you know, have dealt with us

and bought from over the years. And there's been a lot of interested phones, you know, so that they're great memories, you know, they really are those guys is you know, they were my teachers, just like my mom and dad. Yeah, Nostalgia is a powerful driver and for something it feels like an actual physical ache for the absence of the thing or person that was loved and lost suddenly resurrected

in the memory like an apparition. Perhaps this is why during the American Civil War the song Home, Sweet Home was banned from being played. The homesickness, the depression and anxiety that resulted from the song's yearning sentiment was thought to stoke what was regarded as a disease of nostalgia. In fact, there were more than fifty cases recorded of nostalgia in the General Surgeon's records, with seventy four deaths

attributed to nostalgia during the Civil War. Today, we better under stand the bitter sweet nature of nostalgia and the ways the bitter can be tamped down and the sweetness once again offered up, something explored in the A MC drama Madman and this scene. Don Draper forwards through Codex new slide projector the carousel, using photos of his own family from the last decade in front of him, A simpler,

happier looking life flicks before his eyes. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory. Alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine go backwards and forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, It's called the carousel. Let's just travel the way the child travels round and round, back home again to a place where we know we are loved.

When I started doing the Stalgia research, I wasn't surprised that when people engage in nostalgia and makes them happy. I mean, look at the marketplace or nostalgia, whether it's rebooting movies, rereleasing music, fashions coming back around. I mean, nostalgia is big business. Anyone in consumer psychology or in behavioral economics can tell you that. My name is Clay Relige.

I am a social psychologist and professor of psychology at North Dakota State University, and I study, among other things, the psychology of nostalgia. I'm interested in the big questions. So what is it they give us meaning in life? How do we cope with insecurities about things like death, loneliness, and those sorts of issues that are uniquely human concerns? So how does someone who studies nostalgia define it and what triggers it Stalgia defined is a sentimental or wistful

longing for the past. Now what that means for most people, based stun our analyzes of over you know, several thousand cases, um for sure is nostalgia seems to be these special memories that we hold dear, that we cherish, and that we bring to mind when we want to revisit the you know, some of the more important times in our life are the times that we think are really important to our our sense of self and our sense of meaning in life. So there seems to be two general

classes of nostalgia triggers. One is, I think the most obvious, which is we could call like a sensory trigger ac cues that serve as reminders of the past. So they might be familiar smells or sits, or things like music. You hear an old song from you know, when you were a teenager, and it brings to mind the memories associate with that. You smell your mom's you know, grandmother's apple pie baking in the oven, and it reminds you of when you had it when you were a kid.

Seasonal changes can remind you, you know, the first snowfall can remind you of when you were a little kid and used to gosside build snowman UM. So there's those types of century triggers UM that are really just primes of you know, they're just they're just reminding you of the past. The second class of triggers has to do with feeling a psychological threat. These are things like loneliness,

feeling meaningless um, even boredom. And what nostalgia seems to do is that when people have these sorts of experiences that make them feel feel vulnerable UM or scared, or some sense of loss and meaninglessness UM, they bring to mind these nostalgic memories as a compensatory response or as a coping mechanism UM to reassure themselves, to right the ship, to feel like you know, no, I'm fine. So loneliness is a good example because it's a very powerful trigger

of nostalgia. When you feel lonely UM, it inspires you to remind yourself of times where you've had, you know, relationships with people, and to remind you to remind yourself that there are people that care about you, There are people that you know love you, that you have had experiences in your life of relationship success, and you can use those memories as a way to boost your confidence.

You're into personal confidence that you know this. This might be a tough time, but you can get through it and the future is the future of your social life could be bright. Again. This can be heavy stuff, especially when just the right piece of music hits us don't make you take a say, making better. The way I think about it is we we kind of have a soundtrack for our lives and for different times in our life.

Music is very meanful. I mean, it's it's pervasive in all areas of culture, whether it's you know, religious or secular culture. Um, whether it's you know then you know nationalism, your national anthem or song junior at church, or even just you know, the music you like to listen to on your iPod. It does seem to be woven into the fabric of of culture. And so it's not surprising that that goes hand in hand with when we access our memories of wanting, you know, wanting that soundtrack to

go with them. These snatches of nostalgia do something pretty magical, mainly giving a person a sense of continuity, as though there's a cohesive self among all the disparate thoughts and actions contained in one person self continus is the sense of stability and the self that I'm the same person that I used to be and even though my life you know, goes through twists and turns that you know, there's some core part of me or some sense of

me that remains stable and the same. And this seem to be good for psychological well being to feel like you have like a stable sense of self. Um. What now nostalgia can do, especially in times of upheaval, whether it be economic change or major life transitions like going off to college or starting a new job or retirement. And what nostalgia can do is sort of serve as a reminder, allow you to access these memories about who you are, who your close friends and your family are

as a way to um regain some sense of stability. Yeah, moving to a new place, I'm starting a new job, I'm going off to college and getting a new retire um, but I'm still the same person I used to be. I still have the same um, you know, thoughts and feelings and interests. In Clay's research, he found that people

who engage in nostalgic reflection get a motivational charge. We found that having people listen to nostalgic music, for instance, or having them write about a nostalgic memory again um increase their desire to meet new people, their willingness to um to work with strangers on a task, They're confidence that they could solve problems they're having in their relationships, and their desire to to make new friends and to

try new things. So it doesn't just seem to make people feel meaningful, doesn't just seem to like make them feel energetic. It seems to also mobilize people for pursuing new opportunities, which I thought it was really cool because, like I said, I mean, we think of nostalgia's, oh, it's just you kind of avoiding the president and hiding in the past. But it really seems to be a

catalyst for um future oriented behavior. Again, this comes down to a kind of time travel, the ability to move between the past, present, and future and create sense from it. Something that drove Clay to research nostalgia in the first place. When I was in graduate school working down my PhD. I was interested in the fact that human beings are the only species capable of a very sophisticated appreciation of time. By being able to access memories and tell ourselves, are

you know, fashion our own life narrative? Um, we are able to deal with some of the some of the consequences of this awareness of time. You know, when we can think about the future and think about the fact that one day we're going to die, but at the same time we can say to ourselves, well, I'm going to do everything I can to live the best life. I can make a meaningful contribution, to leave a legacy

and to live on in the memories of others. And so that process um of thinking about the future and what that might inspire UM in my mind got me thinking about the past. How people can use the past, use their memories for past as a way to cope with these existential anxieties. So that's how I first got into it, was just thinking about, well if the if you're kind of afraid of the future, can you use

the past as a way to cope with that fear? Um, And then it started going from there, Well, it looks like the past can do lots of stuff for us and puzzling out the pieces of our lives and how they fit together. Nostalgia can be incredibly useful. But there's also the temptation to use nostalgia like a movie set, rolling it in and out of our lives, mistaking the movie set as a reality, and glossing over the details

that are less charming or wonderful than we've remembered. In her essay in the New York Review of Books, Z. D. Smith, who is of Jamaican descent, rights of nostalgia, quote, in that period, I could not vote marrying my husband, have my children work in the university, I work in, or live in my neighborhood. Time travel is a dis grecitionary art, a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.

The initial like uh uh. The mechanism of it in terms of survival is like, oh, it's a coping mechanism, and you will be you know, sort of soothed, presumably. But instead what's happening is angry. Now used to be better, real angry. It's not back then like it. It's there's some problem going on where it's not soothing at all anymore.

It's just like the longing has superseded any sort of benefit the pleasant memory had, and now it's sort of like this weird anger Maker for a Lot of People podcast co host Holly Fry and editor Christopher Hasiotis explore the problem of imagining a past that wasn't If you look at ed Greece when has written in the seventies and the film that came out in the eighties, it's looking at the fifties in a very very nostalgic rosie view.

Everything's great, everyone's dancing, and the dancing is great, but it completely ignored as all the social upheaval about around the corner. It ignores the poor living conditions for a significant amount of the population. And so I wonder if we take this thing, which on a personal, you know, individual animal basis, is helpful, and if it's applied culturally, it prevents us from I don't know, looking accurately at

our at our own past. Well, first of all, let's get it straight, like clearly Greece as a documentary and it's accurate. Now, I'm not like a big grease person. I just I'm sure there are people that think that's

exactly what the fifties was. Like you, I know I did when my sister watched that movie every two days when she was a kid, and I thought, oh, that, well, that's what it was like a long time ago, in the past, years ago, at the time you were innocent in that you were ignorant of the things going on around you. So it feels like that time was wonderful and delightful and full of nothing but glitter and breakfast cereal. But in fact, really you're just longing for the time

when you didn't know better. The problem is that this kind of rhetoric, this a simpler time, become such an ingrained idea that it's taken as a universal truth, which is what I think nostalgia does, at least when it's like this sort of super crowdsourced and nostalgia, there was one truth. It was great, we had good times all the time. And it's like, no, it's there's so much more texture to any given moment in history than that

times before you were even born. You look back on these these things that must have been great back then. But you know, if you gave me a time machine, I could take you somewhere and show you that it was much worse than you think it was. And when it comes to childhood nostalgia, the memories created in the nostalgia factories of the mind can be very different from other family members experiences. I sort of experience that with

my siblings sometimes and my friends. I don't know if it's just because I'm super cynical, but like, I mean, like any family, we had complicated stuff and it sometimes we're great and sometimes weren't. But as we've aged and like my mom has passed, and when my siblings talk about are growing up years and there's a big gap between them and me, So there's there's a different childhood experience as part of it. But like they'll just talk about like this magical, wonderful thing, and I'm like, did

we grow up in the same house? Like sometimes it was cool, but do you remember the Okay, okay, hey you're happy. I'm not gonna mess it up. And it is kind of an interesting I mean, that's it's like nostalgia has driven the bus at that point, and it's kind of like covering the puddles that were ad and just whitewashing the yucky bits and everything's good. It's all happy. Remember those amazing cakes that we got on our birthday, So those we're pretty great, And maybe that's a you

know again, that's a cultural survival mechanism. It keeps your family closer that if you actually had to talk about all the things that were complicated all the time with your family, families wouldn't stick together. The problem is when nostalgia is used as a manipulating force, fomenting hyper nationalistic pride that would have wide swaths of the population cast aside in favor of an America that never really existed

in the first place. And I wonder how much of that is at play with UM A lot of what's going on around the world right now politically in terms of I mean, it's so we're recording a couple of days after the vote for the Brexit and the referendum on that it seems like from a lot of the data that was driven by the older electorate UM and a lot of people who express that they are really no check for lack of a better word, about the way things used to be before the EU before you know,

there was before borders were as open, before labor markets were as open. And I think we see that a lot of that in the US too, in certain political movements, people wanting things to be the way they were when when they were younger, or when they understood things better when there was more. Do you think they were exactly To all Americans tonight, in all of our cities and in all of our towns, I make this promise. We

will make America strong again. We will make America proud again, we will make America safe again, and we will make America great again. To be clear, nobody here is begrudging anyone of their nostalgia used in its best form. It can be something when you return to again and again, propping us up when we need it. I um bathe

in it, do you know what I mean? Like our entire house, my husband is the same, is filled with Star Wars toys that we had when we were kids, all the way up to new stuffs, kind of like this, this hallway that's always open to you to like kind of still remember and retain that childlike wonder at something.

Holly's idea of nostalgia is beautiful, even helpful, in thinking of the past as a touchstone to something elemental about our existence, something full of awe, a reminder that on this planet, in this galaxy, in this universe, we somehow get to exist. In the next episode, we look at what happens when fear takes hold and desperation takes over. In the United States, we are a very suspicious nation.

We'd like to thank Larry Singleton for sharing his work with us, and we'd like to thank Clay Rutledge for showing us the ways nostalgia can bolster us and our times of need. And thank you to Holly Fry of stuff you missed in history class and editor Christopher Hessiotis for taking a seat at the table and discussing nostalgia. The Stuff of Life is written an executive produced by

me Julie Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Original music is by Noel Brown, and editorial oversight is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagin and Head of Production Jerry Rowland. This episode also featured music by Tristan McNeil, Aaron Grubbs, and Dylan Fagin. If you have a story you'd like to share with us, you can call into our podcast line at one eight four four h s W Stuff That's Stuff. We'll be doing a wrap up episode at the end of the season and we want to hear

your voice in it, so leave a message. You can find The Stuff of Life on Facebook and Twitter. And you can email us at the Stuff of Life at how staff works dot com. If you're just looking at your own life and your own sphere of existence, to a lot of people, that was the way life was. And you know, I think that's why it's a lot of times vialable to be able to look beyond yourself and connect with others. Are I don't know, Yeah, sorry, that's another ship hippie