Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos Top 5: Love the Past, But Don't Live There About this episode Happiness Lab is five years old. To mark our birthday, Dr Laurie has picked her favorite five episodes from the archive. The show Why Nostalgia Ain't So Rosy was certainly a memorable one for her.
Actor Rob Lowe LOVES the 1980s. And who can blame him? He was one of the most famous men on the planet. But, as he tells Dr Laurie, he's careful not to wallow in nostalgia for the music, fashions and events of his youth too much - and happiness science backs him up on this.
Research suggests that our memories of the past can be very selective and highly unreliable - causing us to misremember events and cast them in a rosy glow. Sadly, this also causes us to make very bad decisions about what will make us happy in the future.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:39 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
1:48 Laurie Santos? It's birthday season here at the Happiness Lab. We are celebrating our fifth year anniversary. And it's prompted us to go back into the archive to pull out five of my most memorable and meaningful episodes from the hundreds that we've made. My producer, Ryan, has number three on the list, which is...
2:04 Speaker 03 So it's a show from season three called Why Nostalgia Ain't So Rosie. And I think I know why you're happy to grab this one out. Why don't you tell the listeners?
2:10 Laurie Santos? Is it because of our main guest, who we start with? My heartthrob? Yes, so this is an episode where I got to interview the actor Rob Lowe, who definitely was one of my 80s heartthrobs. I believe you made fun of me for a smile on my face in the Zoom interview. Yes, I looked a little cheesy.
2:28 Speaker 03 And this was the first big season we made during the COVID lockdown. So I remember sitting with you on Zoom and with Rob Lowe. He told so many funny stories and did all the accents. We couldn't fit them all in.
2:37 Laurie Santos? Yeah, I mean, and aside from all his Hollywood anecdotes, Rob also really helped us understand the psychology of nostalgia, both the parts of nostalgia that we get right that help us and the parts of nostalgia that lead us astray.
2:48 Speaker 03 Because Rob's very nostalgic. I mean, he, there's lots of things in his youth he remembers fondly. But as I remember, he's also careful not to get caught up in them. What are the things you get nostalgic about?
2:57 Laurie Santos? Well, Rob and 80s movies, obviously. You know, really cheesy music from the 90s. I mean, there's so many things I get nostalgic about. And I think that's the beauty of our understanding of nostalgia, right? Is that nostalgia can kind of bring us joy. But as we'll see in this episode, it's something that we don't want to get caught up in. We want to be nostalgic without falling prey to the pitfalls of nostalgia. And that is what I think you'll learn today. So here is why nostalgia ain't so rosy.
3:38 Laurie Santos? When you hear the word nostalgia, where do your thoughts go?
3:42 Speaker 04 Oh, boy. You know, it gets triggered, you know, usually by music or a smell, like hot air and pines, that combination. And then if you throw in a little bit of saltwater, reminds me of the very first time I ever saw California in 1976, when I first set foot out here and started my journey to where I am today. So that really gets me nostalgic.
4:08 Laurie Santos? You're listening to one of the most surreal conversations of my life. I'm talking about nostalgia with the actor who personifies some of my fondest 80s memories, Rob Lowe.
4:19 Laurie Santos? If you're a child of the eighties like me, Rob is an icon. He was part of pretty much everything I'm embarrassed to love about that decade. He was in ABC after-school specials. He starred in classic eighties movies like St. Elmo's Fire and The Outsiders. He was a member of the infamous Brat Pack. He was on the cover of Teenbeat magazine, week after week. He dated all my teen girl idols, from Demi Moore to Winona Ryder. He played the saxophone, or at least I thought he did. Do you actually play the sax, or was that just for the movie?
4:50 Speaker 04 Let me tell you something. I am a longtime actor. I can fake do almost anything. I can fake shoot a gun. I can fake rappel. I can fake play the saxophone like no other. And I have fooled many a person with it.
5:07 Laurie Santos? And let's not even get started on his hair.
5:10 Speaker 04 I used more hair mousse than any human being should ever use.
5:15 Laurie Santos? All this goes to say that even though I was trying to be my smoothest professional podcast Yell professor self when I chatted with Rob, I was finding it really hard to hold it together.
5:25 Speaker 04 When the carpenters come on the radio and you're like, immediately next to your grandpa, co-driving his station wagon, and you're nine or 11 years old, it's awesome. It's magic. You're in a time machine. You're literally in a time machine.
5:45 Laurie Santos? But I love that the time machine point because, you know, in some sense, you've created that time machine for other people. You know, even for me, like just talking with you on this Zoom call, I hear your voice and I hear certain ways that you express things and certain parts of your smile. And I'm taken back to, you know, movies I watched in grade school and with friends and fun times in college. And, you know, what does it feel like to be creating the time machine for other people?
6:08 Speaker 04 That is amazing. That makes me feel so good. It really does, because I can put the shoe on the other foot so easily. You know, when I meet my heroes or whatever and go, hey, man, what that song you wrote? I played it at my wedding. To me, hearing feedback like that, at the end of the day, it's the real reason, I think, that I became an actor and got into this business, was to move people and create memories for them. Because memories are all you got. That's all you got.
6:42 Laurie Santos? Rob is right here. When we look back at our lives, our memories are all we've got. And reliving all those nostalgic moments often feels really fun. But nostalgia can also cause pain. Research shows that if we're not careful, our happiest memories have a way of messing with our future well-being, making us downplay bad experiences, or totally misremember the past, which can set us up for some potentially damaging choices. So how can we experience the benefits of nostalgia in a way that doesn't hurt our happiness? How can we relive our fond past memories in a way that doesn't hurt our future selves?
7:23 Laurie Santos? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos.
7:49 Laurie Santos? So, full disclosure, I am a nostalgia junkie. When I have a tough day at work, I re-watch old movies or play the classic songs that I loved in high school. So you can imagine my total glee when I learned that I share a fondness for all things old school with my 80s heartthrob, Rob Lowe.
8:05 Speaker 04 I love nostalgia. I love that I'm on this podcast right now because I'm very big on it.
8:10 Laurie Santos? The science shows that Rob and I are not alone here. Nostalgia is an incredibly common experience. In fact, one study found that around 80% of participants reported feeling nostalgic at least once a week.
8:22 Speaker 04 If you were to look over my shoulder at night when I'm going down my YouTube wormhole, it's all nostalgia. It's all history nostalgia-related, behind-the-scenes of 70s music, all of that stuff.
8:36 Laurie Santos? Like me, Rob loves thinking back to the songs of his youth and the concerts he enjoyed when he was young. For him, a big one was seeing his idol Bruce Springsteen live for the first time.
8:47 Speaker 04 One of the things I remember of that crazy time was going to see him at Giants Stadium. And it's the Born in the USA tour, talking about nostalgia.
8:56 Laurie Santos? But Rob's concert memories are also a bit different than many of ours.
9:01 Speaker 04 The stadium's full, it's just before showtime, and I walk in and people start noticing and saying hello and wanting an autograph. And the next thing I know, the entire stadium is chanting my name.
9:17 Speaker 04 I get really embarrassed, but the good news is that led the Springsteen people to get me the hell out of the stadium and backstage. And that's how I finally met Bruce.
9:27 Laurie Santos? The same is true for his memories of 80s television. Rob also loves to get nostalgic about bad old school TV. I told him stories of how I used to run off the school bus to catch my favorite afternoon shows. But Rob's childhood TV watching stories are a bit more over the top than mine. Because Rob wasn't just watching those ABC afternoon specials, he was also starring in them.
9:48 Speaker 04 And I used that as an excuse to go up to the cutest girl in the school and kind of try to chatter up. And her name was Jennifer, and one thing led to another, and she invited me to come to her house and watch the after school special. And she was like, you know, my dad's in acting, so you know, that'll be great. So I roll up to her house, it's a mansion in Beverly Hills, first time I've ever seen a mansion. And I opened the door and it's Cary Grant in a bathrobe. And so we watched my little stupid after school special with Cary Grant. And afterwards, he was like, you remind me, son of a young Warren Beatty, which I took as a huge compliment.
10:27 Laurie Santos? As I heard more and more about Rob's incredible stories, I realized that he might not be the best starting point for understanding the average person's connection between nostalgia and happiness.
10:37 Speaker 04 I love the 80s, but I had obviously a very, very, very unique seat at the 80s.
10:44 Laurie Santos? So to get a more scientific sense of why we love thinking about the past, I decided to turn to someone else I thought could help, my friend and colleague, Felipe de Brigard.
10:52 Speaker 05 I'm an addict to nostalgia. Yes, I love it. I relish that feeling.
10:57 Laurie Santos? Felipe is an academic triple threat. He's a professor of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy at Duke University.
11:06 Speaker 05 Full disclosure, there are times in which I feel that I was born in the wrong time. I love the 1920s. I love hats. I love like dressing up nicely, you know, like chatting with Virginia Woolf. I have a very nostalgic feeling about that.
11:21 Laurie Santos? But Felipe isn't just a fan of nostalgia. He's also an academic expert on the topic.
11:26 Speaker 05 The term nostalgia was coined in the 1600s and it was originally considered a neurological condition, which is very interesting because neurology and psychiatry were, well, there was no such a thing as psychiatry back then, but it was very clearly considered a condition of the body. And it was thought to mainly affect army personnel. It was described in Germany and it was mostly thought of to affect Swiss soldiers. And then there were all sorts of very interesting origin stories as to why people felt nostalgia. One of them had to do with eardrum damage due to the incessant clanging of the cowbells in Switzerland. There were stories about atmospheric pressure and so on and so forth. But it was always considered a malady. It was considered an illness of the body,
12:11 Speaker 05 mainly a neurological illness, and also that it was associated with depression, anxiety, lack of appetite and so on. It wasn't until much later where people started to think that there might be something positive about nostalgia.
12:27 Laurie Santos? It's kind of amazing that it took hundreds of years for scholars to realize that nostalgia actually felt good. But these days, scientists are learning that the effects of this bittersweet emotion are often more sweet than bitter. In fact, psychologists have observed that thinking wistfully about the past can make us feel really good.
12:44 Speaker 05 We use memories, just as we use imagination, to make us feel better now. So nostalgia is a very good way of going on a little mental vacation without leaving your home. And when you cannot leave your home, that's the best way you can do it, right?
13:01 Laurie Santos? One of the times that our brains especially seek out old memories is when we're feeling more alone than usual.
13:07 Speaker 05 There's been a lot of research on making people feel kind of lonely, isolated, and stuff like that. That tends to elicit a little bit more feelings of nostalgia. So it looks as though it is when you're in a negative situation that you're more likely to generate this sense of nostalgia.
13:24 Laurie Santos? If you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab, you probably know that feeling socially connected is an important condition for happiness. But it's not just the right now social connection we get from seeing friends in the present that makes us happy. Research shows we also get a happiness boost from merely thinking about past social times, especially if we're feeling lonely in the present. As one scientific paper nicely put it, "During nostalgic reverie, the mind is peopled." But science has found another way that nostalgia can boost our well-being. Re-experiencing the past can help us feel better about how things went back in the day, which is important, because let's face it, our past selves weren't always our best selves.
14:06 Laurie Santos? Past us's didn't always make the smartest choices, something my 80's idol, Rob Lowe, knows all too well.
14:13 Speaker 04 Look, there are people who lived through the 80's, and there are people who lived through the 80's.
14:18 Laurie Santos? If you've read Rob's memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, you know that Rob had some pretty rough times early in his career. And that's one of the reasons he personally loves nostalgia so much. When we look back at some of the bad choices of our youth, we often do so with a bit more clarity than we had when we were living through those events.
14:38 Speaker 04 And I don't think nostalgia is nostalgia without that, underpinning. You know, and also, looking back on anything, you have 20/20 hindsight. So if you're being nostalgic and you're looking back, implicit in that is, what would I have done differently?
14:55 Laurie Santos? This redemptive lens, through which we naturally view the past, means that we remember even the worst events with a positive spin. We recall the good parts and neglect the not-so-good, or even embarrassing parts.
15:08 Speaker 04 It's like talking about the greatest beer pong game you ever played. You're like, "Yes, great!" "Well, did you vomit?" "Yeah, I vomited, but it was still great." Or like...
15:18 Laurie Santos? When we get back from the break, we'll look in more detail at why we tend to distort the past so badly. Or to paraphrase Rob, how it is that our brains get all the great beer pong of the past without any of the vomit. When the Happiness Lab returns, we'll see that our rosy, redemptive view of the past stems from an unfortunate design feature of our minds, one that comes with a huge happiness cost that we don't often recognize. We'll learn that what seems like a harmless bit of rosy nostalgia can sometimes cause us to make bad decisions in the present. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.
15:54 Laurie Santos? There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. And I have to tell you, when it comes to my go-to gift this season, I think this might be the year of the hoodie, specifically Quince's Mongolian Cashmere Full Zip Hoodie, which I bought for myself and absolutely love. You know when you get something that's so comfortable, so soft, and so easy to throw on that you suddenly want to wear it every day? That's where I am with this hoodie. And I started to think that instead of agonizing over what to get everyone on my holiday list, I might just buy them all one of these. I mean, who on my list wouldn't love a gift of perfect coziness? But it's not just hoodies. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian
16:38 Laurie Santos? cashmere and organic cotton. And if a cashmere hoodie isn't quite right for someone on your list, Quince has so much more, from leather bags and jewelry to cozy scarves, down outerwear, and even hotel-quality bedding. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. The holidays have a way of reminding us what matters most: our health, our loved ones, and making memories together. That's why MassMutual's Living Well Rider is now included with eligible
17:21 Laurie Santos? MassMutual Whole Life Insurance as part of their commitment to supporting policy owners' total wellbeing. It's about helping people live well so they can live on. Learn more at massmutual.com/wellness. That's massmutual.com/wellness. OK, quick pop quiz. Ready? What's your daily routine for fueling your gut? If your brain immediately went, "Ah, that's fair." We spend a lot of time thinking about what fuels our body. But when it comes to gut health, things can start to feel surprisingly complicated. The good news, it doesn't have to be. That's why Kashi Gut Health Granola is such an easy win. It's a straightforward, delicious way to help fuel your gut,
18:03 Laurie Santos? made with prebiotics, fiber, and gut-activated cultures. Plus, it tastes good. Wait, let me rephrase that. Kashi Gut Health Granola is delicious. Their blueberry almond granola, for example, starts with whole grain oats and combines them with, well, blueberries and almonds. It's right there in the name. But it's so good. And Kashi Gut Health Granola makes a great breakfast. It's also the kind of afternoon snack that's just so satisfying. I mean, it's straightforward. It fuels your gut and it tastes great. Gut fuel is in the bag. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola.
18:47 Speaker 06 I mean, there's nothing like being on a bike and suffering with people, rejoicing with people. You know, to me, it's a real shared experience.
18:55 Laurie Santos? This is Lee Thompson, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She's an expert on the ways that our memories can play tricks on us. But Lee is also a world champion cyclist. She took up the sport late in life, encouraged by a very devoted teacher, her fiancee, Bob.
19:12 Speaker 06 You know, he was a cyclist and, you know, my response was like any normal person's response who doesn't ride a bike, which is, well, anybody can ride a bike. Like, what's the big deal? But then he said, "Well, do you know what it's like to go 25 miles an hour on a bike? And can you do that for an hour?" And it's like, okay, well, is this a challenge or what?
19:32 Laurie Santos? And Lee was up for that challenge. After she and Bob got married, they headed not for a beach vacation honeymoon, but for the San Juan Islands and day-long, grueling bike rides.
19:43 Speaker 06 I didn't know that my husband's secret plan was to get me to ride up Mount Constitution. If I would have read anything about that, I think I would have freaked myself out, said, are you kidding me? There's no way we're doing this. But it was only when we were like a quarter of the way up that he said, this is going to be a pretty serious climb. But by that time, I was already kind of one quarter into it.
20:09 Laurie Santos? A painful bike ride that's so steep, you don't even think you can finish it. That doesn't sound like most people's idea of a good honeymoon. But Lee gets nostalgic whenever she thinks about it.
20:19 Speaker 06 There was one time in my life where I could go back to. It would probably be that because it was just epic, you know, epic fun. But I know enough as a psychologist in my own research to know that on any given day, there was a sunburn, there wasn't enough food, somebody ran out of water. So not every moment was glorious.
20:45 Laurie Santos? Lee recognizes that our minds lie to us. And one of our minds' biggest misconceptions is that our recollections of the past are totally accurate.
20:53 Speaker 06 Our memories are pretty fallible. That seems like a judgy word, but our memories are not necessarily like a video recorder.
21:03 Laurie Santos? Human memory doesn't have the hard drive space to videotape life in its entirety. So our brains play fast and loose with the footage. The first thing we do is delete most of the boring parts. The half hour of your vacation that you spent in traffic, or the part where you had to wait for dinner to show up, or the 10 minutes you spent going through airport security. All those filler moments get dropped. But dropping those boring bits means that our memories are skewed in a very systematic way. The past seems to have a higher ratio of interesting moments to boring stuff than real life does. But that's not the only way our minds are biased. Our brains also don't like to recall the bad stuff. The sunburns and the rainy beach days and lost luggage. And so our brains cook the data.
21:46 Laurie Santos? Lee has argued that we simply tend to forget the parts of an event that weren't positive.
21:51 Speaker 06 For example, I know on my honeymoon, there was a day where both of us didn't wear sunscreen and there were very, very uncomfortable burns. I choose not to dwell on that. I choose not to make that the most important aspect. But anybody who's had a pretty bad sunburn knows that can be a deal breaker as far as your ability to enjoy the rest of the vacation.
22:18 Laurie Santos? Our minds are also wannabe movie directors. They really like a good story, the kind that has a happy ending. And that means that our brains unconsciously rewrite past events so that they seem more entertaining. That sunset becomes even more beautiful. That fish we caught becomes not just reasonably sized, but really, really huge. That beer pong game becomes more fun and less vomit-filled. And when we do manage to remember those annoying moments, they somehow magically transform into life lessons that provide a nice narrative arc.
22:50 Speaker 06 So what was an absolute disaster trip could turn out to be a hilarious story after the fact. Kind of like, oh, look at me, I managed to survive. That's kind of an extreme example of what we call story construction or sense-making. It becomes kind of a funny story to tell.
23:09 Laurie Santos? After all these edits, our memories are no longer accurate recordings of real-life events. They're unconsciously spin-doctored highlight reels. It's a bias that Lee and her colleagues have referred to as rosy retrospection.
23:21 Speaker 06 Which technically means that our memory for this bounded event in time is a lot more favorable and positive and fulfilling than was the actual experience of the event itself.
23:37 Laurie Santos? But rosy retrospectives aren't just memories we think back on passively. We also use them to predict what we will enjoy and won't enjoy in the future. And that leads to a second bias, what Lee and her colleagues call rosy prospection. When we think about a future event, like a dinner with friends or a vacation, we predict that it's going to be great, just like similar events are in our biased, positive memories.
24:01 Speaker 06 Anticipating that event, I probably wouldn't be thinking about the stress of going through an international airport and the stress of, I don't know, packing or not getting my bag. I'd just be thinking about, oh, the arrival and the perfect weather.
24:17 Laurie Santos? The idea of rosy prospection and retrospection fit well with what Lee experienced in her own honeymoon. But did Lee's hypothesis match what real people actually experience? Lee wanted to test this empirically, but she had to locate a pretty special population of subjects. She had to find a group of people who were about to undergo a positive experience in their lives, some sort of event that would make for a good memory. But those people also had to be willing to fill out a bunch of boring surveys during the event. What Lee didn't realize at the time was that her scientific solution to these problems would come, oddly enough, from the biking world. Her colleague Randy Crong was organizing a bike trip down the coast of California for his students.
24:57 Speaker 06 And so we thought, oh, my gosh, this is fantastic. It's like our perfect dream study.
25:04 Laurie Santos? Lee first had the students predict how much they'd enjoy the bike trip before it started. They were asked, how much do you agree with these statements? I'm going to enjoy this trip. I'm going to think this vacation is fun. I'm going to feel good during this trip, and so on. Subjects were also asked the same questions again when they were on the trip itself and after the trip when they were on their flight back home. So what did Lee find? Well, before the bike trip, subjects thought their enjoyment would be at a 27 out of 28 total points on Lee's measure. They thought the trip was going to be awesome. But by the second day, subject had dropped to only a 20 out of 28. The bikers' enjoyment stayed lower than they had initially predicted for the entire week. But what happened a single day after the bike tour ended?
25:50 Laurie Santos? Subjects remembered their trip much better than it was. They said their experience was a 26 out of 28. On average, the bikers' final post-trip rating was higher than their enjoyment had actually been at any single point during the trip. Now that the trip was over, it was awesome.
26:07 Speaker 06 When you ask people, "Oh, you have this event coming up. How are you feeling?" "Oh, my gosh, it's gonna be fantastic. I'm so excited. This is gonna be so pleasureful." And then during the event, "Ugh, my socks are wet. I forgot to bring mosquito repellent." You know, like, so yucky, you know, the food, they ran out of whatever. So there's a dampening, as we called it during the event. And then after the event, boom, all of a sudden, the rosy retrospection kicks in, where people are remembering the event as much more pleasureful than they reported during the event itself.
26:49 Laurie Santos? Now, at first glance, the positive biases Lee identified may seem like a great design feature of the mind. Rosie retrospection allows our memory banks to be filled with extra positive, less boring recordings of the past. And remembering all those positively edited memories makes us feel happier, less lonely, and even more redeemed in the present. All good stuff, really. But Lee's research also reveals a major dark side to these biases. Our positively skewed recollections aren't just passive recordings that we go back to when we're feeling nostalgic. We also use our memories in the present to make predictions about how we ought to be spending our time. So if our overly rosy memories are getting our past realities really wrong, what does that mean for the accuracy with which we're making the decisions of today?
27:35 Speaker 06 I remember distinctly having the time of my life at, I don't know, what do you call them, kind of small-town carnival things that you go to at night. They have these, like, rides, and you'd eat cotton candy. And I just remember thinking, "This is my thing. I want to go do that."
27:52 Laurie Santos? Even though she's a world expert on memory biases, Lee still sometimes falls prey to the problems of her own nostalgia.
27:59 Speaker 06 Well, I made the mistake of doing that not so long ago. And I was dizzy. I got a migraine headache. The cotton candy, ugh, was terrible. Like, how does anybody eat that stuff?
28:13 Laurie Santos? Lee naturally assumed that her fond memories of carnivals would accurately predict how positively her present self would feel if she jumped on a roller coaster or took that first bite of cotton candy. She assumed all the great things she remembered about fairs of the past would feel just as good today as they seemed in her nostalgic memories. But Lee's overly glossy memories of the past wound up reducing her current happiness and making her a little nauseous. Constantly rewriting the past in a favorable light may make us happier when we look back, but it also means we don't correctly adjust to the demands of the future. For instance, focusing on the highlights of a marriage or a job might cause us to stay in relationships or work environments that aren't good for us, where the bad times, in reality, outweigh the good.
28:58 Laurie Santos? But it's not just our personal choices that are led astray by our biased memories. When we get back from the break, we'll see that there are also societal costs to all these rosy retrospectives, ones that can be used against us when we least expect it.
29:12 Speaker 01 We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together, we will make America great again.
29:24 Laurie Santos? We'll explore this dark side of nostalgia when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.
29:34 Laurie Santos? There's nothing quite like having pieces in your closet you love and know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that same feeling. And I have to tell you, when it comes to my go-to gift this season, I think this might be the year of the hoodie, specifically Quince's Mongolian Cashmere Full Zip Hoodie, which I bought for myself and absolutely love. You know when you get something that's so comfortable, so soft, and so easy to throw on that you suddenly want to wear every day? That's where I am with this hoodie. And I started to think that instead of agonizing over what to get everyone on my holiday list, I might just buy them all one of these. I mean, who on my list wouldn't love a gift of perfect coziness? But it's not just hoodies. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere
30:18 Laurie Santos? and organic cotton. And if a cashmere hoodie isn't quite right for someone on your list, Quince has so much more, from leather bags and jewelry to cozy scarves, down outerwear, and even hotel-quality bedding. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada. And the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show. The holidays have a way of reminding us what matters most: our health, our loved ones, and making memories together. That's why MassMutual's Living Well Rider is now included with eligible
31:01 Laurie Santos? MassMutual Whole Life Insurance as part of their commitment to supporting policy owners' total wellbeing. It's about helping people live well so they can live on. Learn more at massmutual.com/wellness. That's massmutual.com/wellness. Okay, quick pop quiz. Ready? What's your daily routine for fueling your gut? If your brain immediately went, "Ah," that's fair. We spend a lot of time thinking about what fuels our body, but when it comes to gut health, things can start to feel surprisingly complicated. The good news: it doesn't have to be. That's why Kashi Gut Health Granola is such an easy win. It's a straightforward, delicious way to help fuel your gut, made with prebiotics, fiber, and gut-activated cultures.
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32:24 Speaker 05 I'm from Colombia, and that's where I grew up until I moved to the States 18 years ago.
32:31 Laurie Santos? Nostalgia expert Felipe de Brigard's immigrant experience explains why he relates so much to one of his favorite literary heroes: Juvenal Urbino, a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's famous book, Love in the Time of Colera. Like Felipe, Juvenal made the tough decision to leave Colombia to study abroad. But unlike Felipe, Juvenal's ignorance of his own rosy retrospections never let him properly process that decision.
32:57 Speaker 05 When he's in Paris, he feels extraordinarily nostalgic about going back to his hometown. And he wants to go back, doesn't enjoy Paris. And then, when he goes back, he's not happy. It's like, this is not at all how I imagine it, right?
33:11 Laurie Santos? Our rosy retrospectives mean that we spend the present constantly wishing we could go back to what it was like in the past. But in the rare cases where those wishes come true, as they did for Juvenal, we usually find that those past situations aren't as good as we rosaly remembered. To steal the eloquent words of Garcia Marquez, we become easy victims to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia. But the fact that our nostalgic tendencies are so easily deceived also makes us easy marks for people who might want to exploit a rosier past. Human minds are so prone to rosy retrospection that it's really simple to feed us a good story about what things were like back in the day, some imagined utopia that was better then than it is now, which is why so many political movements are keen to convince
33:56 Laurie Santos? us that everything in life would be peachy if we could just return to the good old days.
34:01 Speaker 05 That was the whole Trump campaign, right? Make America Great Again. And that again was clearly an indication that it was good before and that we should strive to do something like in the past.
34:13 Laurie Santos? Felipe saw just this pattern in his own country's right-wing propaganda amid attempts to end decades of political violence.
34:20 Speaker 05 I left Colombia very unhappy with the political situation. Some of the most horrible acts ever committed by a government, I think, in Colombia happened during that time. But what is very surprising to me is that, you know, many of the people that voted against the peace process had an extraordinarily distorted view of how the past was. So they were hoping to sort of go back to a kind of life that never occurred in Colombia, never. This is a situation again in which nostalgia is a very bad motivator.
34:51 Laurie Santos? And that's because the science shows that we don't just experience nostalgia for a past that we actually experienced. Our memories are so biased that we sometimes experience nostalgia for a past that never even occurred, for one that we only imagined happening.
35:05 Speaker 05 You go like, holy moly, I would be so much better off if I was in that imagined situation that I never lived, I never experienced, but I am very capable of mentally simulating relative to this state that I am in right now. It is just the worst possible way of going about making decisions.
35:25 Laurie Santos? So how can we protect ourselves from the nefarious parts of nostalgia? How can we get the benefits of our rosy past without all those biased memories hurting our current decisions? Felipe thinks one path forward is to pay attention to why we're turning to the past in the first place. What do our memories tell us we're missing in the present?
35:45 Speaker 05 You might think that what you want is to go back to high school, but really what is going to satisfy the desire is to get new friends.
35:55 Laurie Santos? But there's also a second way to avoid the problems of nostalgia.
35:58 Speaker 05 The funny thing is that it seems kind of counterintuitive because what I think we should do is to improve our memory of the past. We need historians really helping us dispel the delusions that nostalgia create. I think universities should hire historians. I think podcasters should interview historians. The best way to sort of minimize the distortions of nostalgia is to actually improve our memory.
36:25 Laurie Santos? As I heard more Felipe's strategies for preventing the problems of rosy retrospection, I realized I needed to talk to someone who had special insight into how to use our fond memories productively. Not a historian or scholar, but someone whose entire career could have been defined by the past, but wasn't. My 80s idol, Rob Lowe.
36:46 Speaker 04 Listen, I love the 80s as much as the next guy, but when people come up to me, the thing that I'm most proud of in all my career is that I never know what they're going to want to talk about. I love that I'm not anchored to any one era, or to any one TV show, or to any one movie. The 80s is merely a fantastic chapter that a lot of people like, including me.
37:17 Laurie Santos? Unlike many stars from the 80s, Rob managed not to get stuck there. Despite the fact that Rob is himself very nostalgic, and the fact that he is, for me at least, the absolute epitome of 80s nostalgia, he's seamlessly managed to move beyond that decade. Nearly all of Rob's biggest successes in movies, in TV, as an author, and now even in podcasting with his new show, Literally with Rob Lowe, they've all come since the 80s. For a self-proclaimed lover of nostalgia, Rob hasn't let his rosy retrospection affect his present success or his current happiness.
37:51 Speaker 04 One of my greatest fears was always being a one-hit wonder.
37:56 Speaker 04 Four decades in, I still wake up and go, "Am I a one-hit wonder?"
38:00 Laurie Santos? So what's Rob's secret? Well, even though he's not a psychologist, Rob seems to have an intuitive sense that our memories are more fallible than we realize. His unique cultural seat in the 80s has made him all too aware that we sometimes celebrate parts of the past that were, at the time, kind of sucky.
38:16 Speaker 04 So in the 80s, everybody shit all over the music. It seems shocking now. But like, when did Journeys Can't Stop Believin' become the national anthem? Because I remember the 80s. And people laughed at Journey. They thought they were a cheesy hack rock band. Now that's every college campus frat party, raise your beer, start crying and dancing song. It's the end of The Sopranos. If you'd have told me in 1984 that that was the song, I would have said, "No way."
38:50 Laurie Santos? While it's easy for all of us to misremember the past, that's a luxury that people who've lived in the public eye don't always have. Rob's problems with substance addiction and sex scandals are common knowledge. And that means that Rob has had to be honest with himself about the harmful actions he engaged in as a young man. It's made him penitent and more clear-eyed about the past. Rob's also gotten a newfound perspective on the challenges of teenage life. As a father to his own boys, Matthew and John, Rob's kids never became huge teen movie stars like their dad. Watching Matthew and John grow up with more run-of-the-mill adolescent milestones has made Rob realize just how odd his own experience was.
39:31 Speaker 04 My son is 18. Okay, so now he's world famous. That kid right there, 18, world famous. And it just takes my breath away. I'm like, I wouldn't wish that on that 18 year old kid. He's never home. He's on the road. He's making tons of money. And it's like, I can't believe it happened to me.
39:53 Laurie Santos? But Rob's biggest insight comes from something we talk about a lot on this podcast. To be fully happy, we need to get out of the past long enough to make the most of the present moment. When you think about happiness, do you think it's more about looking back, looking forward, a combination of both? Like, how do you think about it in your own life?
40:10 Speaker 04 It's not looking forward and not looking back, although we've been talking about nostalgia, which does make me happy, obviously, really happy. True happiness is, is being present in this moment. And your mind's not telling you, hey, you know what you should really be doing? You should be doing X, Y, and Z. Or, hey, you know, you should really go back. None of that. That part, that monkey brain part of yourself is shut off. And you are fully present in whatever you were doing, and content with that. That is the definition of true happiness for me.
40:45 Laurie Santos? This insight into the importance of making sure he's living in the present moment came from one of the hardest won battles of Rob's life.
40:52 Speaker 04 You know, I've been sober now 30 years. And it's, you know, it changed my life. And one of the big tenants of recovery is learning to live in the now, and learning to be happy with what's in front of you. To the extent that I'm able to do that on a daily basis is a direct correlation to how happy I am at any given time.
41:13 Laurie Santos? Nostalgia can be a pleasant experience, but our memories of the past can also hurt our present selves if we're not careful. But when we take a present focus, when we learn to be content with what's in front of us, when we recognize that we want to remember what's going on in the here and now as happily as possible, we can avoid the problems that come with an extra rosy retrospection. Rob's living proof that understanding our mind's biases can help us appreciate our past and even dig into all that yummy and psychologically beneficial nostalgia without the drawbacks. When we notice what we're longing for in the past, we can choose not to go backwards, but decide how to move forward in the future. Rob taught me that an accurate sense of the pros and cons of the past can be a helpful way to enjoy and make the most of the present.
41:58 Laurie Santos? Which was really good news for me, because I really, really wasn't ready to throw away my 80s playlist just yet. In fact, after chatting with Rob, I think it's time for a long classic 80s movie marathon. And maybe some cheesy music videos. Because I definitely still want my MTV.
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