Top 5: Love the Past, But Don't Live There

Summary

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos
Episode: Top 5: Love the Past, But Don't Live There
Release Date: November 18, 2024

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Introduction: Celebrating Nostalgia in the Happiness Lab

In the milestone fifth-anniversary episode of The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos, the conversation pivots to explore one of the most relatable and bittersweet human emotions—nostalgia. Dr. Santos revisits one of her most cherished episodes, "Why Nostalgia Ain't so Rosy," featuring the beloved actor Rob Lowe, and delves deep into the psychology behind our longing for the past.

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A Revisit with Rob Lowe: The Allure and Pitfalls of Nostalgia

Timestamp: [05:00] – [10:36]

Dr. Santos reminisces about her engaging Zoom interview with Rob Lowe during the COVID lockdown. Despite technical challenges and playful jabs about her smile ([05:35]), the conversation with Lowe was both entertaining and enlightening. Lowe, an emblematic figure of the 80s, shares his fondness for nostalgic memories—from classic movies like St. Elmo's Fire and The Outsiders to the contagious energy of his youth.

Notable Quote:
Rob Lowe reflects on his nostalgic tendencies, stating, “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.” ([06:18])

Lowe emphasizes the dual nature of nostalgia, acknowledging its power to bring joy while cautioning against becoming ensnared by idealized pasts. This balance sets the stage for understanding how nostalgia impacts our present happiness and future decisions.

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Exploring Nostalgia with Felipe de Brigard

Timestamp: [10:36] – [35:25]

To gain a more scientific perspective, Dr. Santos introduces Felipe de Brigard, a professor of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy at Duke University. De Brigard provides a historical context, explaining that nostalgia was once deemed a neurological condition affecting soldiers in the 1600s. Over time, research has shifted to recognize nostalgia's positive effects on well-being.

Notable Quote:
De Brigard elaborates, “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.” ([12:55])

He discusses how nostalgia serves as a mental coping mechanism, especially during times of loneliness or isolation. However, Dr. Santos and de Brigard caution that while reminiscing can boost mood, it often involves rosy retrospection—the tendency to remember the past more fondly than it truly was.

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The Science of Rosy Retrospection and Prospection

Timestamp: [21:12] – [28:13]

De Brigard introduces the concepts of rosy retrospection and rosy prospection, explaining how our memories and expectations are skewed towards the positive. He describes a study where participants who went on a bike trip initially predicted high enjoyment ([25:36]). However, during the trip, their reported enjoyment dipped ([26:45]). Post-trip, their memories reflected a more positive experience than what was actually felt in the moment.

Notable Quote:
De Brigard summarizes, “Our memories are so biased that sometimes we experience nostalgia for a past that never even occurred, for one that we only imagined happening.” ([34:50])

This cognitive bias not only affects how we recall past events but also influences how we anticipate future experiences, often leading to unrealistic expectations.

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The Dark Side of Nostalgia: Impacts on Decision-Making

Timestamp: [28:13] – [35:25]

While nostalgic memories can enhance present happiness by reducing loneliness and fostering a sense of continuity, they can also distort reality and impair decision-making. Dr. Santos discusses how rosy retrospection might lead individuals to remain in unfulfilling relationships or unsatisfactory job situations, believing the past was better and neglecting current issues.

Notable Quote:
Rob Lowe warns, “We will make America great again.” highlighting how political movements exploit nostalgia by promising a return to an idealized past. ([29:50])

De Brigard points out that this selective memory can fuel harmful ideologies and resistance to progress, as people cling to imagined utopias rather than addressing present realities.

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Rob Lowe's Strategies for Healthy Nostalgia

Timestamp: [35:25] – [41:12]

In the latter part of the episode, Rob Lowe shares his personal strategies for balancing nostalgia with present-focused happiness. Having navigated substance addiction and public scrutiny, Lowe emphasizes the importance of living in the moment and being content with the present.

Notable Quote:
Lowe advises, “True happiness is being present in this moment and your mind's not telling you, hey, you should be doing X, Y, Z... and you are fully present in whatever you are doing and content with that.” ([40:09])

He underscores the value of understanding the fallibility of memories and not allowing idealized pasts to overshadow current experiences. By recognizing and mitigating the biases of nostalgia, individuals can appreciate their memories without compromising their current well-being.

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Conclusion: Embracing the Present While Honoring the Past

Dr. Santos wraps up the episode by highlighting the delicate balance between cherishing past memories and engaging fully with the present. Drawing from both scientific research and personal anecdotes from guests like Rob Lowe, the episode underscores the importance of mindfulness and accurate memory recall in fostering genuine happiness. By acknowledging the biases inherent in nostalgic thinking, listeners are empowered to enjoy their past without letting it dictate their future decisions.

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Key Takeaways:

1. Nostalgia as a Coping Mechanism: Nostalgia can alleviate feelings of loneliness and enhance present happiness but comes with the risk of distorted memories.

2. Rosy Retrospection and Prospection: Our recollection of the past and expectations for the future are often overly positive, which can skew our perception and decision-making.

3. Impact on Decisions: Idealized memories may lead individuals to make choices that favor past experiences over present well-being.

4. Strategies for Balance: Emphasizing mindfulness and present-focused living can help mitigate the negative effects of nostalgic biases.

5. Understanding Memory Biases: Recognizing that memories are not perfect recordings but constructed narratives allows for healthier engagement with both past and present.

This episode serves as a comprehensive exploration of nostalgia's role in happiness, blending scientific insights with personal stories to offer listeners a nuanced understanding of how to honor their past without hindering their present.

Transcript

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Painful Thoughts I could catch anything sitting in this doctor's waiting room. A kid just wiped his runny nose.

[Rob Lowe]

On my jacket and the guy next.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

To me sitting in a pool of perspiration insists on sharing my armrest. Next time, make an appointment with an Amazon One medical provider. There's no waiting and no sweaty guy. Amazon One Medical health care just got less painful. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

[Felipe de Brigard]

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations. IPhone XS are later required charge time and actual results will vary. Pushkin 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 so. It's a show from season three called why Nostalgia Ain't so Rosy. And I think I know why you had me grab this one out. But why don't you tell the listeners? Is it because of our main guessed 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 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. 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. Cause 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? Well, Rob and 80s movies, obviously, 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.

[Rob Lowe]

Okay, ready?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

A C. One of those. Orange juice? Yeah. Like, when you hear the word nostalgia, where do your thoughts go?

[Lee Thompson]

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 salt water, 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. That really gets me nostalgic.

[Dr. 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. If you're a child of the 80s 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 80s movies like St. Elmo's Fire and the Outsiders. He was a member of the infamous Brat Pack. He was on the COVID of Teen Beat 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?

[Lee Thompson]

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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

And let's not Even get started on his hair.

[Lee Thompson]

I used more hair mousse than any human being should ever use.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

All this goes to say that even though I was trying to be my smoothest professional podcast Yale professor self, when I chatted with Rob, I was finding it really hard to hold it together.

[Lee Thompson]

When the carpenters come on the radio and you're, like, immediately next to your grandpa co driving his station wagon and you're 9 or 11 years old, it's awesome. It's magic. You're in a time machine. You're literally in a time machine.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

But I love the time machine point because in some sense, you've created that time machine for other people. Even for me. Just talking with you on the 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?

[Lee Thompson]

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, 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.

[Dr. 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? 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. So, full disclosure, I am a nostalgia junkie. When I have A tough day at work. I rewatch 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.

[Lee Thompson]

I love nostalgia. I love that I'm on this podcast right now because I'm very big on it.

[Dr. 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.

[Lee Thompson]

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.

[Dr. 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.

[Lee Thompson]

One of the things I remember that crazy time was going to see him at Giant Stadium. It's the Born in the USA tour. Talk about nostalgia.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

But Rob's concert memories are also a bit different than many of ours.

[Lee Thompson]

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. I get really, like, 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.

[Dr. 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.

[Lee Thompson]

And I used that as an excuse to go up to the cutest girl in the school and kind of try to chat her 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 open 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 Lauren Beatty, which I took as a huge compliment.

[Dr. 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.

[Lee Thompson]

I love the 80s, but I had obviously a very, very, very unique seat at the 80s.

[Dr. 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.

[Felipe de Brigard]

I'm an addict to nostalgia.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Yes.

[Felipe de Brigard]

I love it. I relish that.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Felipe is an academic triple threat. He's a professor of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy at Duke University.

[Felipe de Brigard]

Full disclosure. There are times in which I feel that I was born 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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

But Felipe isn't just a fan of nostalgia. He's also an academic expert on the topic.

[Felipe de Brigard]

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 cow bells. 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, mainly a neurological illness. And also that it was associated with depression and 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.

[Dr. 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.

[Felipe de Brigard]

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 in. You can do it, right?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

One of the times that Our brains especially seek out old memories is when we're feeling more alone than usual.

[Felipe de Brigard]

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.

[Dr. 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. Past us's didn't always make the smartest choices. Something my 80s idol, Rob Lowe knows all too well.

[Lee Thompson]

Look, there are people who live through the 80s and there are people who live through the 80s.

[Dr. 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.

[Lee Thompson]

And I don't think nostalgia is nostalgia without that underpinning, you know, and also looking back on anything, you have 2020 hindsight. So if you're being nostalgic and you're looking back, implicit in that is, what would I have done differently?

[Dr. 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.

[Lee Thompson]

It's like talking about the greatest beer pong game you ever played. You're like, yeah, it's great. Well, did you vomit? Yeah, I vomited, but it was still great. Or like.

[Dr. 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. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. This month is all about gratitude. And so today I wanted to give a shout out to my mom. Mom, thanks for everything you do. I got to give a nice shout out to my mom. But there's someone else we should all be giving a shout out to ourselves. It's sometimes hard to remind ourselves that we're all trying our best, and in this crazy world, that's not always easy. So here's a reminder to send some thanks to the people in your life that you love, including yourself. And a great way to extend gratitude to yourself is through therapy. Therapy can help you learn positive coping skills and how to set boundaries. It can empower you to be the best version of yourself. And therapy isn't just for folks who've experienced major trauma. It's for anyone wanting to help themselves out a bit. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. BetterHelp is entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com Lauri today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelph E-L-P.com Lauri L-A U R.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I'm Dr. Laurie Santos from the Happiness Lab. Intuit QuickBooks wants you to achieve your dreams of starting your own business and working for yourself. And if you're a small business owner launching a company, then you'll want to check out Mind the small business success stories from iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio and Intuit QuickBooks. Season one and two are out now and season three is launching Thursday, January 9, with new episodes coming out every other Thursday after that. So make sure you catch up and listen as hosts Austin Hankwitz and Janice Torres talk to small business owners about how they've grown and maintained their businesses and tackled the hurdles and challenges that come with being your own boss. From tracking money in and out to cutting through day to day management with an all encompassing platform like Intuit QuickBooks, you don't want to miss these inspiring stories of small business journeys. Listen to mind the small business success Stories on the iHeart app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Lee Thompson]

I mean.

[Rob Lowe]

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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

This is Lee Thompson, a professional 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.

[Rob Lowe]

Her fiance Bob, 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?

[Dr. 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.

[Rob Lowe]

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.

[Dr. 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.

[Rob Lowe]

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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Lee recognizes that our minds lie to us. And one of our mind's biggest misconceptions is that our recollections of the past are totally accurate.

[Rob Lowe]

Our memories are pretty fallible. That seems like a judgy word. But our memories are not necessarily like a video recorder.

[Dr. 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. Lee has argued that we simply tend to forget the parts of an event that weren't positive.

[Rob Lowe]

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. 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.

[Dr. 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.

[Rob Lowe]

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.

[Dr. 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.

[Rob Lowe]

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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

But rosy retrospections 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 Rosie 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.

[Rob Lowe]

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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

The idea of rosy prospection and retrospection fit well with what Li experienced in her own honeymoon. But did Li'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 Crump was organizing a bike trip down the coast of California for his students.

[Rob Lowe]

So we thought, oh my gosh, this is fantastic. It's like our perfect dream study.

[Dr. 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? Subjects remembered their trip much better than it was. They said their experience was a 26 out of 28. On average, the biker's final post trip rating was higher than their enjoyment had actually sleep in at any single point during the trip. Now that the trip was over, it was awesome.

[Rob Lowe]

When you ask people, oh, you have this event coming up, how are you feeling? Oh my gosh, it's going to be fantastic. I'm so excited. This is going to be so pleasureful. And then during the event, 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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Now, at first glance, the positive biases Lee identified may seem like a great design feature of the mind. Rosy 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. But 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?

[Rob Lowe]

I remember distinctly having the time of my life at, I don't know, what do you call them, kind of small town kind of 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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Even though she's a world expert on memory biases, Lee still sometimes falls prey to the problems of her own nostalgia.

[Rob Lowe]

Well, I made the mistake of doing that not so long ago, and I was dizzy. I got a migraine headache. The cotton candy was terrible. Like, how does anybody eat that stuff?

[Dr. 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. 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 retrospections, ones that can be used against us when we least expect it.

[Rob Lowe]

We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together we will make America great again.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

We'll explore this dark side of nostalgia when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

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[Felipe de Brigard]

I'm from Colombia and that's where I grew up until I moved to the States 18 years ago.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Nostalgia expert Felipe de Bregard'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 Cholera. 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.

[Felipe de Brigard]

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. Like this is not at all how I imagine it, right?

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Our rosy retrospections 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 Huvenal, we usually find that those past situations aren't as good as we rosily 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 us that everything in life would be peachy if we could just return to the good old days.

[Felipe de Brigard]

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 that in the past.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Felipe saw just this pattern in his own country's right wing propaganda amid attempts to end decades of political violence.

[Felipe de Brigard]

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 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.

[Dr. 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.

[Felipe de Brigard]

You go like, holy moly. I would be so much better off if I was in that imagined situation that I never live, 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.

[Dr. 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?

[Felipe de Brigard]

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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

But there's also a second way to avoid the problems of nostalgia.

[Felipe de Brigard]

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.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

As I heard more of 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.

[Lee Thompson]

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.

[Dr. 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.

[Lee Thompson]

One of my greatest fears was always being a one hit wonder. Four decades in, I still wake up and go, am I a one hit wonder?

[Dr. 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, kinda sucky.

[Lee Thompson]

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.

[Dr. 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.

[Lee Thompson]

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.

[Dr. 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?

[Lee Thompson]

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 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 monkey brain part of yourself is shut off and you are fully present in whatever you are doing and content with that, that is the definition of true happiness.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

For me, 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.

[Lee Thompson]

I've been sober now 30 years and it changed my life. And one of the big tenets 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.

[Dr. 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, 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. 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 I definitely still want my MTV Amazon One Medical Presents Painful Thoughts I could catch anything sitting in this doctor's waiting room. A kid just wiped his runny nose on my jacket and the guy next to me sitting in a pool of perspiration insists on sharing my armrest. Next time, make an appointment with an Amazon One Medical provider. There's no waiting and no sweaty guy. Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful.