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Nov. 3, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:49
1779 The Philosophy of Nostalgia
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My thoughts on nostalgia, for what they're worth.
I think nostalgia has two aspects to it.
One I think is good, and one I think is not so good.
So a guy was writing and saying that although he spent a lot of time drinking and smoking some pot in college, he looks back upon those as the best years of your life, and you can see that there is a significant idealization of the past that The American Constitution, the glory days of the British Empire, which has been revised pretty considerably now, but was fairly prevalent when I was a kid.
And there's even nostalgia for wartime.
And there was a lot of, you know, England's finest hour in the Battle of Britain that was certainly floating around.
So a lot of praise of the past.
And the question is, why?
Why would this be such a prevalent Emotion or experience, and it's related to sentimentality, though I think sentimentality is more about the present, and sentimentality is usually a lot more treacly.
So sentimentality is, as Jung said, the superstructure of brutality.
In other words, people who are very nasty tend to be very sentimental.
They tend to be very immortal, you could say.
And the reasons for that I've talked about before.
But let's just focus on nostalgia.
Just sort of separate it from those other experiences.
Now... When we look back upon a good time that we had, that's not quite the same as nostalgia.
So having a pleasant memory is not quite the same.
a great vacation that I had, or I mean, I came off a real high in 2009, both after the Liberty Forum speech and the Batnarek debate, realizing that I was good at that, public speaking,
that was a huge leap forward for me, and I'm very, that was a huge leap forward for me, and I'm very, very happy and proud, and of course, the birth of my daughter, and being home to raise my daughter, so many great memories about my time with Izzy, my memories of great times I've had with my wife, and giggles and laughs we've We used to have these weekends.
I remember telling her at the time, this was many years ago, that our weekends were just Our weekends were just perfect together.
I mean, we'd go for walks, we would cuddle, we'd watch a movie, we'd chat, we'd cook and eat and play Scrabble, and just perfect.
They were like, I remember saying this at the time, like, my weekdays are like the string, and our weekends are like the pearls, the beads, perfectly perfect.
And I just basically get through the week to get to the weekend with her.
And... That is not the same as nostalgia.
Because I think in nostalgia, there's not just pleasant memories, but there's a general sense that the past was better than the present.
But it goes even further than that.
Not only was the past better than Nostalgia is not so much an overvaluing of the past as it is an undervaluing of the future.
So you can think back upon pleasant memories, but you don't feel that bitter sweetness of nostalgia unless you feel that those days have gone by and are not likely to return.
So if you've seen Toy Story 3, at the end, the boy who's grown up plays with his toys for one last time with a girl.
Now, that's sentimental.
That's emotional. I mean, the last time he would play with his toys.
But that's not nostalgia because the future holds for him, you know, college and dating and marriage and kids and career and all the other good things that can occur in life.
So that's, I guess you could say, sentimental in a good way.
Because he's looking backwards and he's re-experiencing the joys he had playing with his toys, it's only saved from being completely mortal and by the fact that he's playing with a girl, he's bestowing his toys too.
But his future beckons, and he's sort of having one last look back at the great times he had as a kid with his toys.
But then he's leaving that stage behind and moving on, not necessarily to better things, but to age-appropriate growth, age-appropriate progressions of his life.
There's another movie...
Called Avalon.
With Aidan Quinn and Joan Plow, right?
And Elizabeth Perkins, I think.
And Amit Müller-Stahl.
And that is a very interesting film, well, well worth watching in my opinion, a very, very emotional film for me.
And it starts out, I won't give anything away in particular, but it starts out with a guy coming to America and there are fireworks and everyone had their own shoes and wore new clothes and it was a land of possibility and potential and all that.
And the movie progresses, and the movie progresses, and his life does not amount, or at least his children's life do not amount to what the hope was.
So when you're young, and this has a lot to do with that U-shaped happiness, that we're happy when we're young, we're unhappy when we're middle-aged or less happy, and then we get happy again when we're older.
And I have some theories about this, which I'll talk about in another podcast, but...
When you're young, you think you're going to conquer the world, and you have great goals and intentions and so on.
And if those fail to materialize, if you believe that you're going to have a great love, a great family, be a great parent, and all those kinds of things, and if those things don't materialize, then you look back with nostalgia upon the hopes that you had.
And there's a scene in City Slickers 2 with Daniel Stern.
Aha! Pop Culture Reference Day.
Fair enough. Yes, I may in fact watch too many movies, but...
In Daniel Stern, he's got a wretched relationship with his wife.
Classic line. If hate were people, I'd be China!
And he wants a do-over with his life, because he's just made so many mistakes.
And in Avalon, the movie ends...
With the man thinking back to when he first arrived, full of hope and wonder and excitement, and then his life, which has kind of become ruined, he's looking back, and that to me would be nostalgia.
It's a kind of heartbreaking nostalgia, but the mistakes have accumulated so much to such a degree.
That you simply can't go back.
You can't go back. There is no do-over after a certain amount of time.
I remember reading a biography of Marlon Brando by, I think, his business agent, where after Marlon Brando ballooned up like 350-plus pounds, that he had a set of weights in his house, and he just sort of looked really regretfully at the set of weights, because he used to be incredibly buff and trim in the 50s, you know, and he was in his Stanley Kowalski phase and a streetcar named Desire.
I mean, the man was a god as far as looks went and physique.
And that's the nostalgia of like, well, I can't ever.
I mean, not just in terms of age, but just in terms of like, once you've gone to 350, you can't ever.
Your skin is stretched and everything's messed up and you can't ever go back to that.
So, to me, there's a kind of nostalgia in which you experience the past as being irrevocably better or more full of potential than the present.
That, to me, is nostalgia that is tragic.
And there's, of course, a lot of people in the libertarian movement who look back upon the founding of the republic and the minimal government fantasy that people had.
It sure wasn't a minimal government to the slaves or the women or the children, poorer sections of the white population or the people who were conscripted into various wars in the 19th century, even in the Civil War.
But there's this belief that the past was irrevocably better than the present.
And there's this yearning desire to go back and make different choices, to go back and do things differently.
And it reminds me of a demotivational poster that I saw many years ago, which was a ship sinking.
And it says underneath, it could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
I think that the feeling of nostalgia is a cultural meme designed to help people communicate bad decisions to others to help them avoid them.
Clearly, a man who smokes for 40 years and then gets lung cancer looks back with regret at smoking.
He may have a certain acceptance like, well, it's done and it's done, but if he doesn't feel any regret, then he's not serving as a warning to others.
Christopher Hitchens, in his interview...
Where Anderson Cooper was talking about, you know, I lit the candle at both ends, and he had a line, which I guess he's quite proud of, he's repeated it a few times, and it made a lovely light.
I can't do a good Christopher Hitchens.
Dawkins! Much easier.
Hitchens, much tougher.
And it made a lovely light.
And Anderson Cooper said that Christopher Hitchens had sort of the mildest regret where he said, you know, for people who are looking to cut back on smoking and drinking, I might argue that it's not a bad idea as opposed to don't do what I did.
But if people don't have regret, if they don't look back upon the potential that they have squandered at the hope that they have failed to materialize, at the cowardice, perhaps, that has overtaken their potential...
Then if they feel nostalgia and regret, then that's a way to communicate bad decisions to others so that those bad decisions can be avoided.
So, for example, one of the, I think the most common regret that people have when they get old, when sort of asked about what you wish you had done differently in your life, what you wish had been an alternate choice, is people say, I wish I'd cared less what other people thought.
I wish I'd cared less what other people thought.
I think that's a very, very important reality to mull over, to dwell upon.
I wish I thought less what other people thought.
That to me is a kind of regret.
Now, it's not the kind of regret where you look back and you say the past was better than the present.
That's the kind of regret where you look back and you say the present could be better than it is now if I've made different decisions in the past.
I want to differentiate those two forms of nostalgia.
The one form of nostalgia is the past was better than the present, and that can be divided into the past was better than the present because it was just objectively better, or the past was better than the present because the potential for a better situation existed.
So, let me just sort of run over that.
So, if the past is better than the present, there's two reasons why that might be the case.
The first is that the past was just better than the present.
And, you know, if you think back when you're 80 and you think back to when you were 18...
Your health is just better when you're 18.
Almost always, right? I see kids.
I took Isabella to Chuck E. Cheese yesterday.
I see these kids climbing up on this equipment and jumping down from like 10 feet in the air and it's like, I mean, I'm only 44 and I would hesitate to do some of that stuff.
Just because in your 40s you start running into a few limitations, nothing major.
But I've had a couple of soft tissue injuries from the gym which took forever to heal and I'm just sort of careful about that kind of stuff.
You're just a little older. I don't want to get boomeritis, right?
Which is why you think you're still 18 and keep injuring yourself.
So, in that sense, the past was definitely better than the present.
So, when you're 80 and you're looking back from when you were 18, it's like at the opening of A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe.
The old guy is looking at these young people springing up and down.
It's like, youth, youth!
You can do that without concern or without fear.
And... That, I think, is not exactly the same as nostalgia, although it is a way of looking at the past.
I guess you could sort of look at that. Yeah, that's nostalgia.
Let's be fair. Let's be fair.
That's nostalgia. Let's look at the past as being better than the present.
But not because of any sort of bad decisions or whatever.
It's just that's aging, right? I mean, yeah, I was a spring year of step when I was 18 than when I'm 44.
But I don't sort of have any particular regrets.
I think I've taken pretty good care of my health.
I've stayed active. I continue to work out.
And I've lost some weight.
So I think I'm doing about as well as you can in that sort of situation environment.
I can still hike for hours.
I can still work out pretty hard.
And I can still do half-hour...
Level 16 on the bike machine and so on.
So, I think I'm doing okay.
So, I can sort of look back and say, well, that was better than now, but this without regret.
So, there's nostalgia where the past was just better than the present.
But then there's nostalgia which is… But you don't dwell on that a lot because there's not really much to be learned from that, right?
Yeah, I was healthier when I was… I was sort of more capable when I was 18 than when I'm 45, and I'll be more capable at 45 than I am at 95, right?
But I don't feel that there's too much for me to be learned from that.
I mean, again, I think I've done as much as I reasonably can without becoming too obsessive about maintaining good health and flexibility and strength and so on.
So I look back, but I don't really sort of think back and say, oh, all these things I could do when I was 18 because I don't have any regrets about it.
So yeah, the past was better than the present, but there's no regret in that for me like I should have done something different.
Now, if I were 300 pounds and so on, then I'd be like, well, I shouldn't have gained this weight and there'd be some regret.
So, that's... But I don't think that really hits people very hard.
I don't think that happens a lot.
So, that's sort of the one form.
Now, the other form is where you look back at the past being better than the present and...
It's because there was a potential for something that didn't happen, right?
So if I thought, oh, I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't go out for an audition to theater school, or if I was accepted to theater school, I didn't go, or if I went, I didn't give it my all, and so on, then there would be regret.
Now, I didn't work out as an actor, and I think in hindsight, because I have far too many words of my own to be content uttering other people's, And because the art scene is lagging so far behind the few incursions we've made in the realm of philosophy to a better world, that art is always at least a generation behind philosophy, so there's just no room for philosophical art at the moment.
Ayn Rand...
Well, we'll talk about that another time, perhaps.
Now, there's another species of nostalgia, though, which is a subset of the it's better than the present and their regrets, which is a nostalgia, which I think we all have, those of us who are free thinkers, who are rational thinkers, who are just what I would just call thinkers, who are rational thinkers, who are just what I would just call thinkers, which is where we look back upon the past when it was better because When it was better because we were ignorant.
As Keanu Reeves' character, I'm sure Nero looks back and wishes he were back in the Matrix, like that bald guy who gets plugged back in.
That I was better and happier before I began to think.
And so the past, it's recognized as worse, but it's also recognized that growth is a kind of punishment.
Like, if you lose weight, there's very little that you look back on and say, I really have nostalgia for when I was fat.
But that's because people praise you for losing weight.
It's considered a positive thing.
Whereas if you become aware and you start to think and you reason from evidence and first principles, then you get roundly rejected and attacked by the vast majority of people.
So, it's like when you discover evil, you're called evil.
That's the story of the Garden of Eden, right?
As we talked about almost five years ago in the podcast series.
So, there is a kind of innocence.
Like if someone's in a, quote, happy marriage before the husband's affairs are discovered, then the woman sort of looks back with nostalgia about the happy time in the marriage before the knowledge or before the affairs or whatever happens.
Whether that's tinged with regret or not, I don't know.
I mean, if she avoided the knowledge of the affairs, there's probably regret in staying in the relationship too long.
But if you leave a relationship too soon, there's regret in that you could have tried more and so on.
So I think that when looking at nostalgia at your own, if you're lost sort of in history, I mean, this is the way I approach it, which is I sort of look back, if I find myself drawn to a particular time, and it hasn't happened in a long time, but if I find myself drawn to a particular time in the past, I mean, okay, well, no, I thought of one, actually, when somebody posted this, when Isabella was younger and lighter.
I mean, I still do it now, but I did it more back then.
I remember so many memories of carrying her out of a room, cupped in a sitting position with my arm under her legs, and kissing her head when it was bald and when it had hair and so on.
I love that memory.
I love just how comfortable and peaceful and warm and loving all of that was.
And we were just at the library yesterday for her reading class, and we walked past the area, which I think was filmed, which is where she first learned how to walk.
And I felt great nostalgia for that.
I don't want to go back there. I really like the fact that she could walk now.
She actually played for herself, played on her own in the library for 10 minutes yesterday, which was unprecedented and totally cool.
I don't want to go back to that, but I remember what a beautiful time that was, what a wonderful time that was.
So, I guess there's a kind of nostalgia, but there's no regret, and there's no particular desire to revisit it.
And the very first video I did, Living Richly, was basically trying to make the argument that, you know, how much would you, if you're having a day where, you know, maybe things aren't going that well or whatever, but, you know, when you're in your deathbed, how much would you pay to go back and live that one day, right?
So, if I'm having a... And it's very rare, but if on occasion I'm having a difficult time with Isabella...
Well, you know, when I'm dying, how much would I give to go back and live just that one day again where I was having a crappy day with Isabella?
That's unfair. I don't have crappy days with Isabella.
But just think of something if you have something in your life.
When I'm dying, what would I give to go back and be healthy on my worst day at work?
Well, I would give almost anything, I'm sure.
So, I think that's really important.
If you live your life that way, then you constantly are able to dismantle the crankiness and grumpiness and irritation that occasionally seems to be the hallmark of human nature.
And... You also can live in a way that you don't continually adjust to beneficial situations, right?
I mean, this is well studied and well understood in psychology that if you give a man a benefit, it takes him only a couple of weeks to adjust his happiness level to incorporate the new benefit so that if a man wins a million dollars, he's much happier for a couple of weeks or maybe a little longer and then he simply adjusts and now starts to worry about his money.
Oh my God, I just lost $100,000 in the stock market, right?
Oh my God, I don't know what to do with all this money.
Everybody wants something from me.
Everybody's jealous. So it doesn't take very long for improved circumstances.
I'm continually reminding myself of this when FDR gets troublesome or difficult or scary.
I remember when I first wrote on my blog that I would like to make it a full-time job.
I just thought, there's no way that's ever going to happen.
Or if it is going to happen, I'm going to be living in a shoebox or something.
So I remind myself that this is what I absolutely wanted.
And would have given almost anything to achieve and did give up a lot to achieve, so to not enjoy it is to say that the satisfaction of my heart's greatest desire should not bring me pleasure.
That sort of helps me shake off that, you know, that kind of negative feeling that comes with everything from time to time.
So I hope that helps in terms of thinking about nostalgia.
I think if you have regrets, nostalgia should prompt you to change whatever you can change, to change whatever you can change.
If you have regrets about not doing the things, it's the life unlived that produces the regret.
I think every positive decision we make, we're much less likely to regret than any avoidant or negative or non-decision that we're going to make.
And I think the way to avoid regrets is just, you know, screw your courage to the sticking place, as Shakespeare talks about in Macbeth, though with less violent results.
And just work as hard as you can to confront your fears, to do that which terrifies you, to take the chances which bring self-esteem and pride.
Particularly if you have the responsibility of this true philosophy, then you have sure knowledge of a cure for the world's ills, and however people may protest At the pill, I think screw your courage to the popping place.
Pop that pill in your mouth and other people's mouths and heal the world.
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