HealthyGamerGG - Nostalgia, and Getting Stuck in the Past

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Today Dr. K talks about why looking back in the past hurts so much and why it is so pleasant - but most importantly: how to move forward. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But the more that you're thinking, I wish there was another one, the more you're losing sight of the thousand things around you that you can only enjoy in this moment. And so once you adopt this kind of mind shift, which I'm not saying is easy, you have to understand that like look at all of the temporal influences on your mind. And then set all of those temporal influences aside for a moment. And this is why it's a practice. It's a skill. And try to enjoy just one thing. And then what you'll realize, which is like really neat, is that your enjoyment of the thing is actually determined by your presence in the moment.

Nostalgia is not as pleasant when you're depressed. So for most people, nostalgia is generally accepted as being a nice feeling, a pleasant memory. But for me, it just reminds me of a more innocent, happier time when I was a child. I thought my future was good and all I cared about was playing with friends and climbing trees. how things have changed. Edit, I genuinely didn't expect so many kind comments even on a sub like this. I feel better and I have you all to thank for that. I know exactly how you feel.

I'd kill to go back to the days of running around the forest in my old neighborhood with my old friends. We've all gone our separate ways. Some of us were best friends from the age of three all the way to college, but we have now all gone our separate ways. I mean, I cherish the memories with my friends and we'll be. forever be grateful, but nostalgia hurts. Stay strong, friend. Here, if you need to talk, sending good vibes your way. So it is interesting, right? That we tend to think about nostalgia as a good thing, right? So it's like, oh, the good old times. And when you go back in time and you start thinking about the good old times, you like smile, right? You start to think about, oh, like,

life was simpler. And we also see this like generationally, where there's this sort of thing where, you know, the older people, like the older generations, and I think this is like pretty common throughout humanity. I don't really know I haven't studied it, but, you know, they start to think that the world is going in the wrong direction and the world was like simpler and better when I was young. So we sort of had these like rose tinted glasses when we look into the past. The challenge is that sometimes when we look into the past, it can be like depressing in the present. And especially for people who sometimes do feel kind of sad or depressed, what they can really do is romanticize the past, and it can really become like, it can make you feel like you've fallen so far, and that,

you know, things have gotten so much worse, and like things in the past were so much better. And so before we kind of, you know, so then the kind of question becomes, like, was the past actually better? Like, is the present actually worse? Like, what's going on here? How much of this, and especially if we're talking about depression, is there some amount of, of cognitive bias at play. And so this is the kind of thing where you can sort of look at these older generations and you can look at things like cognitive bias and you can sort of logically say, I don't know if this is correct or not, but I'm sure you could make an argument, that things in the past

weren't better, that that's actually just in your head and that the present is just as good as the past and that we have a lot of things to look forward to a lot of things to be hopeful for. right? So there's sort of that argument which you can make. But I think what's really useful is if you're someone who's kind of struggling with nostalgia or if you're someone who is really looking back into your past life and sort of like not past lives. I mean like your past. And you're sort of seeing that, oh man, like things were really were happier for me then than they are now. Like let's take that sentiment seriously. Right. So instead of dismissing it and saying, oh my God, it's cognitive bias. Let's try to take a look at it somewhat seriously. And let's try to understand what are the features that lead you to that conclusion. And if the past was better, can we actually be a little bit scientific and start to wonder, okay, what about the past made it better? Because we look at these things like circumstances and stuff like that, but I'm not so sure that that's what actually makes the past better. So, and the interesting thing is that if we can really start to understand the nature of why the past was better, because that's your experience, right?

Why the past is better, maybe we can try to understand how the present got worse. And then the cool thing is that if we're lucky, we may be able to figure out a roadmap to sort of get back to that place. So let's kind of take a quick look at this, okay, and run through, you know, what's going on with nostalgia. So let's kind of recap. So the first thing is that for nostalgia, some people is pleasant, and for some people, nostalgia is unpleasant. And for the people for whom it's unpleasant, there's a sense of change, right? There's a sense of loss. And in the pleasant nostalgia, things were simpler.

Now my life is more complicated. it's harder. Right? So we'll have these kinds of thoughts. And then remember, we sort of talked a little bit about the potential of cognitive bias. Right. So what's the level of cognitive bias? Is this kind of generational romanticism?

Is this depressive bias, right? Because when you're depressed, your mind is going to be looking at different kinds of things. Like, what's going on here? So we can kind of acknowledge that. But we have to be super careful because if we sort of dismiss your experience, if we say like, oh, like you're depressed, it actually wasn't that great and your life isn't that bad right now, that doesn't actually help you. So what I'd like to explore today is what are the features that make nostalgia pleasant?

What are the features that make the past more enjoyable? Because if we can understand those, then we can start to dig in to potentially recreating it in the present. So first, let's kind of take a step back and take a look at nostalgia from sort of a clinical perspective. So why does the brain even do nostalgia in the first place? Like, what's going on here? Why does the brains think about the past? What advantage of any does it serve? So a couple of axioms, a couple of assumptions that we're going to make.

The first is that the more I've come to understand the human brain in psychology, the more I've come to appreciate that even the things that cause us pain, serve some kind of function. And on the simplest level, the fact that we feel pain, right, that makes our life worse. So why on earth have we evolved pain receptors? Because all it does is hurt us. And that's because pain actually helps us survive, right? So pain is a warning that something is wrong, whether it's emotional pain, physical pain. If someone is toxic towards me, that's my, and I feel emotionally hurt by them, that's my brain and mind's way of signaling to me that this could be a dangerous interaction. Maybe this person doesn't belong in my life. Things get super, super complicated,

though, and we sort of end up, you know, encouraging that person's abuse of us in some cases and things like that. So that's why we're going to kind of dig in and try to understand why are we nostalgic in the first place. So we know from studies on especially things like grief and studies on trauma processing that things like rumination and dwelling on the past are necessary components to emotionally process. And then if we emotionally process, this essentially causes us to move on. So what we can see is that like dwelling on the past serves a function.

Okay. We also recently talked a little bit about counterfactual thinking, which just to give you guys a quick refresher, is when we think about things that did not happen. So when I go into the past, let's say I got a B on a chemistry test or C on a chemistry test. What my mind will do is something called counterfactual thinking. So it'll go back into the past and it'll imagine scenarios that are factually not true.

If I had studied, I would have gotten a B. If I had studied more, I would have gotten A. If I had done this. What if, what if, if, if, if. This is essentially if thinking. Because then what your mind is doing is it's thinking about things that are factually incorrect. And so what we know from studies on counterfactual thinking is that this serves an adaptive purpose too. It helps us correct our behavior. And it also sort of creates a sense of

regret that can be used as a motivational drive. Right. So sometimes this can get out of control where like the regret gets so powerful that it negatively impacts our motivation. But generally speaking, counterfactual thinking is something that we engage in a lot. Right. So we can engage in it. We probably engage in it several times a day for all kinds of little things. Like, oh, if I had warmed my T, for example, for 40 seconds instead of 30 seconds, it would have been warm today. It would have still been warm, right? So then I take a sip, and I'm like, maybe I should have used an insulated cup. Because this amount of unpleasantness can cause me to change my behavior.

Because the truth is that negative emotion is a very powerful influencer of behavior. So I don't know that either of these things are necessary nostalgia, but we do know that the brain, generally speaking, or the mind has different functions for going into the past and sort of like thinking about things. Okay? So this is kind of like three examples of maybe why we get nostalgic in the first place. So then the question becomes, when we think about the past, was the past actually better? Now, if the answer is no, so one option is no, and then why do we think it's better because of cognitive bias?

So that's okay, right? because if this is the case, then what we need to do is cognitively reframe, which is a useful skill. So this is something that we actually teach people who are depressed. They'll start to think, oh, in the past, like things were so much better, my life sucks now. And you can cognitively reframe to sort of develop a sense of gratitude. Actually, there are things that I can still be grateful for, right? Some things in my life have gotten better. But in the depressed mind, it doesn't automatically do that. So we'll actually sort of create cognitive flexibility through things like cognitive behavioral therapy. Okay. And then in terms of developing gratitude, this is things like met the

meditation. So we can actually deal with the cognitive bias or deal with sort of this idea that life is actually worse for me now. Because it may not be worse. But I don't think that that, I think that's a very dangerous solution because what we're sort of doing is like we're not assuming that life was better, because maybe if that was your experience, it actually was better. And if we assume that life actually was better, then what we need to do is explore, okay, what are the variables that made life better? Because if we can understand that, we can potentially recreate those. Okay? So the first thing that I want to kind of talk about for a second is when you're young, things are in a lot of ways actually better, right?

So when you're young, so I'm going to just share with you all the story from my own life. So when I was like in middle school, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. And I had a lot of fun playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. And so I would like, you know, we would play D&D basically every weekend. We'd play until like four in the morning, five in the morning, six in the morning. We'd play till dawn. And it was just a blast, right? Because back then I did not worry about stuff.

Now that caused me some problems later on. So especially going into high school and stuff, my grade started to drop things like that. I started playing video game. We would also have land parties, right? So it's not just D&D. It would be like, we're going to do D&D this weekend or we're going to have a land party. If it's a three-day weekend, we're going to do a land party. We're going to bring all our computers and stuff like that.

Right? Over Thanksgiving and Christmas, I remember when I was in college, I had like all these ideas of like, oh my God, like I'm so far behind on chemistry one. I need to like really catch up because I got a day. D and I'm going into chemistry two. And if I don't like learn chemistry one, chemistry two is going to be, I'm going to be screwed for the second half of my freshman year. But when Christmas rolls around and all my friends are in town, like we're going to,

we're going to grind D&D because I haven't seen these guys in so long. So there are particular consequences that happened later on. But especially when we look to earlier times in our life, we don't have as many responsibilities. And so then you may think, okay, well, now that I have responsibilities, does that mean that I'm screwed? But no, let's actually tunnel down a little bit further. What is the effect of a responsibility on your mind? So when we think about what responsibility does, okay? Responsibility gets us to think about the future. So if I'm like responsible for something, my mind will start thinking about the future.

The other thing that tends to happen as we get older is that we tend to have regrets, right? hence the nostalgia. So as we get older, by definition, our mind starts thinking more about the future and thinking more about the past. And this is like absolutely neurodevelopmental. So if you look at something like you talk to a four-year-old or a five-year-old, their concept of time is not very well developed. And so as a result, like, you know, if you ask a four-year-old, like, what's going to happen next year? They don't know what a year is. So as we get older, our concept of time continues to evolve and grow.

And even with things like social interactions, so as we enter puberty, we start to realize that people will form opinions of us that will be lasting through time. So even an eight-year-old may know what a year is, but they don't think in terms of like, how is this person going to think about me one year from now. So we start to add a temporal dimension to people's opinions. of us during our teenage years. And so in that way, we had temporal dimensions to all kinds of stuff. And as we start to get older, we add a temporal dimension to the past because an eight-year-old

doesn't really think about the past. A 12-year-old doesn't really think about the past, right? A 15-year-old starts to think about the past, 16-year-old thinks about the past a little bit more. 25-year-old is thinking about the past. 30-year-old, 40-year-old, 50-year-old starts thinking about the past way more. So the temporal dimension as we get older grows. And if we look at some of this philosophy from like yoga, what they sort of say is that the more that you live in the present, the happier you're going to be.

And that a huge source of unhappiness comes from living in the future or living in the past. That when I create expectations for myself a year from now or two years from now. And I think when I think a lot about the consequences of my actions, oh my God, what happens if I don't go to this party, if I do go to this party, what's going to happen, what's going to happen, what's going to happen? The more I start living in the future, the more my happiness gets destroyed in the present. The more I start living in the past, the more my happiness gets destroyed in the present. And so we can sort of see that as you become nostalgic, it can recall positive emotions, but generally speaking, anytime I recall positive emotions in the past,

I may be, I have to be careful because if I'm not, if I'm not careful, what I'm I'm going to do is that's going to create a contrast in the present, which is going to create negative emotion, which is sort of the function of the future in the past in terms of how it affects our mental health. So if we think about why was the past so pleasant, it's because we were kind of like living in the present, right? Living in the present is what creates pleasantness. And as we get older, I know this is not our fault, because if we really think about it, our society objectively makes us think more about the future and more about the past as we get We have the luxury of living in the present when we're kids.

Our brain lets us live in the present. Society lets us live in the present. As we get older, both of those things change. And this is where I think we make a huge mistake. Because we don't teach or prepare people for this change. Right? So we'll say like vague things. Like we'll say like, enjoy your youth while it lasts.

But like if someone tells you that, they just say that and they laugh and then you're like okay right no one is ever like hey here are the ways that you enjoy things here is what's going to change for you right and it's it's like here and the other thing is that sometimes people will tell us like by the way adulthood sucks like by the way like you're going to have a mortgage to pay one day okay so like how do i cope with that right so they may even tell us what changes but they don't tell us like how do i deal it? with that. Because the truth is that objectively, as you get older and your responsibility increases, society pulls you away from the present. But we're not taught how to hang on

to that presentness. Right? So we're like, it's a skill, but like we're not taught that skill. And this is the issue is that when you're young, living in the present is easy. It becomes very natural and no one pushes you out of it. But as we get older and our brain develops, we're not taught how to remain in the present, even though society in your mind are pulling you into the future and pulling you into the past. So this is a big problem. Right? So like let's look at it objectively. Like as you get older, like you're going to have, you know, when you, when you're 10 and you go to school, you don't have to think about the semester. You don't have to think about your grade. You just go to school, you get your homework. You go home, presumably do your homework. Occasionally

you'll have a test. You kind of have to study for the test, but not really. So you don't really have to think about the future. As you get a little bit older, you have to start thinking about tests. You have to think about studying. Then you have to think about paying bills. Then you have to think about paying mortgages. Then as you enter your like, I mean, it varies depending on your culture and your situation. But like, then you enter into this whole marriage and kids dimension where it's like, you know, you'll meet someone one day. Like you're not really too worried about it maybe in 1920 if you're lucky.

You're still able to live in the present. But then we'll also see like 19 year olds and 20 year olds who are terrified. of being alone for the rest of their life. And I saw these posts where people are like, I've been perpetually alone. I'm 19 years old. And it's like, how long is perpetual? I've been alone my entire life.

I'm 16. And it's like, you know, it's kind of weird to me being as old as I am. I mean, that's their experience and it's terrifying for them. So I, you know, I try not to judge. But it's kind of interesting, right? So if you look at that person, why is the 16-year-old unhappy for being alone? their entire life. Versus the 16-year-old who's like, yeah, I'm not dating.

I haven't dated anyone. So, like, I'm not dating is more happy. So, like, let's just like look at this, right? So let's look at what adding the temporal dimension does. I'm not dating. I'm not, or I, let's do this one, actually. I haven't dated. yet are I've been alone my entire life okay now here's the thing all of these statements can come from a 17 year old right

like this person can objectively be the same age but as and I would say that like this has the least amount of temporal this is like medium temporal and this has a large temporal. You all see that? So literally adding the temporal dimension is going to correlate with suffering. Right? And as, like, even as a therapist, if I'm working with someone like this,

the process of cognitive reframing is going in this direction. Right? I'm just not dating. This is like in the present. Okay? So as we get older, it's kind of interesting, but like there's an element of temporal dimension which gets added to our lives is we have to start thinking about mortgages and stuff like this. And that's where like we tend to start worrying about stuff and we start to feel nostalgic because life was so much simpler. Because life was simpler. Like objectively it was simpler. You don't have to pay a mortgage.

Your parents weren't like asking you when you're going to have kids because they want grandkids. Right. And like you're sitting there, you've got a hundred K in student loan debt. I'm assuming you're American. Okay. You've got 100K in student loan debt. You've been, you've been, you've been, you've been, dating someone for two or three years. Housing prices are through the roof. You have no idea if you're going to be able to afford a kid. And all of that anxiety and all of that worry and all of that pressure, your parents don't really appreciate. Right. So we add so much temporal dimension. Our society adds so much temporal dimension because we need it to survive. That's the way that life works. The challenge is that we don't really understand that that's what we're doing. We don't really

understand that that's where the unhappiness comes from. And the most devastating thing is that we also quickly jump to the conclusion that that's the only way to do it. What other choice do I have? This is the way the world is. You get a big choice, right? Because how much have you tried to step away from the temporal dimension? This is where you're going to say something like, oh, like what, I should just stop paying my bills and ignore everything? No, right? Because those are realities. we're not saying ignore them. But how much does thinking about it actually help it? Right?

So if I've got a bill to pay at the end of the month, there's a certain amount of thinking I have to do about it. There's a certain amount of work I have to do about it. But it's my inability to stop dwelling on it that destroys my happiness. I'm not saying that objectively it's better to have more money and not have bills to pay and stuff like that. That's my whole point, is that there's an objective decrease in the quality of your life once you become an adult in some ways, right?

But we can also cognitive reframe because I can have cookies for lunch today if I want to. There are some advantages to being adult. That's where the cognitive reframe comes in. But let's assume for a moment that objectively your life is harder as an adult as a kid than a kid. And that nostalgia was there because you were free of all of your future and past thought. So what can you do now? Okay. So there are a couple of important issues that we need to remember, okay?

So the first, so how to deal with nostalgic loss. So the first thing is that we assume the circumstances create the happiness. So I'll give you all the example, right? So I used to play a bunch of D&D. And so I'm now 39. And like, I thought like, so I got together recently with some friends of mine and we started playing D&D again. And I was like, man, it's going to be dope.

I scheduled like a bunch of stuff. And I was like, we used to play D&D until three or four in the morning, and it's so much fun. So we get together at two in the afternoon, and we're all old men now. And like, we can't play D&D until four in morning. We can't eat like Taco Bell and drink Mountain Dew by the leader because we're like old men. And so like we'll do things like we'll make like a fruit plate. And we'll play for like six to eight hours. Yeah, my back aches by 7 p.m. You're damn right.

I can't sit in a chair for eight hours. We got up and we'd take a walk in the middle. Like, we'd go out for a walk. And like some of us, like, I even started doing yoga. We were doing like push-ups randomly during the middle of the D&D session. Like, we just can't handle the debauchery anymore. Right? You're damn right, grapes and cheese.

Not just grapes and cheese. It was like strawberries. Like one person brought pita crackers. There was hummus. It's like protein. Right? And so this is the thing is that we assume that it's the circumstances. And then what we try to do is we try to recreate that happiness, right?

Because this is what the brain does. The brain is like, what made me happy in the past? That will make me happy in the future. Okay? And now some of you all are saying this is mature D&D. It sounds dope. But here's the thing. If I'm trying to recreate my teenage experience of D&D, it's going to feel like it sucks.

It's nowhere near. Dude, we played so much D&D. And it's like we just can't handle it anymore. So then what you can do. is lean into that, right? Make the most of them. Be like, all right, we're going to do like matured D&D. Right? This is what we're going to do. So like now we plan our menu ahead of time. Like, all right, we're going to do this. We're going to do this. You know, like, we're going to do some of this stuff. You guys want to take a break. Oh my God. So we try to recreate that happiness

and thereby we actually lose sight of the present. So instead, when you kind of notice like your current circumstances, you can actually lean into your present to create happiness. But as long as you're trying to hold on to the past, it's not going to work. And this is the kind of thing where people will say, don't hold on to the past, but then everyone's like, how do I do that? Like, what do you mean by that? And what does that practically look like? What does it mean to not hold on to the past?

What it means is to recognize that the past is gone, recognize that your situation has changed, and try to literally adjust your current situation based on your circumstances. So forget about the past and say, okay, I want to play D&D, I like D&D, but I'm 39 years old. I have these friends. We have these time commitments. How can we make this experience as enjoyable as possible? How can I make the present enjoyable as possible? That's how you let go of the past.

And you optimize it. Okay? The next thing to understand is that, like, we sort of talked about this a little bit, but, you know, learning to live in the present is key. And the key thing here is that we have to understand that this is going to be harder as you grow older. Because it was natural for you earlier. But over time, society in your brain is going to add a temporal dimension. The temporal stress is going to increase. So what you actually have to do is it used to be automatic.

Like it was easy, right? It's like back when I was in the fifth grade, I didn't have to study. So I never developed good study habits. So then when I hit college, like I was SOL because now what's going on is like, this is my, let's say, intelligence. And here is my, here is the difficulty of the material. And so this is the gap where I should be learning how to study. And if I don't learn how to study then, then what's going to happen is like,

I'm going to be screwed once I cross this threshold. Right? This is going to be like GG. This is the GG zone. And in the same way, this is what you can say the same thing about living in the present is a skill. So mindfulness is a skill, being able to meditate. So over here, it's really easy.

Like, we don't have to learn how to do it. And then we hit this point. But then what happens is like, no one is like, hey, by the way, the reason that you're struggling right now is because you have not learned the skill of living in the present. And then as things get. like more and more, right? We get more and more overwhelmed. This redness gets like more and more intense. The higher up, the bigger this gap is right here, the more we begin to suffer. And then we find ourselves in our 25, 25 year old, 26 year old, 27 year old. If you're in the U.S., for example,

student loans, like when you're 18 years old and you take out $120,000 of student loans to pay for college, you don't really have a temporal appreciation. But when you're 25 and 26 and you're paying off your student loans and you recognize that like this is going to have a temporal effect for the next eight years of your life, boy, does that hurt. Right? And then that's the barrier of this pain. And this is where people are sort of talking about things like, oh, like, you know, cancel student debt and stuff like that.

And it's not my place to comment on whether that's a good idea or a bad idea. But what I'm saying is that, sure, you can cancel student debt, but it's not the other thing that you can, not the other thing. In addition to that, learning how to live in the present is a skill. skill. So this is where like the solution to these temporal problems, people are sort of looking for circumstances. They're looking for like this thing to change and come down here. So we try to recreate the circumstances of being debt free. We try to recreate the circumstances of plaintiff and D.D. We try to recreate these circumstances of the past. The problem is that the more

we lean into that strategy, the more screwed we are because you can never get the past back. That's a big revelation of living in the present. So the third thing to understand. understand is that life is changing in transient by nature. So this can have a couple, and I encourage you all to just think about this, because this can have a couple of transformative impacts on your life. So when you start to think about how life is changing in transient, the first thing that happens is people get terrified. They're like, how do I hold on to something? Because that's what we want to do, right? We want this happiness for the rest of our lives. And so then what happens is like, if we're not even careful, the acknowledgement that life

is transient damages our happiness because then what happens is any time we're happy, we're like, when am I going to lose this? When is the other shoe going to drop? When will this leave? And then you can't even enjoy it because you're paranoid about losing it because Dr. Kay told you on the internet that life is transient and nothing lasts forever. So now I'm terrified because I want to hold on to it. But if you really kind of focus for a little while and you start to really think through it,

it can transform. It's like hard. It's kind of binary. And this is where you've got to meditate and really like just think about it. Okay. If life is transient, how do you want to live? What's the only way to live? The only way to live is in the present, right?

So you can sit there. You've got this one thing in front of you. This tea is cooling with every passing second. I can't keep it hot forever. So the only choice I have for happiness, the only way I have to enjoy the tea is to drink it now. Because I can't keep it warm forever. So the only way, the only solution is to act now, to embrace the present. And then what happens is like it's kind of interesting because this can be transformed.

Because once you realize that now is the only time to enjoy it, you will enjoy it fully. Right? So I want you all to think a little bit about like, you know, if you get one thing before you die, it's like a coin flip where that is either going to be like, you know, the best thing of your life or it's going to taste awful because all you're thinking about is the impending loss. Right. So like once you realize that things are transient, like that's when you can really start to enjoy them. It's kind of bizarre. But once you realize that this flower is only going to be in bloom for this. moment or this amount of time, and I don't know, instead of being paranoid about when the flower petals will fall off and when the fragrance will go away, just enjoy the flower. Right? And then you can look back on it. You can say, wow, that was a great flower. Then you have to be a little bit careful because you can say, oh, I wish there was another one. But the more that you're thinking, I wish there

was another one, the more you're losing sight of the thousand things around you that you can only enjoying this moment. And so once you adopt this kind of mind shift, which I'm not saying is easy, you have to understand that like look at all of the temporal influences on your mind and then set all of those temporal influences aside for a moment. And this is why it's a practice. It's a skill. And try to enjoy just one thing.

And then what you'll realize, which is like really neat, is that your enjoyment of the thing is actually determined by your presence in the moment. that even this tea, even though it's cooler, can still be enjoyed. Right? There are some things about it that I can appreciate. And so the more that you move in that direction, I'm not saying you should ignore your bills. It's just like work when you need to work and then have satisfaction that today I've done what I can. I've moved, sure, like, you know, I'm not making much money right now, but like I've moved in the direction that I need to to like, it's going to take me eight years to pay off my student loans, but I did what I could today.

and I've worked for eight hours or nine hours. I did one hour of overtime. I've chipped away at it, and then I have two or three hours. I'm going to try to enjoy myself as best as I can. Right? So that's what it means to live in the present. Be cognizant of it.

Be recognized that your life may be objectively worse. And that you can still extract water from the stone that is life. It's absolutely possible. It doesn't feel that way, right? It feels like you can squeeze and squeeze and squeeze and you're not getting anything out of it. But that's because of the way that you're living. Because all you're thinking about is the eight years of suffering.

So even today, like whether you have eight years of suffering or one, if you're paying off your student loans tomorrow or you're paying off your student loans in 30 days or 30 years, the sandwich that you eat today is going to taste the same. You can either enjoy it or not enjoy it. Right? And this is what people are going to say, but yeah, but like if I like, if I didn't have student loans to pay, like I'd eat like a very fancy sandwich and it would taste better, Sure, I'm not saying that that isn't true.

But even the humble grilled cheese can be delicious. But the more that you're in your head about paying off your debt, the less you're going to enjoy the grilled cheese. Yeah, and someone is saying being out of debt does not equal happiness, by the way, right? So that's another big thing. But that's like that's exactly my point is that happiness is somewhat independent of your circumstances. Because there's also data that shows that financial security makes people more happier. or I wouldn't say makes people more happy.

I would say is fertile ground for happiness to grow in. So in my experience, financial security and financial freedom is like the quality of the soil. You can still get a desert rose, but it's way easier with a bunch of fertilizer. This is all we got. How does that go over our heads? Because it's easy because we're not thinking about what we have. We're thinking about what we used to have and we're thinking about what we could have. That's how all we've got goes over our heads.

So I know it's kind of weird, but at the end of the day, I think that nostalgia, like if we kind of just recap, right? So nostalgia is there for a reason. We know that there are a lot of different functions in the mind, whether it's trauma processing, grief processing, counterfactual thinking for performance improvement, which is why our mind goes into the past in the first place. Now, does the past seem better just because of cognitive bias and memories and selection bias? and stuff like that, there may be an element of that, especially if you're in a depressive mindset, right? Because then you're going to compare and contrast and you're going to take, you're going to come to the worst conclusions and your mind is going to be like moving away from positive information. But I think if we sort of stop there, if I were to say, yeah, your brain does it because it's evolved

to do it. And yeah, it's all cognitive bias in your head. That doesn't actually help you in this moment. Because if we look at it objectively, the past is usually better. right? If we're thinking about better times, like, there's a lot to say about the past actually being better. And a lot of that has to do with our innocence. And what does innocence mean? Innocence means living in the present. Right? It means not having that temporal dimension. And what happens as we get older is we start thinking about time more. We have to. Society makes us do it. Our brains make us do it. And no one teaches us, by the way, as your brain starts thinking about time more, your propensity for anxiety will increase, your propensity for regret. will increase. Your fear of the future will increase. Your ability to enjoy yourself in the present will become harder. So let me teach you how to account for that difference, right? Because we teach

people how to stretch. Like, kids don't need to stretch that much. Adults need to stretch a lot. You know, the number of adults that I've seen that have pulled a muscle, or the number of times that I've pulled a muscle when I was a kid and the kind of crazy physical stuff that I used to do versus now, it's like night and day. I used to do way more way crazier stuff. And now like picking up a child, I pulled muscle in my back by picking up a child. So as people as we, as we like grow older, like we warn people. And so we have stretching baked into our society. Like you learn how to stretch even though you don't really need to as a kid. Right. But we don't teach us like what is the what is that cognitive flexibility? What is the cognitive stretch that we need to do to be able to

enjoy and appreciate the present because the more that we hold on the past, the more that we try to recreate the past, the more it's not going to work because life is different now. And so we have to learn how to live in the present, learn how to craft things to our benefit. So instead of assuming if you liked a particular activity, instead of just trying to recreate that experience, try to optimize it for today. So how are things different? How can I make this as pleasant as possible? You know, when I'm making grilled cheese, should I switch from butter to olive oil?

because olive oil is a little bit healthier. There are all kinds of optimizations that you can do. Questions. How can we separate present thinking from making impulsive decisions? I could see it as justification for doing risky things. You're absolutely correct. So present thinking is oftentimes used as like justification for making bad decisions, right? We talked about that a little bit.

So that's where I think that, let me think about that this for a second. It's a good question. So here's what I'd say. Present thinking is not willfully ignoring the future or the past. So to be in the present means also a present focused appreciation for the future. Right. So like, I don't know if this is going to kind of make sense, but it's sort of subtle. So in my present circumstances, let's say I have a $10,000 loan to pay. I can worry about the $10,000 loan. I can say, oh, I'm living in the present. Therefore, I'm going to completely ignore the $10,000 loan.

But that's not actually living in the present because in the present, you have that $10,000 of debt. So the real road is somewhere in the middle where it's like, in my present circumstance, I have a loan, which I am paying off at the rate that I'm, comfortable with, and I'm going to enjoy today. I don't know if that makes sense. But sometimes what people will do is they'll use present-focused thinking as a way to ignore their present circumstances. Whereas that's a present circumstance. You can't actually ignore that. And that's why it's a skill, because it's really easy to do one and it's really easy to do the other. It's doing it in the middle where you're like, okay, I'm acknowledging that I have $10,000 of debt. I'm not going to pay it off today. I'm going to pay off $20 of it today. And I'm

going to pay off $20 for the next, you know, if I pay $20 a day over one course of over the year, it'll be $6,000, right? More. $72, $73,000. I mean, sorry, $7,300. Right? So that's how you do it. It's like, I'm going to pay my $20 bucks today.

It's an appreciation of the debt. It's acknowledgement of the present. And like, I'm going to enjoy the rest of it. right? So I earn 40 bucks today. I'm going to pay off $20 of debt. I'm going to enjoy the rest. Make sense? Yeah. So how do you deal with all the bad emotions like getting older, feeling lonely, lacking purpose? Do you have to confront those feelings? Absolutely. We'll get to that in a second. The next thing we're going to talk about relates to that somewhat. Ah, so, so, so like getting older has a temporal component, right? So like when we say like it's, it has a comparative component. So the way

that you deal with all of these kinds of things. So lacking purpose, too, generally speaking, like, lacking purpose is like a temporal emotion. I'm not, like, sitting there on the toilet. Like, sometimes this can happen where you can have, like, an existential panic attack where, like, lacking purpose, like, hits you in the present.

But generally speaking, lacking purpose is like an emergent property, right? You lack purpose over the course of a day or a week or a month or a year or a decade. And you can work on that. So that's where like confronting those feelings is important because negative feelings are signals for you to change. Right. So it's okay.

Like you have to acknowledge them. Like if you're lonely, like that's something that you can do something around, right? That's also where like negative emotions are also compasses to move you in the right direction. So I was talking to someone who was an artist and they were kind of saying to me that they realized one day that like they were unsatisfied with their music, and they used to beat themselves up about it a lot because of the dissatisfaction. But then one day they realized that the dissatisfaction of the music is like a sign of their good taste. And also, when that feeling is satisfied, that's when they know they've made good music. And so they course correct over and over and over again, and they kind of lean into that

dissatisfaction. And that's how they know how it needs to be fixed. So if there's a lot of dissatisfied with a piece of music that they make, what needs to be better about it? They make that change. What needs to be better about it? They make that change. And as they move in that direction, they wind up with satisfaction and they wind up with award-winning music. And so even things like feeling lonely can be the same way. It's like, what are the times in your life? What should you gravitate towards if you feel lonely? What I've realized is that as I get older, I'm more likely to project my momentary pain as if life will be this pain from now on. What can you suggest to that. Remove the temporal component. Right? So that's exactly what we're talking about.

So your mind is going to project this present circumstance into the future. I'll be alone forever. Newsflash, you can't see the future. No one can. So that thought, I know is kind of weird, is like actually just wrong. Like, unless you have a time traveling machine or you're talking to someone from the future, you have no idea what the future holds. The other interesting thing to remember is that that is going to make all kinds of impacts on your current behavior. Because if this pain will last forever, if it's a certainty of the future, what does that do to your motivation? Right? So there's people have done studies on hopelessness and rats.

And once you create hopeless circumstances for a rat, so it's kind of a cruel study. It's a slight trigger warning here. what they'll do is they'll drop a rat in like a bucket of water and they'll see how long it swims before it gives up. There's no way out, right? They don't actually drown the rat. Once it gives up, they pull it out. But that hopelessness, once you have hopelessness,

you give up and you stop trying. And so the problem is that once we start to think that momentary pain is forever, we give up. The challenge is that, unlike the experiment, there ain't no bucket, and no one's going to pull us out. So there is actually a path forward. It's not artificially closed. It feels that way to us. But the moment we give up, that's when we actually drown. Because the circumstances are very different. No one's going to pull us out, which sucks. But on the upside, we're not actually in a bucket. Right? We're in a pool of water and there's a shore somewhere.

there's land somewhere. So understand that your mind may want to do that. Notice the activity of the mind as it tries to project into the future. Notice what it does to your motivation and your desire for effort. And then recognize that you can't really like that thought is coming, that future projection is actually coming from an emotion. It's not coming from a logical place. And even if you say, but I have all this evidence,

I'll be alone forever. don't you see I'm 17 years old and I've asked out two people or I've asked out or I'm 25 years old and I've asked out 25 people. You can have as much evidence as you want to, but people can be alone until they're not, right? That's where like maybe you need to be a little bit more careful about how you ask people out. Like you may have some kind of like red flag in your process. Right? So like be reflective. Don't just assume like the reason that you're alone may have something to do with your behavior.

So I'm not disputing your evidence. I'm just saying that your evidence is incomplete and doesn't necessarily conclude that you shouldn't bother with anything. More practically, there are practices that can teach your mind to live in the present, to train yourself to be in the present. All meditation does this.

So meditation will help with that. Okay? So Universal Emperor is saying the present sucks. I disagree with that in 98% of cases. So in my overwhelming experience, the more you lean into the present, the better life gets. I wish I could say 100%, but I've had a couple of experiences where all of my meditative strength and energy and mana and experience

falls short for me with nausea and vomiting, which like, I just can't enjoy the present when I'm puking. I've tried. Boy, have I tried. But, like, in most cases, like including social things, work things, setbacks, all that kind of stuff. Like, you can still enjoy the present.