Stuff You Should Know - Nostalgia is not the most toxic impulse

Episode Date: March 31, 2016

Nostalgia is a funny thing. It's not home sickness, it's more connected to emotions and a time in your life. But is nostalgia worthwhile? Nascent science says it just might be. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Chuck, let's go over the stuff you should know concert calendar. My friend, we are hitting the road for the Spring Head Sprung Tour. We are gonna be at the Neptune Theater

in lovely Seattle, Washington on April 8th, my friend. The next day, we're gonna head south to Portland, Oregon, at Revolution Hall, April 9th. We are going to Houston, Texas, my friend. Nice. We're house live on May 28th, Memorial Day weekend. And finally, finishing up Denver, Colorado, at the Gothic Theater on May 29th, two more dates coming.

Yeah, keep your ears out. And in the meantime, if you wanna get tickets, you can go to sysklive.com, powered by Squarespace. And we'll see you guys on the road. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from house.works.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry. And this is Stuff You Should Know. There's so many things I could do right now. I could sing the My Buddy theme song. I could sing the theme song, The Thundar, The Barbarian. I could talk about Topps baseball cards, 1986. Yeah, and that rock hard stick gum. That came with it, yeah.

I don't think they have gum in baseball cards anymore, do they? Maybe they just gave up the goats. They were like, no one wants this. Nobody wants it. It took out some kid's eye, and that was that. Yeah, nostalgia. So I think we should dedicate this show to John Hodgman. Let's.

I thought we kind of implicitly dedicated every show to Hodgman. Well, we do. Why explicitly this time? Well, Hodgman is, he is on record time and time again with the following quote. Nostalgia is the most toxic impulse. Oh yeah, he doesn't like a Christmas story, does he?

I don't think he's seen a Christmas story, but he is very adamant and has been on record many, many times on his own podcast, Judge John Hodgman. And to me in person, when he wants to go on about how much he hates nostalgia, about how bad it is, and his deal. And I'm going to mention him quite a bit in here. So he's either going to listen to this and be like, oh my god, it's about nostalgia.

And these are my friends, or he's going to skip it all together. I could see him skipping it all together. Because he didn't want to hear about it. We maybe should clue him in and be like, Hodgman, you're in this. He'll listen to it a million times if we tell him that. So his notion is that it's a longing for a better time

that does not exist. That we look back with rose-colored glasses, and it was not, in fact, better, and that it's toxic to do so. Right, and that's absolutely a correct definition of nostalgia. But Hodgman's idea falls apart at the end when he says that it's toxic. Because quite the contrary, nostalgia's been proven again and again to be quite helpful.

I don't even agree that that's the definition of nostalgia. I don't think it has to be longing for a time in your past. Because for me, nostalgia is not longing for that. It is just very warm remembrances and wrapping myself up in that. Not, man, I wish I could be 14 again. You don't wish you could be 14 again? No, not at all.

What is wrong with you, Chuck? I wish I could be 26 again. Nostalgia. That's a pretty dope time in one's life. Nostalgia. But I don't look back and say, man, and I also take issue with sometimes things were better back then.

Yeah, but Hodgman makes a pretty good point. And so do the social scientists that support his point. When, basically, by definition, when you are experiencing the emotion, this very complex, weird, understudied emotion of nostalgia, you're thinking about something in a way that it really kind of didn't actually happen. Like the negative stuff gets cut out.

Like stepping on a rusty nail right after that great memory from camp or whatever, that part gets cut out. I just agree with that. Just the good stuff. So I'm talking about the studies that support it. Yeah, but I don't think these studies are right because it's subjective. It's very personal.

I can remember. Well, that's social science for you. I can remember the smell of my grandparents' house, their first house, and how much I loved it. And that one summer I went on my first plane trip. And I also remember biting my tongue off playing soccer and how awful that was. Like I don't edit that out and be like, no,

everything about it was great. Like, no, I bit my tongue off and it was terrible. So OK, I think then what you're talking about is the difference between reminiscing, which is more of an episodic memory, and nostalgia, which is almost purely just an emotional memory. No, it's an emotional memory. All right, well, then you'll just

have to say, I believe you, Chuck. I heard it burns. I believe you, Chuck. All right, so let's go back in time a little bit. There's a Swiss doctor named Johannes Hofer in 1688. And he was studying some Swiss soldiers that were stationed abroad. And he said, you know what, there's something going on here.

They are depressed. They're anxious. They can't sleep. They're tired. They're even having heart palpitations and fever. They're angry really easily. And they just can't stop thinking about their home. It is almost as if they are home sick.

Right. And he coined the term. He coined the term nostalgia from Greek nostos, which means to return home. And algos, or algos, pain. So the pain of yearning to return home is what he described. He literally said it's a cerebral disease of essentially demonic cause, ideas of the fatherland,

making them sick and longing for home. It's a no brainer. It's like these guys are fighting a war, and they'd rather be back home. Yeah, it sounds like he was describing PTSD, though, as well. Yeah, maybe. Because when these attendant symptoms that he talked about,

like not being able to sleep, or eat, and having fever and heart palpitations, that's not nostalgia. But Johannes Hoffer did set the tone for nostalgia for centuries. So either it was viewed as a physical malady, or disorder, or disease, or a psychological one, up until basically the 1980s, to tell you the truth. And at first, because of Hoffer's study of the Swiss soldiers,

they actually thought that possibly it was just the Swiss who were afflicted by nostalgia. And one of the other alternative explanations for it was that the constant clanging of cowbells had done something to the nerves connecting the eardrum to the brain. That makes sense. And was basically driving these people crazy,

making them want to go home. Right, or at least steal the cowbell. Right, get it off the neck. You want to hear something weird? Sure. So Hoffer also said that the ideas of the fatherland that were vibrating in the soldier's brains, he said that that was brought on by animal spirits.

And I read this yesterday. The same night, I was reading an article by Dr. Jack Kevorkian about human experimentation among the condemned and executed. That's what I do, right? He mentions animal spirits. Whoa. In the exact same way.

So apparently there was a time when they thought that the, or they called, but what we would now call the electricity in the central nervous system, animal spirits. Right, some of those old terms. Right. And I ran across it twice in one day, which is basically the Bader Meinhoff phenomena.

Right. I just thought that was so weird. I mean, like. Yeah, and that's pretty obscure, you know. Very obscure. It's not like, oh, I saw 11-11 on the clock again today. Right. Right.

Those people. Animal spirits. All right, so fast forward a little bit. And we, like you said, for many, many years, it was looked at as a mental illness called melancholia or immigrant psychosis. Yeah, that was another thing. They thought that just immigrant seamen, soldiers,

and kids who went off to school were the ones who suffered from it. Yeah, basically you get shipped off somewhere and you yearn for the place that you liked better. Right. Which is called just homesickness. Homesickness, right. Two different things.

But not until the 80s even did it begin to get separated. Yeah, and this article points out very astutely. I thought this one was pretty good. Yeah. That homesickness. This is a Julia Layton joint. Yeah, she's been around house supports for a while. She's a vet.

Not a veterinarian. Or a veteran soldier. Although I don't know Julie. She might be both. Yeah, she could have. You never know. Served the MP dogs as a vet in the army. Homesickness, Julie, points out is distressing,

which makes a lot of sense. That's different from nostalgia because nostalgia generally is, even though it is complex, and we'll get to all that, it is generally looked at as a feeling of pleasant feelings watch over you when you think of the good old days. Indirect contradiction to Hodgman's wacky ideas. All right, so let's talk about it. OK, so since it was up until, again, the late 1980s

viewed as basically an attendant symptom or somehow tied into depression or some other psychological malady, it wasn't until very recently that the social sciences started to say, I don't know if that's necessarily true. Let's look into it. So the actual study of nostalgia itself is extremely new. And it's still very much understudy,

which is to say that the social sciences has not yielded any kind of definitive answer as to what nostalgia is, where it comes from. There seems to be a general consensus that it is an emotion, but it's a complex secondary emotion, meaning it's not anger, it's not fear, it's not joy, but it seems to be secondary, and it seems to spring from society in the same way

that a secondary emotion like embarrassment or self-consciousness has arisen from our experience in society. Nostalgia seems to have come in the same way. Yeah, and they've noticed some trends, which is about as good as you can do when you're studying something like nostalgia. And when we talk about some of these real studies, they're frustrating for me to read, but we'll get to those.

But some of the trends, if you are a worry wart, you might be a little more prone to nostalgic eyes, because you're trying to escape your worries and think about a happier time when you're on the beach, toes in the sand maybe. And they experts think that if you are in transitional periods of your life, you're going to be more prone.

Like if you're a kid growing into an adult, or if you are in your 40s and 50s and you're transitioning into, let's say, 50s or 60s, I'm in my 40s. From middle age into senior adulthood. Yeah, these transitional big transitions in your life, you might be a little more prone to look at your life and think, because what have I done with my life is also tied to nostalgia.

And that makes sense utterly and completely, because what they found with nostalgia is that it's like you said, it's a means of escapism. And during these times where you're going from adolescence into young adulthood, or middle-aged into old adulthood, that's a place of fear, what's coming next. And you start thinking about the good times that you've had.

Almost involuntarily, it seems like nostalgia happens. It's not like you think, hmm, I'm a little nervous right now. Let me nostalgize. It's almost like an involuntary mental trigger that takes place. Although that is a thing, Julia points out that people can use it almost like a bag of tricks if they are prone to depression to call upon these things.

And it's like nostalgia can be a tool. I mean, you'd have to kind of conjure it up. Sure, no, I know you can, but you don't necessarily, that's not necessarily how it happens. And they found that there are plenty of things that trigger it, like music, like smells, different things that basically serve as mnemonic devices in the formation of emotional memories.

And the thing that's come up from the study that has been done on nostalgia is that it seems to be universal. It's not culturally bound. And the triggers that trigger nostalgia are also universal. So it'll be like a memory of a social experience with friends and family. And that might be culturally bound,

like Thanksgiving here in America or Canada, where they have fake Thanksgiving a month early. But then it might be Carnival down in Buenos Aires or something like that. So the actual experience might be culturally bound. But the trigger itself, having a good time at a holiday, is universal. Yeah, so let's take a break.

We'll come back and talk about triggers more after this. And we'll let Hodgman take a deep breath and maybe run around the block, because I sense he's getting angry. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted

Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

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You mentioned music being a trigger that is very powerful. So powerful. And again, it's variant among people's individual experience. But music, for me, still I'm thinking about this, this is a huge nostalgia trigger. But I think I realize that almost 100% of the time, it's a song that I haven't heard for a long, long time. So if I hear Jay Giles' band's centerfold.

Boo. Great song. Boo. Reminds me of elementary school in a very powerful way in even specific things. But I've heard that song a gazillion times. I hear it once a week on classic rock radio. So it doesn't flood you with nostalgia?

No, no more. We've heard it too much. It's over years. Right. But if I hear a song from all of my CDs are packed up in the attic, and most of those are from a certain period in my life where I bought CDs. So if you hear True Blue, you just start weeping like babies?

Not True Blue, more recent than that. But if I hear a song from one of my CDs from the mid-90s that I just may not have heard in a long time, that is super, super powerful. Well, what song? I don't know. Just a song for my LA days, maybe. OK.

Or just something I don't listen to like something from college that I don't listen to anymore. And it's like never played on the radio. Like, I'll hear Urban Dance Squad, Deeper Shade of Soul. Deeper Shade of Soul, remember? No. That sounds like a pretty 90s song, though. Yeah, it was very 90s.

And you never hear that song anymore. Sure. So if I hear that song just now, I just sang a little bit of it. How are you feeling right now? I'm feeling great. I'm not feeling toxic. Hodgman's mad at you right now. I know.

It feels wonderful, John. Stop, stop. And I don't want to go back in time to then either. I'm just remembering like, man, what a great song. That takes me back to college. Yeah. And the reason why songs tend to be so powerful and potent, especially from a certain age, typically adolescence, right?

Supposedly has to do with the way that the brain is working right then. Everyone says teenagers have raging hormones going on. Sure. Well, there is a lot more brain chemistry floating around than happens throughout the rest of your life. So it's easier to form very powerful emotional memories and when you're listening to music at that age,

so that when you go back and listen to it, it's basically going back into your card catalog of a brain and unlocking that emotional memory so you get to experience it a little bit again. And then that's nostalgia brought on by music. Yeah, that makes sense. For me, the one that gets me the most is scent. Yeah, scent and taste for me are really powerful too.

So the smell of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls and orange rolls is like Christmas age eight. Wow. Like every time. Now, do you ever eat that stuff now? I just did yesterday. As a little trip down memory lane? Yes, well, not as it, but it inevitably brought it on.

OK, so you didn't say like, I'm doing a nostalgia podcast. I'm going to go get some of those sweet rolls. No, it was totally coincidental, actually, like the animal spirits. Yeah, what I've been doing lately is seeking out things that I haven't had in forever just to see what happens. Oh, yeah, so basically you're going to slurpee the other day.

You're like Strange Days. Remember that movie with Ray Fiennes? Yeah, boy, that takes me back. But with nostalgia, what flavor is slurpee? I did the same. I always did a mixed cherry and Coke. Oh, nice. And I haven't had a slurpee since probably like high school.

And that taste was so familiar and exactly how I remember. But it wasn't like, oh, this takes me back to those days. Just like, oh, this is interesting. I ate a circus peanut the other day. Oh, gross. No, they're awful, but I haven't had one since I was probably 10. I've avoided those my whole life. Yeah, and the other one that gets me, remember when you were kid,

trick-or-treating, and you would get those kind of chewy peanut butter treats and the waxy wrappers? Yeah, I don't remember what they're called. There were no name, but everyone got them. No, there's a name and like 50 people are going to email me. Oh, really? Sure. Yeah, it's got to be that orange or black wax wrapper.

Like those, man, instant nostalgia. Yeah, nice. Not toxic. Yeah. It's wonderful. Peanut butter Twix can do that for me. That was one of my first favorite candy bars. I thought you'd say, like, it takes me back to 2008.

No, they had peanut butter Twix in the 80s. They tried it for a little while. Yeah, they were all stopped. Yeah, they don't have those anymore, do they? No, it's back. Oh, it is. OK. Is that one in your pocket?

It's one tucked into my cheek right now. So taste, they think, induces nostalgia pretty heavily because the pathways carrying information from taste buds are in the limbic system, which is where scent is as well. Yeah, and your olfactory bulb is super duper in the limbic system. And it's actually got a direct connection to the amygdala, which helps experience emotions. And what's the other component of the limbic system?

The hippocampus. Yeah, the hippocampus, which sorts and stores memories. So your olfactory bulb itself is almost literally plugged in to the two components of your brain that form emotional memories, which is one reason why scent can trigger nostalgia so powerfully, too. Yeah, does that, I wondered if that means that if it's more immediate, then it's stronger.

Like, if it's just a quicker link. Maybe. Like, literally, the pathway is shorter. Right. Could be. Interesting. I mean, that's what Layton supposed. Yeah, I don't think she pulled that out of her head.

I think that's the common belief, right, for something that they don't understand that much. Yeah, and I think that's probably got to be coming through to dear listeners, right? I think they know. This is, like, there's a lot of grasping at threads going on, in part because it is just very early on in the study of nostalgia.

There's not a lot of people studying it. And so the number of theories is kind of narrow. But a lot of it does make sense. Yeah, and when you look at these studies, which we'll talk about, so many of them hinge on, you're feeling nostalgic? All right, let's do something to you. Right.

Oh, you're not feeling nostalgic. Yeah. Let's do the same thing to you. Yeah. Which, I mean, this is a very tough study to pull off. It totally is, and that's a big problem that the social sciences run up against is, like, they are studying subjective reports.

Well, the average person can't tell you how they're feeling, even when they sit there and think about how they're feeling. So there are standardized questionnaires that have become accepted in the field that say, this scores a person's feeling of nostalgia. There's actually a questionnaire that is designed to rate how nostalgic you are at the time you take it.

And there are ways to study it. It's not just totally willy-nilly, but when you compare it to something, say, like biology or something like that, it's a little, it's slightly wispier. Agreed. Should we take a wispy break and talk about some of these studies after this?

Yes. All right, buddy, we teased on some studies. And I don't want to say I made fun of them, but there is. I think you pointed out some of their inherent flaws. Sure. So let's talk about them. Here is one where they had subjects read about different things.

One was a tsunami disaster. Like one bad thing, two good things. One was a disaster. One was the successful landing of a space probe. Another one was the birth of a polar bear in a zoo. Which I mean, depending on like that right there. You might hate polar bears. You might hate zoos.

You know? That's a good point. Yeah, it's a real good point. They probably shouldn't use that. No, and it's a problem with any kind of standardized questionnaire, whether it's the SAT or the standardized questionnaire for nostalgia. Totally.

So after reading these, they answered questions assessing their current levels of nostalgia. What they found was the people who read about the tsunami were the most nostalgic, which led them to believe that people call upon nostalgia when they're not feeling good about something. Right, and then they use it. That is the prevailing predominant theory

of nostalgia these days. That it is a, you can do it voluntarily, but it's basically an involuntary defense mechanism when we experience what's called discontinuity. And discontinuity comes in many forms, but all of it amounts to a reminder that we are going to eventually die one day. And that thought can come in all sorts of different forms.

It can come when we have a relationship that's breaking down, when we're far away from our social network. There are any number of ways that we're reminded of our own mortality, right? And one of our big defense mechanisms is growing nostalgic. And it's basically built-in suicide prevention, because it makes you wonder if we didn't have a way to get back on track through nostalgia,

and you just like entered a period of discontinuity and never got back to, you know, life's good again. Where would we be as a species? Who knows? So nostalgia seems to be some sort of evolutionary trick where when we look into the void and think, oh God, I'm gonna die or my life is meaningless or whatever, we experience nostalgia,

and it has this incredible flood of beneficial effects on the person who's feeling nostalgic. Yeah, I thought this one article was pretty great when they were talking about discontinuity. They referenced Sweet Judy Blue Eyes by Crosby Still's Nash and I think Young, right? Like I know. You know the song.

No. Very popular. Can you sing it like an Urban Dance Squad song? No. Come on. You know Sweet Judy Blue Eyes. I swear I don't. If you have heard any Crosby Still's

and Nash song, you've heard this one. It's very, very famous. I'm thinking Bob Seeger right now. Is it the Bob Seeger song is what you mean? No. But here's a line by Stephen Stills. Don't let the past remind us of what we are not now. Right, that's again, Hodgman's not alone in his criticism.

Yeah. That it seems like nostalgia could lead you down this road where you're just like, oh, the past is so much better than the present. But apparently from study of nostalgia, it does the exact opposite. It affirms the meaning of your life. It reminds you that you are loved now, here and now,

and it gets you back on track after an experience of discontinuity, which is bizarre. I'm gonna sing a little bit of it. Okay. You know, I am yours. You are mine. We are what we are. What have we got to lose?

Right. That's that song. I got you. That's a good song. See, it's a great song. It's better than the Bob Seeger song, I think. There is no good Bob Seeger song. That's not true.

Name one. Old time rock and roll. No. Terrible. Worst song ever. Turn the page awful, like a rock awful. Catmandu, kill me. There's one though that's not bad.

I think we've had this conversation before. I think I've been on record as being a big Bob Seeger hater. I'm not big on them either, but there's at least one or two. Oh, you'd love them. You wanna get married to them. All right, that's enough about me and Bob Seeger.

Yeah, see, you got uncomfortable. So I'm having a moment of discontinuity. Yeah, we were talking about the studies, right? Well, I think what we were saying was that if you look at nostalgia from the way that Hodgman looks at it, which makes sense, you would think, well, nostalgia is a bad thing. When in fact, studies have shown

that nostalgia actually gets you back on track when you're feeling like, oh God, I'm gonna die one day, or oh, I'm not loved, or whatever. Rather than getting stuck in reminiscing about how great the past was compared to the present, it reaffirms that the present's pretty great. Yeah, they said, and we always say they, like it's sort of an ambiguous body of people to study this.

I know sometimes we get called out by people who are paying attention. Yeah. Who is the? Researchers of Nostalgia say that positive mental states include higher self-esteem, more socially connected, more generous, more altruistic, more optimistic, worry less about the future and death.

Yeah, that makes it a part of terror management theory, which we actually did a really cool episode on. Oh yeah. It was one of those sleepers, you know, that probably not a lot of people listened to, but it was awesome. Yeah, and they did some other studies, and this to me is really interesting.

In China, it was one study and elsewhere, they have determined that nostalgic feelings might literally make you warmer. Right. Like physically warmer. Yeah. And when I said the warm thing washes over you, they think it might have played a role in evolution.

Like when you're colder, and you think of these thoughts, you get warmer. Yeah, from this study in China, they found that the study participants were, when they were cold and they were nostalgizing, they were imagining themselves, or they were remembering an experience in a warm place. Right.

And apparently it had the effect of making them feel physically warmer. Yeah, and less susceptible to the pain of extreme cold. And another study that had nostalgic and non-nostalgic subjects hold their hands in 39 degree Fahrenheit water, until they couldn't take it anymore. And if you were feeling nostalgic,

you could hold your hand in there longer. So that proves that it warms you up, right? Right. Not really, but it's interesting. It is interesting, all of this is pretty interesting. And there is supposedly a point where nostalgia can become harmful to you, it's called pathological nostalgia,

where you basically do get locked into the idea that everything used to be better back in the day, or whenever at some other point. Yeah. But it's rare compared to regular, what's called personal nostalgia, which is all the nostalgia we've been talking about. And then there's the social nostalgia too, right?

Yeah, like when you didn't even live through it. Yeah, where, you know, like 17 year olds today wearing like a Nirvana t-shirt, or a Misfits t-shirt, or something like that, or being into that music, or thinking like, how great the 90s were, and it's like, dude. Yeah. We lived through the 90s, they were not great.

But it's the same thing, like I love 80s stuff. Sure. I lived through the 80s, but I remember thinking the 80s sucked. And then, you know, as an older person, when the 80s came back, I'm like, yeah, the 80s were pretty fun. Yeah, I think that's kind of accompanied sometimes too,

by this feeling of like I was born in the wrong time. Right. Like man, I would have been a great hippie in the 60s, and I just don't fit in here in the 90s. Sure, like, personally, I think the 70s were probably the greatest decade of all time. Oh yeah? But that's ignoring the fact that like,

Richard Nixon was president, there was an oil embargo, there's all this bad stuff, whereas, I'm just thinking like, dazed and confused type 70s, where everything was just great and happy, and loose, you know, and laid back. Sure. And that's nostalgia. It washes out the negative for everyone but you.

Yeah, I would say Richard Linklater is one of the more nostalgic filmmakers out there. He really plays on that. Yeah, supposedly his new movie that's coming out is gonna be awesome. Everybody wants some? Is that what it is? Yeah.

So it's like Dazed and Confused like four or five years later, right? Yeah, he said it's sort of like a spiritual sequel, like not the same characters, but just sort of 1980, that advent of when things were transferring to disco from, yeah, it's gonna be awesome. He's the best. That was a great movie, Dazed and Confused.

Agreed. So the other thing that they found is that they did a study, Clay Rutledge of North Dakota State did a study. There, there, specifically a they with a name. Yeah, a real guy. So complain to him. He did a series of experiments with English Dutch

and American adults, so he kind of had some different nationalities going on. It's not exclusively American, of course. He let them listen to hit songs from their youth and read lyrics and afterward people said they were more than likely to feel loved and that life is worth living. So more affirmation when they remember these good old days.

Yeah. Question 28, do you feel life is worth living? Check yes or no. And finally, I got one more thing. They say, well, they do recommend that you not fall into that trap of. Pathologicalness. Yeah, of comparing the present to the past so much.

And they also found that certain kinds of people aren't as great with nostalgia. So maybe you should not indulge in nostalgia if you're leery of intimate relationships they found or you're an avoidant person. It says they have reap smaller benefits from nostalgia compared with people who crave closeness. So I don't know what that says about hard one,

but let's throw that out there. So what's your number one nostalgia thing? What gets it for you more than anything else? Probably music. I got two things that are tied for first. The smell of a used bookstore or comic book shop that smell of like that. I guess rotting paper reminds me of mad magazines

from back in the day. And they love them. The fat Christmas lights. Oh yeah, the big. I could just faint from the nostalgia. Yeah, they're like, they were the big tacky ones that are coming back now. That's all my family ever used was the big fat ones.

It was like more Christmas light. You know what you call those? Tree burners. Yeah. Yeah, we never caught a tree on fire, but yeah, they'd get pretty hot. You know what my dad did for a few years is as we were opening our gifts toward the end,

he would start dismantling the tree and pruning the limbs and putting them in the fireplace. He would literally burn the Christmas tree on Christmas morning. That's very, wow, that's very efficient. Was he German? Why don't we look at it? No.

I should say is he? He is not. And I wish I would have given you a specific nostalgic thing. You did urban dance squad. No, just music in general. Taste, smell, music. Gotcha. Put those three together and look out.

Chuck's eyes roll back into his head. And Hodgman claps over him and says, get up. If you want to know more about nostalgia, you can type that word into the search bar at www.howstuffworks.com and I said search bars. It's time for Listener Mail. This is from Christina about the makeup episode. He points out some good things, I think.

Hey guys, I have to weigh in on how makeup works. I think you failed to adequately acknowledge something. We are not, in fact, at a stage where makeup is truly optional for women. And I think we've said that basically. Did we? Yeah, at the end. Well, I think we said it should be your option,

but I think she doesn't feel like it truly is an option. Right, no, we said that. We said the very fact that there was taking a picture of yourself and posting on Twitter without makeup was rebellious, says that it's still not really an option. We said that. All right, so forget it, Christina. We're not reading this.

Right, yeah. No, we're going to read it. While many love wearing makeup, many women simply feel obliged to wear it and are, in fact, penalized if they choose not to. Comes in the form of failing to be promoted, maybe, or taking seriously, getting raises, even being hired. It is a hugely expensive habit, too, especially if you

like to buy the prestige makeup brands. Oh, nice. Yeah. Call out. So she recommended to people read an article from the Atlantic, which is always a good recommendation, called the makeup tax. And it kind of sums up the problem like this.

Women invest time and money into doing their makeup because it impacts their relationships and their paychecks. While both genders tend to buy haircuts, shaving cream, and moisturizer, the price of makeup is something men never have to worry about. And then she goes on to point out just how expensive the gap is between a man's haircut and a woman's haircut, even. You know?

Yeah. Oh, it's huge. Well, it depends on where you go. Yeah, but if you're a woman that goes to not supercuts. Right, it depends on where the man goes, though, too. If you go to a salon and you get a cut in color as a woman, you're paying like several hundred dollars. Sure.

But that's the color jacking it up. Yeah, it's both. I don't mean to be contrary. I agree with you. They pay a lot more money, trust me. Is it Christina? Yeah, I go to Great Clips. Big shout out to Great Clips.

Nice. There's a free cut in your future. So Christina says, yeah, after my 10th cut. Do you have a card? No, not a card, but they give you a receipt every now and then it says 15% off your $8 haircut. Which amounts to $8? It's actually more than that.

It's like 14 or 15. But remember in tipping, it's 14. I give them 20. And you were like, what? Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. So Christina, she finishes up with, I look forward to a day when wearing makeup is really,

truly a choice for anyone of any gender. And both individuals and institutions respect those choices. In the meantime, I choose to save my pennies and stick it to the man by not buying makeup and normalizing my own bare face. Good for you. Christina is a California native listening in Dublin, Ireland.

Nice. Ahoy, as they say in Ireland. Did they say that? Yeah. All right, let's find out, I think. I hope. Thanks a lot, Christina. All points agreed.

If you want to get in touch with us like Christina did, whether you're in Dublin or Los Angeles or wherever, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

visit howstuffworks.com. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey, Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey, Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to this. We're going to come back and relive it. We're going to come back and relive it. We're going to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey, Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

About my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.