The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Top 5: Love the Past, But Don't Live There

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

Happiness Lab is five years old. To mark our birthday, Dr Laurie has picked her favorite five episodes from the archive. The show Why Nostalgia Ain't So Rosy was certainly a memorable one for her.   Actor Rob Lowe LOVES the 1980s. And who can blame him? He was one of the most famous men on the planet. But, as he tells Dr Laurie, he's careful not to wallow in nostalgia for the music, fashions and events of his youth too much - and happiness science backs him up on this. Research suggests that our memories of the past can be very selective and highly unreliable - causing us to misremember events and cast them in a rosy glow. Sadly, this also causes us to make very bad decisions about what will make us happy in the future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. And it's prompted us to go back into the archive to pull out five of my most memorable and meaningful episodes from the hundreds that we've made. My producer, Ryan, has number three on the list, which is... So it's a show from season three called Why Nostalgia Ain't So Rosy. And I think I know why you had me grab this one out, but why don't you tell the listeners? Is it because of our main guest who we start with? My heartthrob? Yes. So this is an episode where I got to interview the actor Rob Lowe, who definitely was one of my 80s heartthrobs. I believe you made fun of me

for a smile on my face in the Zoom interview. Yes, I looked a little cheesy. And this was the first big season we made during the COVID lockdown. So I remember sitting with you on Zoom and with Rob Lowe. He told so many funny stories and did all the accents.

We couldn't fit them all in. Yeah, I mean, and aside from all his Hollywood anecdotes, Rob also really helped us understand the psychology of nostalgia, both the parts of nostalgia that we get right that help us and the parts of nostalgia that lead us astray. Because Rob's very nostalgic. I mean, there's lots of things in his youth he remembers fondly. But as I remember, he's also careful not to get caught up in them.

What are the things you get nostalgic about? Well, Rob and 80s movies, obviously. You know, really cheesy music from the 90s. I mean, there's so many things I get nostalgic about. And I think that's the beauty of our understanding of nostalgia, right? Is that nostalgia can kind of bring us joy. But as we'll see in this episode, it's something that we don't want to get caught up in.

We want to be nostalgic without falling prey to the pitfalls of nostalgia. And that is what I think you'll learn today. So here is Why Nostalgia Ain't So Rosy. When you hear the word nostalgia, where do your thoughts go? Oh, boy. You know, it gets triggered, you know, usually by music or a smell. Like hot air and pines. That combination. in a little bit of salt water reminds me of the very first time I ever saw California in 1976

when I first set foot out here and started my journey to where I am today. So that really gets me nostalgic. You're listening to one of the most surreal conversations of my life. I'm talking about nostalgia with the actor who personifies some of my fondest 80s memories, who personifies some of my fondest 80s memories, Rob Lowe. If you're a child of the 80s like me, Rob is an icon. He was part of pretty much everything I'm embarrassed to love about that decade. He was in ABC after-school specials. He starred in classic 80s movies like St. Elmo's Fire and The Outsiders.

He was a member of the infamous Brat Pack. He was on the cover of Teen Beat magazine week after week. He dated all my teen girl idols, from Demi Moore to Winona Ryder. He played the saxophone. Or at least I thought he did. Do you actually play the sax, or was that just for the movie? Let me tell you something. I am a longtime actor. I can fake do almost anything.

I can fake shoot a gun. I can fake rappel. I can fake play the saxophone like no other. And I have fooled many a person with it. And let's not even get started on his hair. I used more hair mousse than any human being should ever use. should ever use. All this goes to say that even though I was trying to be my smoothest professional podcast Yale professor self when I chatted with Rob, I was finding it really hard to hold it together. When the carpenters come on the radio and you're like immediately next to your grandpa co-driving his station wagon and you're nine or 11 years old, it's awesome. It's magic. You're in a time machine. You're literally in a time machine. But I love that the time machine point because, you know, in some sense, you've created that time machine for other people. You know, even for me, like just talking

with you on the Zoom call, I hear your voice and I hear certain ways that you express things and certain parts of your smile. And I'm taking back to movies I watched in grade school and with friends and fun times in college. And what does it feel like to be creating the time machine for other people? That is amazing. It makes me feel so good. It really does because I can put the shoe on the other foot so easily. When I meet my heroes or whatever and go, hey man, that song you wrote, I played it at my wedding. To me, hearing feedback like that, at the end of the day, it's the real reason I think that I became an actor and got into this business was to move people and create memories for them because memories are all you got. That's all you got.

Rob is right here. When we look back at our lives, our memories are all we've got. And reliving all those nostalgic moments often feels really fun. But nostalgia can also cause pain. Research shows that if we're not careful, our happiest memories have a way of messing with our future well-being, making us downplay bad experiences or totally misremember the past, which can set us up for some potentially damaging choices. So how can we experience the benefits of nostalgia in a way that doesn't hurt our happiness? How can we relive our fond past memories in a way that doesn't hurt our future selves. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.

But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. So full disclosure, I am a nostalgia junkie. When I have a tough day at work, I rewatch old movies or play the classic songs that I loved in high school. So you can imagine my total glee when I learned that I share a fondness for all things old school with my 80s heartthrob, Rob Lowe. I love nostalgia. I love that I'm on this podcast right now because I'm

very big on it. The science shows that Rob and I are not alone here. Nostalgia is an incredibly common experience. In fact, one study found that around 80% of participants reported feeling nostalgic at least once a week. If you were to look over my shoulder at night when I'm going down my YouTube wormhole, it's all nostalgia. It's all history, nostalgia related, behind the scenes of 70s music, all of that stuff. Like me, Rob loves thinking back to the songs of his youth and the concerts he enjoyed when he was young. For him, a big one was seeing his idol Bruce Springsteen live for the first time. One of the things I remember of that crazy time was going to see him at Giants Stadium.

It's the Born in the USA tour. Talk about nostalgia. But Rob's concert memories are also a bit different than many of ours. The stadium's full. It's just before showtime. And I walk in and people start noticing and saying hello and wanting an autograph. And the next thing I know, the entire stadium is chanting my name. I get really, like, embarrassed. But the good news is that led the Springsteen people to get me the hell out of the stadium and backstage, and that's how I finally met Bruce. The same is true for his memories of 80s television. Rob also loves to get nostalgic about bad old school TV. I told him stories of how I used to run off the school bus to

catch my favorite afternoon shows. But Rob's childhood TV watching stories are a bit more over the top than mine. Because Rob wasn't just watching those ABC afternoon specials. He was also starring in them. And I used that as an excuse to go up to the cutest girl in the school and kind of try to chat her up. And her name was Jennifer. And one thing led to another. And she invited me to come to her house and watch the after school special.

And she was like, you know, my dad's in acting. So, you know, that'll be great. So I roll up to her house. It's a mansion in Beverly Hills. First time I've ever seen a mansion. And I open the door and it's Cary Grant in a bathrobe. And so we watched my little stupid after school special with Cary Grant. And so we watched my little stupid after school special with Cary Grant. And afterwards, he was like, you remind me, son of a young Lauren Beatty, which I took as a huge compliment.

As I heard more and more about Rob's incredible stories, I realized that he might not be the best starting point for understanding the average person's connection between nostalgia and happiness. I love the 80s, but I had obviously a very, very, very unique seat at the 80s. So to get a more scientific sense of why we love thinking about the past, I decided to turn to someone else I thought could help. My friend and colleague, Felipe de Brigard. I'm an addict to nostalgia. Yes, I love it. I relish that feeling. Felipe is an academic triple threat. He's a professor of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy at Duke University. Full disclosure, there are times in which I feel that I was born in the wrong time. I love the

1920s. I love hats. I love like dressing up nicely, you know, like chatting with Virginia Woolf. I have a very nostalgic feeling about that. But Felipe isn't just a fan of nostalgia. He's also an academic expert on the topic. The term nostalgia was coined in the 1600s, and it was originally considered a neurological condition, which is very interesting because neurology and psychiatry were, well, there was no such thing as psychiatry back then,

but it was very clearly considered a condition of the body. And it was thought to mainly affect army personnel. It was described in Germany and it was mostly thought of to affect Swiss soldiers. And then there were all sorts of very interesting origin stories as to why people felt nostalgia. One of them had to do with eardrum damage due to the incessant clanging of the cowbells in Switzerland. There were stories about atmospheric pressure and so on and so forth. But it was always considered a malady. It was considered an illness of the body, mainly a neurological illness. And also that it was associated with depression, anxiety,

and also that it was associated with depression, anxiety, lack of appetite, etc. It wasn't until much later where people started to think that there might be something positive about nostalgia. It's kind of amazing that it took hundreds of years for scholars to realize that nostalgia actually felt good. But these days, scientists are learning that the effects of this bittersweet emotion are often more sweet than bitter. In fact, psychologists have observed that thinking wistfully about the past can make us feel really good. We use memories, just as we use imagination, to make us feel better now. So nostalgia is a very good way of going on a little mental vacation without leaving your home. And when you cannot leave your home, that's the best way you can do it, right? One of the times that our brains especially seek out old memories

is when we're feeling more alone than usual. There's been a lot of research on making people feel kind of lonely, isolated, and stuff like that. That tends to elicit a little bit more feelings of nostalgia. So it looks as though it is when you're in a negative situation that you're more likely to generate this sense of nostalgia. If you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab, you probably know that feeling socially connected

is an important condition for happiness. But it's not just the right now social connection we get from seeing friends in the present that makes us happy. Research shows we also get a happiness boost from merely thinking about past social times, especially if we're feeling lonely in the present. As one scientific paper nicely put it, during nostalgic reverie, the mind is peopled. But science has found another way that nostalgia can boost our well-being. Re-experiencing the past can help us feel better about how things went back in the day. Which is important, because let's face it,

our past selves weren't always our best selves. Past us's didn't always make the smartest choices. Something my 80s idol, Rob Lowe, knows all too well. Look, there are people who lived through the 80s, and there are people who lived through the 80s. If you've read Rob's memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, you know that Rob had some pretty rough times early in his career. And that's one of the reasons he personally loves nostalgia so much.

When we look back at some of the bad choices of our youth, we often do so with a bit more clarity than we had when we were living through those events. And I don't think nostalgia is nostalgia without that underpinning. You know, and also looking back on anything, you have 20-20 hindsight. So if you're being nostalgic and you're looking back, implicit in that is what would I have done differently? This redemptive lens through which we naturally view the past, means that we remember even the worst events with a positive spin.

We recall the good parts and neglect the not-so-good, or even embarrassing parts. It's like talking about the greatest beer pong game you ever played. You're like, yeah, it was great! Well, did you vomit? Yeah, I vomited, but it was still great. Or like... When we get back from the break, we'll look in more detail at why we tend to distort the past so badly. Or to paraphrase Rob, how it is that our brains get all the great beer pong of the past without any of the vomit.

When the Happiness Lab returns, we'll see that our rosy, redemptive view of the past stems from an unfortunate design feature of our minds. One that comes with a huge happiness cost that we don't often recognize. We'll learn that what seems like a harmless bit of rosy nostalgia can sometimes cause us to make bad decisions in the present. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Ugh, we're so done with new year, new you. This year, it's more you on Bumble.

More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and We love that for you. Someone else will too.

Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. I mean, there's nothing like being on a bike and suffering with people, rejoicing with people. You know, to me, it's a real shared experience. This is Leigh Thompson, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She's an expert on the ways that our memories can play tricks on us. But Leigh is also a world champion cyclist. She took up the sport late in life, encouraged by a very devoted teacher, her fiance, Bob. You know, he was a cyclist. And, you know, my response was like any normal person's response who doesn't ride a bike, which is, well, anybody can ride a bike.

Like, what's the big deal? But then he said, well, do you know what it's like to go 25 miles an hour on a bike? And can you do that for an hour? And it's like, OK, well, is this a challenge or what? And Lee was up for that challenge. After she and Bob got married, they headed not for a beach vacation honeymoon, but for the San Juan Islands and day-long, grueling bike rides. I didn't know that my husband's secret plan was to get me to ride up Mount Constitution. If I would have read anything about that, I think I would have freaked myself out, said, are you kidding me? There's no way we're doing this. But it was only when we were like a quarter of the way up that he said,

this is going to be a pretty serious climb. But by that time, I was already kind of one quarter into it. A painful bike ride that's so steep, you don't even think you can finish it. That doesn't sound like most people's idea of a good honeymoon, but Lee gets nostalgic whenever she thinks about it. There was one time in my life where I could go back to. It would probably be that because it was just epic, you know, epic fun. But I know enough as a psychologist in my own research to know that on any given day, there was a sunburn, there wasn't enough food, somebody ran out of water. So not every moment was glorious. Lee recognizes that our minds lie to us. And one of our mind's biggest misconceptions is that our recollections of the

past are totally accurate. Our memories are pretty fallible. That seems like a judgy word, but our memories are not necessarily like a video recorder. Human memory doesn't have the hard drive space to videotape life in its entirety, so our brains play fast and loose with the footage. The first thing we do is delete most of the boring parts. The half hour of your vacation that you spent in traffic, or the part where you had to wait for dinner to show

up, or the 10 minutes you spent going through airport security. All those filler moments get dropped. But dropping those boring bits means that our memories are skewed in a very systematic way. The past seems to have a higher ratio of interesting moments to boring stuff than real life does. But that's not the only way our minds are biased. Our brains also don't like to recall the bad stuff, the sunburns and the rainy beach days and lost luggage. And so our brains cook the data. Lee has argued that we simply tend to forget the parts of an event that weren't positive. For example, I know on my honeymoon, there was a day where both of us didn't wear sunscreen and there were very, very uncomfortable burns. I choose not to dwell on that. I choose not to make that the most important aspect. But anybody who's had a pretty bad sunburn knows that can be a deal breaker as far as your ability to enjoy the rest of the vacation.

Our minds are also wannabe movie directors. They really like a good story, the kind that has a happy ending. And that means that our brains unconsciously rewrite past events so that they seem more entertaining. That sunset becomes even more beautiful. That fish we caught becomes not just reasonably sized, but really, really huge. That beer pong game becomes more fun and less vomit-filled. And when we do manage to remember those annoying moments, they somehow magically transform into life lessons that provide a nice narrative arc. So what was an absolute disaster trip could turn out to be a hilarious story after the fact. Kind of like, oh, look at me, I managed to survive.

That's kind of an extreme example of what we call story construction or sense making. It becomes kind of a funny story to tell. After all these edits, our memories are no longer accurate recordings of real life events. They're unconsciously spin-doctored highlight reels. It's a bias that Lee and her colleagues have referred to as rosy retrospection. Which technically means that our memory for this bounded event in time is a lot more favorable and positive and fulfilling than was the actual experience of the event itself. But rosy retrospections aren't just memories we think back on passively. We also use them to predict what we will enjoy and won't enjoy in the future.

And that leads to a second bias, what Leigh and her colleagues call rosy prospection. When we think about a future event, like a dinner with friends or a vacation, When we think about a future event, like a dinner with friends or a vacation, we predict that it's going to be great, just like similar events are in our biased positive memories. Anticipating that event, I probably wouldn't be thinking about the stress of going through an international airport and the stress of, I don't know, packing or not getting my bag. I'd just be thinking about, oh, the arrival and the perfect weather. The idea of rosy prospection and retrospection fit well with what Leigh experienced in her own honeymoon. But did Leigh's hypothesis match what real people actually experience? Leigh wanted to test this empirically.

But she had to locate a pretty special population of subjects. She had to find a group of people who were about to undergo a positive experience in their lives, some sort of event that would make for a good memory. But those people also had to be willing to fill out a bunch of boring surveys during the event. What Lee didn't realize at the time was that her scientific solution to these problems would come, oddly enough, from the biking world. Her colleague Randy Kronk was organizing a bike trip down the coast of California for his students. And so we thought, oh my gosh, this is fantastic.

It's like our perfect dream study. Lee first had the students predict how much they'd enjoy the bike trip before it started. They were asked, how much do you agree with these statements? I'm going to enjoy this trip. I'm going to think this vacation is fun. I'm going to feel good during this trip, and so on. Subjects were also asked the same questions again when they were on the trip itself and after the trip when they were on their flight back home. So what did

Lee find? Well, before the bike trip, subjects thought their enjoyment would be at a 27 out of 28 total points on Lee's measure. They thought the trip was going to be awesome. But by the second day, Subject had dropped to only a 20 out of 28. The bikers enjoyed Mint stayed lower than they had initially predicted for the entire week. But what happened a single day after the bike tour ended? Subjects remembered their trip much better than it was.

They said their experience was a 26 out of 28. On average, the bikers' final post-trip rating was higher than their enjoyment had actually been at any single point during the trip. Now that the trip was over, it was awesome. When you ask people, oh, you have this event coming up, how are you feeling? Oh my gosh, it's going to be fantastic. I'm so excited. This is going to be so pleasureful. And then during the event, my socks are wet. I forgot to bring mosquito repellent, you know, like so yucky, you know, the food they ran out of whatever. So there's a dampening, as we called it during the event. And then after the event, boom, all of a sudden,

And then after the event, boom, all of a sudden, the rosy retrospection kicks in where people are remembering the event as much more pleasurable than they reported during the event itself. Now, at first glance, the positive biases Lee identified may seem like a great design feature of the mind. Rosy retrospection allows our memory banks to be filled with extra positive, less boring recordings of the past. And remembering all those positively edited memories makes us feel happier, less lonely, and even more redeemed in the present. All good stuff, really. But Lee's research also reveals a major dark side to these biases. Our positively skewed recollections aren't just passive recordings that we go back to when we're feeling nostalgic. We also use our memories in the present to make predictions about how we ought to be spending our time. So if our overly rosy memories are getting our past realities really wrong,

what does that mean for the accuracy with which we're making the decisions of today? What does that mean for the accuracy with which we're making the decisions of today? I remember distinctly having the time of my life at, I don't know, what do you call them, kind of small town kind of carnival things that you go to at night. They have these like rides and you eat cotton candy. And I just remember thinking, this is my thing. I want to go do that. Even though she's a world expert on memory biases, Lee still sometimes falls prey to the problems of her own nostalgia. Well, I made the mistake of doing that not so long ago, and I was dizzy. I got a migraine headache. The cotton candy was terrible. Like, how does anybody

eat that stuff? Lee naturally assumed that her fond memories of carnivals would accurately predict how positively her present self would feel if she jumped on a roller coaster or took that first bite of cotton candy. She assumed all the great things she remembered about fairs of the past would feel just as good today as they seemed in her nostalgic memories. But Lee's overly glossy memories of the past wound up reducing her current happiness and making her a little nauseous. Constantly rewriting the past in a favorable light may make us happier when we look back, but it also means we don't correctly adjust

to the demands of the future. For instance, focusing on the highlights of a marriage or a job might cause us to stay in relationships or work environments that aren't good for us, where the bad times, in reality, outweigh the good. But it's not just our personal choices that are led astray by our biased memories. When we get back from the break, we'll see that there are also societal costs to all these rosy retrospections, ones that can be used against us when we least expect it. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together, we will make America great again. We'll explore this dark

side of nostalgia when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. We're so done with new year, new you. This year, it's more you on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will, too.

Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. I'm from Colombia, and that's where I grew up until I moved to the States 18 years ago. until I moved to the States 18 years ago. Nostalgia expert Felipe de Brigard's immigrant experience explains why he relates so much to one of his favorite literary heroes, Juvenal Urbino, a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's famous book, Love in the Time of Cholera. Like Felipe, Juvenal made the tough decision to leave Colombia to study abroad. But unlike Felipe, Juvenal's ignorance of his own rosy retrospections

never let him properly process that decision. When he's in Paris, he feels extraordinarily nostalgic about going back to his hometown. And he wants to go back, doesn't enjoy Paris. And then when he goes back, he's not happy. He's like, this is not at all how I imagined it, right? Our rosy retrospections mean that we spend the present constantly wishing we could go back to what it was like in the past.

But in the rare cases where those wishes come true, as they did for Juvenal, we usually find that those past situations aren't as good as we rosily remembered. To steal the eloquent words of Garcia Marquez, we become easy victims to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia. But the fact that our nostalgic tendencies are so easily deceived also makes us easy marks for people who might want to exploit a rosier past. Human minds are so prone to rosy retrospection that it's really simple to feed us a good story about what things were like back in the day, some imagined utopia that was better then than it is now, which is why so many political movements are keen to convince us that everything in life would be peachy

if we could just return to the good old days. That was the whole Trump campaign, right? Make America great again. And that again was clearly an indication that it was good before and that we should strive to do something like in the past. Felipe saw just this pattern in his own country's right-wing propaganda amid attempts to end decades of political violence. I left Colombia very unhappy with the political situation.

Some of the most horrible acts ever committed by a government, I think, in Colombia happened during that time. But what is very surprising to me is that, you know, many of the people that voted against the peace process had an extraordinarily distorted view of how the past was. So they were hoping to sort of go back to a kind of life that never occurred in Colombia, never. This is a situation, again, in which nostalgia is a very bad motivator. And that's because the science shows that we don't just experience nostalgia for a past that we actually experienced. Our memories are so biased that we sometimes experience nostalgia for a past that never even occurred, for one that we only imagined happening. You go like, holy moly, I would be so much better off if I was in that imagined situation that I never lived, I never experienced,

but I am very capable of mentally simulating relative to this state that I am in right now. It is just the worst possible way of going about making decisions. So how can we protect ourselves from the nefarious parts of nostalgia? How can we get the benefits of our rosy past without all those biased memories hurting our current decisions? Felipe thinks one path forward is to pay attention to why we're turning to the past in the first place. What do our memories tell us we're missing in the present? You might think that what you want is to go back to high school, but really what is going to satisfy the desire

is to get new friends. But there's also a second way to avoid the problems of nostalgia. The funny thing is that it seems kind of counterintuitive because what I think we should do is to improve our memory of the past. We need historians really helping us dispel the delusions that nostalgia create. I think universities should hire historians.

I think podcasters should interview historians. The best way to sort of minimize the distortions of nostalgia is to actually improve our memory. As I heard more of Felipe's strategies for preventing the problems of rosy retrospection, I realized I needed to talk to someone who had special insight into how to use our fond memories productively. Not a historian or scholar, but someone whose entire career could have been defined by the past, but wasn't. My 80s idol, Rob Lowe.

Listen, I love the 80s as much as the next guy. But when people come up to me, the thing that I'm most proud of in all my career is that I never know what they're going to want to talk about. I love that I'm not anchored to any one era or to any one TV show or to any one movie. The 80s is merely a fantastic chapter that a lot of people like,

including me. Unlike many stars from the 80s, Rob managed not to get stuck there. Despite the fact that Rob is himself very nostalgic, and the fact that he is, for me at least, the absolute epitome of 80s nostalgia, he's seamlessly managed to move beyond that decade. Nearly all of Rob's biggest successes, in movies and TV as an author, and now even in podcasting with his new show Literally with Rob Lowe, they've all come since the 80s. For a self-proclaimed lover of nostalgia, Rob hasn't let his rosy retrospection affect his present success or his current happiness. One of my greatest fears was always being a one-hit wonder. Four decades in, I still wake up and go, am I a one-hit wonder?

So what's Rob's secret? Well, even though he's not a psychologist, Rob seems to have an intuitive sense that our memories are more fallible than we realize. His unique cultural seat in the 80s has made him all too aware that we sometimes celebrate parts of the past that were at the time kind of sucky. So in the 80s, everybody shit all over the music. It seems shocking now. But like, when did Journeys Can't Stop Believin' become the national anthem? Because I remember the 80s. And people laughed at Journey. They thought they were a cheesy, hack rock band. Now that's every college campus frat party, raise your beer, start crying and dancing song. It's the end of the Sopranos. If you'd have told me in 1984 that that was the song, I would have said, no way. While it's easy for all of us to misremember the past,

that's a luxury that people who've lived in the public eye don't always have. Rob's problems with substance addiction and sex scandals are common knowledge. And that means that Rob has had to be honest with himself about the harmful actions he engaged in as a young man. It's made him penitent and more clear-eyed about the past. Rob's also gotten a newfound perspective on the challenges of teenage life. As a father to his own boys, Matthew and John, Rob's kids never became huge teen movie stars like their dad.

Watching Matthew and John grow up with more run-of-the-mill adolescent milestones has made Rob realize just how odd his own experience was. My son is 18, okay, so now he's world famous. That kid right there, 18, world famous. And it just takes my breath away. I'm like, I wouldn't wish that on that 18-year-old kid. He's never home. He's on the road. He's making tons of money. And it's like, I can't believe it happened to me. But Rob's biggest insight comes from something we talk about a lot on this podcast. To be fully happy, we need to get out of the past long enough to make the most of the present moment. When you think about happiness, do you think it's more about looking back, looking

forward, a combination of both? Like, how do you think about it in your own life? It's not looking forward and not looking back. Although we've been talking about nostalgia, which does make me happy, obviously, really happy. True happiness is being present in this moment. And your mind's not telling you, hey, you know what you should really be doing? You should be doing X, Y, and Z. Or, hey, you know, you should really go back. None of that. That monkey brain part of yourself is shut off and you are fully present in whatever you are doing and content with that. That is the definition of true happiness for me. This insight into the importance of making sure he's living in the present moment came from one of the hardest won battles of Rob's life.

sure he's living in the present moment came from one of the hardest won battles of Rob's life. You know, I've been sober now 30 years and it's, you know, it changed my life. And one of the big tenets of recovery is learning to live in the now and learning to be happy with what's in front of you. To the extent that I'm able to do that on a daily basis is a direct correlation to how happy I am at any given time. Nostalgia can be a pleasant experience, but our memories of the past can also hurt our present selves if we're not careful. But when we take a present focus, when we learn to be content with what's in front of us, when we recognize that we want to remember what's going on in the here and now as happily as possible, we can avoid the problems that come with an extra rosy retrospection.

Rob's living proof that understanding our mind's biases can help us appreciate our past and even dig into all that yummy and psychologically beneficial nostalgia without the drawbacks. When we notice what we're longing for in the past, we can choose not to go backwards, but decide how to move forward in the future. Rob taught me that an accurate sense of the pros and cons of the past can be a helpful way to enjoy and make the most of the present. Which was really good news for me, because I really, really wasn't ready to throw away my 80s playlist just yet. In fact, after chatting with Rob,

I think it's time for a long classic 80s movie marathon. And maybe some cheesy music videos. Because I definitely still want my MTV.