00:00:00.860Hey, it's Melody. Today's full episode is free for everyone. And if you ask me, it is Culture Study Catnip.
00:00:08.000I don't know if you know this, but I got my radio and podcasting start in news and politics.
00:00:12.620And I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would have been able to successfully pitch an hour-long show about the cultural force that is nostalgia.
00:00:21.380But because Anne and I are doing this thing totally on our own, we can.
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00:00:30.000Making a good podcast is a ton of work, but when it's done well, you can't really see or hear the
00:00:36.720work that goes into it. I think of it like taxidermy. When it's done well, you're like,
00:00:42.660yeah, that's what a deer looks like. That's what a good conversation sounds like. But when it's bad,
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00:01:13.180listening to this full intro, but I really, really appreciate you. Okay, this intro has
00:01:18.820fully made me nostalgic for the olden days of public radio fun drives I used to have
00:01:23.820to do. So consider this a segue on with the show. I asked you to come up with a commercial from your
00:01:30.580childhood that has stuck with you. And this is what you brought. Little cinnamon gum freshens
00:01:36.740breath longer than Big Red. So kiss a little longer. Stay close a little longer. Hold tight1.00
00:01:43.740a little longer. Longer with Big Red. This is so evocative to me. Like I know exactly why were
00:01:52.760gum commercials we should say this is a commercial for big red for good gun which i don't think you
00:01:59.880could even buy anymore yeah i don't know i haven't been on the lookout for big red i had to stop
00:02:07.660chewing big red when i was a kid i chewed too much and and couldn't taste anything for a little while
00:02:12.800as a teenager i i was so enticed by this big red jingle i was like well i gotta i gotta do it so
00:02:21.460So you burned your mouth, basically, on big red cinnamon gum?
00:07:17.160Yeah, because it's really evolved over the years. There's the idea of it was originally homesickness and, you know, identified in Swiss mercenaries hundreds of years ago. But when I think about nostalgia, I think of this sort of modern feeling, this longing for the past and sort of warm feelings for the past.
00:07:37.560And through the research that I've read, I think nostalgia is an emotion.
00:07:45.300It's something that studies indicate rises when we're not totally happy with how things are going in the present.
00:07:52.580We might be feeling a little bit down.
00:07:54.200And we look to the past in a warm way.
00:07:56.620And it's a little different than a straight-ahead memory because we have kind of a different effect.
00:08:01.380We get some of the good brain chemicals whenever we go on a little bit of a nostalgia trip.
00:08:05.400and it helps give us a bit of grounding a bit of sense of of who we are adds a little bit of
00:08:11.740meaning to the present i think the the example that a lot of people use is it's very sad when
00:08:17.280when a loved one passes away but there's that point of thinking well i'm i'm sad that this
00:08:22.960person is gone but i'm glad to have known them and i'm glad i had that experience and that
00:08:27.620experience has shaped me in this way and that person has shaped me in this way and it sort of
00:08:32.740gives you that bit of meaning and that bit of a boost afterward of thinking, nostalgia gives you
00:08:38.960that bit of a boost of thinking, okay, I've made it this far. Here's how I got here. I can keep
00:08:44.740going, that sort of thing. So I think if you're unhappy with the present, it can be a really good
00:08:49.220way of pointing out that you're able to keep going. And that to me falls under the umbrella
00:08:55.260of mental coping nostalgia, right? Like coping mechanism, positive nostalgia. And then I think
00:09:02.720that it can also be wielded in really damaging ways. I think the most salient example right now
00:09:08.620is probably Make America Great Again, which is evoking a past that has been, that is based on
00:09:19.500memories that aren't full, right? Like based on a sliver of understanding of what the past used to
00:09:25.800be like, and using that as a weapon, cudgel, like using it to justify various policies and various
00:09:36.640racism and various styles of thinking in order to bring us back to that imagined place.
00:09:42.300Yeah. And there's a good bit of writing, book and essay and everything from this theorist,
00:09:48.660Svetlana Boym. And she had distinguished between reflective nostalgia, which is
00:09:54.400thinking back on the past a fond memory a tv commercial that you know makes you happy to
00:09:59.760to go on youtube and watch and restorative nostalgia which is where you try to actually
00:10:04.080bring the past back or or recreate the past and that's where i see something like maga and
00:10:09.900and this idea of firmly deciding the past was better therefore we must bring it back
00:10:16.680and i think where that really starts to create some trouble too is that it halts progress not
00:10:23.720just progress from where we are now forward, but progress from whatever that imagined point was in
00:10:29.400the past. Somebody could say that they really long for any year, 1955 or whatever. But the thing
00:10:37.440about people in 1955 was it was 1956 and then 1957 until we get to today. Whereas I think with
00:10:44.840a lot of restorative nostalgia, there's this idea of, no, we need to recreate the past and we need
00:10:49.740to not move forward at all and we need to freeze everything in that time and it's impossible but
00:10:55.760it's also really dangerous because not everyone is going to agree on what that past was not everyone
00:11:02.720is going to have all the details you're besides just not being able to physically recreate it or
00:11:08.940anything your version of the past of an ideal past is going to be different from someone else's
00:11:13.860and it's not going to be that that complete picture and so you could have a lot of people who
00:11:18.960want to bring back a certain era and they're going to agree on certain things they're going
00:11:23.240to disagree on others and there's going to be a whole lot of people who don't want the past
00:11:27.620brought back at all like that and and disagree as well so it's this really dangerous type of
00:11:34.600of thinking that you can get into when you get into the restorative nostalgia where i do think
00:11:39.380there could be some some positives uh the writer mark fisher had theorized i think he used the
00:11:45.080term hauntology for this uh which is this idea of bring back elements from the past not so much to
00:11:51.560live in the past but to almost get a do-over like take the road not taken if you're not happy with
00:11:58.160with where we are right now think back to a point where maybe things were a little bit better and
00:12:03.140what were the steps that could be taken differently and i think that's a that's an intriguing idea as
00:12:08.060well that's a lot healthier than restorative nostalgia of saying i have an idea of the past
00:12:13.840And you and everyone else has to come with me to that idea of the past versus, okay, here's what we liked about a certain era. Here was something positive that we've lost. How could we take steps to bring it back to something that if things do get worse or if we find that certain elements of modern life aren't what we had hoped for or aren't as good as something in the past, how could we bring that back?
00:12:39.480I mean, I think about when I get together with my college friends, we spend a good amount of time laughing hysterically about stupid shit that we did. Right. Like just weird, like awkward, also, you know, just memories like and part of the retelling of those memories and the retelling of those stories is is cementing them in memory, mythologizing them to some extent.0.99
00:13:03.840And the important thing, I think, is that we can't let our gatherings exclusively be that.
00:13:12.600Otherwise, you make no new memories to mythologize.
00:13:16.180Right. You know, the reminiscence of the old times can be really helpful in a lot of ways because nostalgia isn't just remembering the past.
00:13:24.840It's rewriting the past for yourself, rewriting it and sort of turning even what might have been a negative experience into a positive.
00:13:32.660You know, it ended up making me stronger. I wasn't happy then, but I got through it. Here's how I did it. I'm, you know, I'm stronger. I'm more resilient because of that.
00:13:41.320But I think that recognizing when you're doing it and recognizing that that's happening is really the key to breaking out of it, because I think it is so easy to just fall into and it's easier now than ever before, I think, to fall into this sort of nostalgic reverie and completely lose sight of the need to to do something new, the need to create those new memories.
00:14:04.340you know i like just as much as the next person going on to youtube and looking at at old ads or
00:14:09.740or watching an old show or something like that but you could spend all your time doing it and
00:14:14.900just end up rejecting all modernity basically rejecting anything that that exists anymore
00:14:20.380and live completely in that world and and at that point it it just becomes isolating you know what
00:14:26.080what is and should be a really nice social force of you know bringing people together to to talk
00:14:31.760about a shared experience becomes just kind of sitting alone in your room watching, you
00:14:37.160know, big red commercials on YouTube or something, which isn't going to isn't going to help make
00:14:41.940new memories, isn't going to be something that, you know, in 20 years, you'll sit down
00:14:45.980with somebody and say, like, oh, remember when when I texted you after I watched a bunch
00:14:53.000So you write really wonderfully about nostalgia in your newsletter.
00:14:56.220And I'm curious if there is a topic that you received a lot of reader feedback on that you're like, wow, I didn't realize people were so nostalgic about this.
00:15:08.180oh gosh um i think the one thing that really has touched a nerve has been this idea of
00:15:18.440particularly what do you do if you recognize that things weren't great in the past but you like
00:15:26.460something from the past or if you even make you know this this assessment and decide okay maybe
00:15:34.100things were actually better in this regard and where i've written about it before has been with
00:15:39.080movies in particular that you know we're going now from a really digital heavy virtual world
00:15:45.020and for millennials and older we're looking from a modern world into a more physical tactile world
00:15:54.660like from from a place where almost everything's created digitally to a place where things were
00:15:59.700done in this older way and so there's this huge gap in material quality that you see in movies
00:16:05.560and you know you talk to people about movies that really hold up special effects that look great and
00:16:11.160jurassic park and the matrix come up and these are movies that jaws exactly like these old movies
00:16:18.040where there's a material quality that holds up you know these movies that are decades old
00:16:23.600hold up now still after all these years more than a superhero movie made last year does when you're
00:16:29.920when you're looking at it and so i think there is this conflict sometimes of thinking well i'm not
00:16:36.060a restorative nostalgist i'm not a person who wants to you know like i reject anything about
00:16:41.340maga that sort of thing like i don't want to to bring back the past but at the same time hey
00:16:46.520things were made better back then like movies looked better you did the episode on clothing
00:16:51.400quality and you know looking back and going to a thrift store sometimes it's really hard not to
00:16:57.320just be nostalgic for an era when clothes were made better made to last differently and i think
00:17:02.460that that's something that when i've written about that people have really responded to
00:17:05.900because i think it's a conflict that other generations haven't necessarily had to deal with
00:17:11.920in quite the same way and it's something that i think feels really pressing because not only are
00:17:16.920things made differently but when it comes to arts and culture if they just hold a different place in
00:17:22.320in society now in a streaming era culture just feels different it doesn't quite hit in the same
00:17:28.300way it doesn't quite look the same way we experience it so differently that being nostalgic
00:17:33.340isn't necessarily just being nostalgic for a particular movie or a particular show or a
00:17:38.660particular song it's for the place that that held in in the culture that we lived in at the time
00:17:44.080And the way that everything existed around it that is really hard to hard to reckon with sometimes.
00:17:51.080I totally agree with you about like what a massive shift that we've gone through in terms of aesthetic quality and other forms of quality as well.
00:17:59.800But the one thing aesthetically that I might think was also very difficult to grapple with was the transition to color for our grandparents and great grandparents generation.
00:18:12.300watching some movies and then many movies and then all movies transitioned into color
00:18:17.760television transitioned into color people who still had black and white tv sets because like
00:18:22.880that was the way that they wanted to watch things or that was the way that they understood like
00:18:27.420how a tv show should look and i think that that probably like i wish i would love to read a study
00:18:33.600of how people articulated their feelings about that transition to color at that time because
00:18:39.380it was celebrated right and like you can read the trade press about like the marvels of technicolor0.96
00:18:44.220but i also think that there were people who were like this looks like shit yeah the same way that0.96
00:18:49.980i look at digital stuff and i'm like this looks like shit give me you know give me a very0.97
00:18:54.480traditional traditionally filmed on film oh totally yeah and and i think with with sound0.73
00:19:01.460coming to movies too the whole idea of yeah like there's always i think going to be a level of
00:19:07.380discomfort with with change. And I think where I am really interested in in that conundrum is
00:19:13.580how do you even know if you're being as objective as as you might want to be when you're making an
00:19:19.600assessment like this? Like, if I look at at a movie right now, like with a lot of digital effects
00:19:24.680and everything, I might think like, gosh, this looks terrible. I missed the way that you know,
00:19:28.520that a movie had been made before. But then at the same time, it's like, okay, but how much of
00:19:33.480this is just I was used to one thing? Yeah, like I was used to black and white. Now I'm not used to
00:19:37.360color like and and so i think that's probably is behind what is really setting off a lot of
00:19:43.400the discussion around it when i write about it is that question of people sort of saying i don't
00:19:49.280know for the life of me i really can't find that this is as solid as well made as the things that
00:19:55.340i remember the movies that i watched you know 20 30 years ago i i think where the other element
00:20:00.520is is to not necessarily make that a judgment of overall taste and quality like movies may
00:20:09.540look bad music I don't think sounds worse now but it does hold a different place in culture
00:20:14.700in in the streaming era and everything it's not that it's worse made like people didn't get worse
00:20:20.920at writing movies necessarily or worse at making music it's just that so so I think it's important
00:20:28.020to not take that sort of you know the construction idea or the presentation idea or the the sort of
00:20:33.980cultural place idea and use that as a well people just don't know how to you know be creative
00:20:39.480anymore or something like that and i think that's the other yeah no the other element that gets so
00:20:44.300tricky is kind of thinking you know like oh well i could say that movies don't look as good now but
00:20:49.120i'm not trying to say that i want to live in you know the year 1995 or anything like that because
00:20:53.920there was also a lot of really bad stuff then too and I think that's the other issue that we grapple
00:20:58.900with so much is for a large part or at least in our own minds our view of the past is kind of a
00:21:03.980highlight reel like we're seeing the best of it when I was a kid at least I loved late night
00:21:08.140television and you can watch some great clips of late night television but at the same time there
00:21:14.060were multiple late night shows every single day like the clips that we remember the really like
00:21:18.900amazing interviews and excellent moments and everything are such a tiny fraction of what we
00:21:23.660see of the hours and hours and hours of just kind of somebody juggling or a comedian who's just
00:21:30.480terrible like there was a lot that wasn't great and what we retain is the best of it and I think
00:21:35.900it's always important to kind of keep that in context of like well the things that last are
00:21:39.300the things that last because they're really good or they're really meaningful to us and as much as
00:21:44.360i might like uh a certain era of filmmaking there's a lot that i could look back on that was
00:21:49.760made in those times and think like oh this is terrible i would never want to watch this i
00:21:52.880wouldn't want to live in the 1930s like the peak 1930s peak of like the classic hollywood period0.97
00:21:59.620like so many amazing films coming out of it like 1939 arguably the apex also so much shit like0.98
00:22:06.420unbelievable amounts of shit like derivative b-movie unwatchable dreck most of which is also0.92
00:22:13.700not even available to watch now because it never made the like arduous transition into being0.99
00:22:19.020available on DVD. So that's a great point. Melody's yelling at me. I can feel it. She's not actually
00:22:25.520yelling at me, but she's like vibing me. She's like, you've been talking about nostalgia as a
00:22:31.000concept for half an hour and you have not gotten to a single listener question. So we're going to
00:22:35.960start and just continue this conversation. So this first one is from Megan. Does each generation
00:22:41.580experience a wave of generational nostalgia, perhaps when they stop being the dominant
00:22:45.560generation and much of pop culture? Or is there something unique to this moment in time or unique
00:22:50.540to the millennial generation? All right. So I know from reading you and also from reading others that
00:22:56.160this is not a contemporary phenomenon. Where have you seen and read about and where have historians
00:23:04.420situated moments of deep nostalgia for other eras yeah so the the writer I mentioned Svetlana
00:23:12.360she's done some writing about in in countries before a revolution sometimes there might be
00:23:18.480an uptick in nostalgia all of that what I'm really interested in is some of the earliest
00:23:24.540writing I was able to find that went really deep on popular culture and nostalgia came out in the
00:23:30.8801970s there's this uh paper by fred davis in 1977 where he's looking at the culture of the 70s
00:23:39.340and essentially saying what's going on because the past is everywhere right now yeah and he kind of
00:23:44.200pins it on the end of the 60s all this upheaval watergate everything that was going on and and
00:23:50.580then looking at the 1970s it is an extremely nostalgic time there were he writes a bit about
00:24:44.800He wasn't solely working in old forms, but he had the hit with The Entertainer, a song
00:24:49.180that had been on, you know, Wax Cylinder before, maybe on Wax Cylinder, I think Sheep
00:24:53.320music, surely, you know, becomes is number three on the charts. But also, you know, mainstream
00:24:59.660rock music at the time, really picked up this nostalgic wave of incorporating a lot of kind
00:25:05.360of old timey country into rock music at the time, where rock kind of split off in the 60s. And
00:25:10.580soul went in one direction and funk went in one direction. But a whole lot of artists went into
00:25:15.740more country influenced music. I mean, the biggest band, maybe the biggest American band ever is
00:25:21.800the eagles who you know lifted a lot of those sort of like country sounds uh punk rock you know the
00:25:28.060clash uh with their pompadours and they toured with beau diddley and london calling's full of
00:25:32.980references to the 50s and the ramones have their uh kind of bubblegum pop era and everything so
00:25:37.920i think the 70s were a time when people thinking about nostalgia and culture were thinking okay
00:25:46.660something's going on here and something is driving this huge wave of nostalgia for the 50s for the
00:25:53.04030s for the early 1900s i suppose in the case of uh of ragtime music and what i think is interesting
00:26:01.640about that though compared to now is that it was sort of an inexact copy that that anybody was
00:26:09.480going off of that there wasn't you know you couldn't go to the record store and buy a scott
00:26:16.000Joplin record. You couldn't, you know, the idea of the 50s, the idea of the 30s was what people
00:26:23.040had just sort of gleaned from seeing culture from that era versus now, you know, I have a
00:26:30.000little pencil box on my desk here that I brought back from my childhood room and it's got the
00:26:34.540multiplication tables on it and a pencil sharpener and everything. This was my brother's when he was
00:26:39.000a kid. I used it when I was a kid. I just liked it and brought it with me one time after I was
00:26:43.020visiting my folks and I wanted to put a new blade on the pencil sharpener I was like oh it'd be cool
00:26:47.620if this you know worked again and I go online I could buy these they're like 20 bucks on eBay
00:26:52.780and within like a minute I could have one shipped to me any other era if you wanted something like
00:26:58.620that that you had had as a child you would have to scour junk stores for you would have to call
00:27:03.400around and say oh does anybody have this versus now we have such a precise replica we have such
00:27:08.820a high fidelity version of the past available to us, that we can buy the old items instantly
00:27:13.760online. We can look at very, very precise pictures, media reports, everything like
00:27:19.740that version of the past is there. We can pull up any album, any movie, any show that's streaming.
00:27:26.020It's so easy to get this high fidelity version of the past that I think makes modern nostalgia
00:27:31.720really different from the wave in the seventies or, you know, even thinking of the fifties
00:27:37.200nostalgia of something like back to the future and that kind of interrogation of it and everything
00:27:40.700that it's just so much it's higher fidelity and it's frictionless almost to a degree now and i
00:27:47.480think that really kind of changes how how it affects us i think it actually cheapens it i'm
00:27:53.340sure that others would maybe disagree with me but i think like there's something lovely about the
00:27:59.140moment again at like a dinner party where you're trying to remember the jingle of uh of the big
00:28:04.800red commercial and everyone has to be like oh it went something like this i think it went like this
00:28:10.580like and you kind of sing it together whereas now you just look it up on youtube and you're like oh
00:28:15.420yeah that was it that was precisely it the immediacy of the referent actually shuts down
00:28:23.000some of that really interesting like attempts to excavate memory um that are very generative
00:28:29.140and community building as well yeah i and i think you see that in popular culture as well that when
00:28:35.260you have to do that extra work of trying to remember it and when it's a little bit inexact
00:28:39.740you kind of end up with making something that's going to be newer uh i'm thinking of of in movies
00:28:47.140you know movies from the 90s that maybe referenced movies of the 70s and it's like oh this shot calls
00:28:52.720to mind this other movie this shot calls to mind this other movie they're not as accurately framed
00:28:58.100Because, you know, if you're directing a film in 1995, it's not going to be easy to go, you know, pull up a movie from 1972 and exactly frame your shot the same way.
00:29:09.860And I think that's one thing that kind of helps keep nostalgia as a positive force is thinking through, you know, oh, I like the way that this looked.
00:30:56.140Why have I felt so drawn to letterpress note cards with the Pyrex pattern of my childhood,
00:31:01.620the American Girl dolls and magazines boxed up at my parents' house,
00:31:05.520and favorite books from childhood that I want to read with my own kid?
00:31:09.220How are millennials, in particular, dealing with favorites that didn't age well, looking at you, Richard Scarry's Busy Busy World book, that hold such a dear place in our memories?
00:31:20.720So I think millennials are very nostalgic.
00:31:24.680I think that we are nostalgic right now because of what the previous listener noted, which is that we are no longer at the vanguard of culture making.
00:31:34.380right like we are we are we're moving out of that of that position and so some of the way
00:31:41.760that you deal with that i don't know if it's exactly grief that reality which is just getting
00:31:47.400older is i think sometimes returning to the things that made you feel young definitely and i think
00:31:55.560there's some pretty good science that helps explain some of this so if we think of nostalgia
00:32:00.200is something that kind of rises when we're not totally happy with the present or when
00:32:05.800the present is a little bit uncertain.
00:32:08.180Well, there's internal and external factors to that.
00:32:10.720External could be the state of the world, politics, just not being happy with what you
00:32:16.220see on the news and worrying that the world's just kind of all falling apart.
00:32:20.840But the other is that personal feeling of your place in the world.
00:32:24.460And yeah, when you're not necessarily at the vanguard of culture, but also when you are just getting older and going through some major life changes, you're buying a house for the first time, you're having kids or, you know, even later in life, your kids are going off to college.
00:32:41.420Like all these changes that are happening cause this bit of kind of reflection and a reminder of you're not young anymore or your place in the world is changing or your personal responsibilities are changing.
00:32:54.860And you start looking back at the past and your memories are strongest.
00:32:58.860They call it the reminiscence bump of that era sort of coming out of childhood into teendom, 20s, young adulthood.
00:33:05.060Like we have such strong memories that are formed then.
00:33:08.560And so when you get a little bit older, you're naturally going to become nostalgic because your place in the world is changing and you're going to look back to the era where you have the strongest memories.
00:33:20.020And that also happens to be an era when maybe you were feeling pretty good because you were young.
00:33:25.320You were, you know, you can just life was totally different.
00:33:28.900You had different possibilities ahead of you.
00:33:31.060It's not that everybody had, you know, a perfect childhood or youth or anything like that. But I think that we just start looking back to where our memories are strongest at these times when we go through these major changes. And millennials are definitely in it right now.
00:33:44.260I would also say that older millennials and younger Gen X are also at the age where their kids are are that age of like memory making bump. And also those kids, those teens are excavating a lot of the material culture from that period, which I think like brings it back. Right. So you can be nostalgic about or anti nostalgic about a certain article of clothing, that sort of thing.
00:34:12.000And then the other thing I would say about millennials, and I this is just I think about this constantly, is that we and younger Gen X have memories, like, our lives are very divided between this time when things when like the way that the world worked was significantly different than the way that the world works now.
00:34:36.600And I mean that in terms of communication. I mean it in terms of how we like documented things and how people went to work, did their work. Digitalization has changed so much. And I like the fact that I did not have a cell phone in college is wild. I developed so many different habits.
00:34:57.040I understood the way that you make friends like the way that you spend your time when you're
00:35:01.660waiting in line at the grocery store like all of those things were firmly imprinted while
00:35:06.060like until I was a young adult and then I went through this massive change and so there is a
00:35:12.900huge section of my life in that like primary memory making moment where I did not my reality
00:35:18.760was profoundly different than it is now and we are by no means the first generation to have this
00:35:24.140happen all of modernity like just fucking people up like in the late 1800s and early 1900s uh
00:35:31.320and then like what wars do to people like all those sorts of things like this is not new but
00:35:37.800i do think that that is amplifying a sense of nostalgia that would also just happen if we were
00:35:43.580like any generation and just reaching this age i i think that's that's a great point and i think
00:35:48.860it's a bit reductive sometimes to think like oh my phone is the source of all my problems because
00:35:54.060my phone is the thing that bothers me all the time when when people need to reach me and i'm
00:35:57.780trying to relax it's the thing that just brings you know trolls and bad news and everything to me
00:36:02.960and oh there was a time when this thing didn't exist like it's so easy to just think of a time
00:36:07.820before that and i think living with the memory of that makes it seem almost reachable again to a
00:36:15.440large degree which is a really interesting and kind of brings me back to that idea of
00:36:20.620of hauntology even of like what would we do what i think about this a lot with myself because you
00:36:26.640know i don't have the power to enact you know global change of how we use technology or anything
00:36:31.440like that and unless everybody subscribes to the newsletters you know um and i could sway them that
00:36:36.900way no um but i think of it of you know if i got my first smartphone today what would i do differently
00:36:46.340and how would i use it differently i don't know it's kind of it's a fun little thought experiment
00:36:52.960but it's one of those things of like would i do anything differently and what would i be missing
00:36:57.020out on because pretty much everything i do centers around around this digitization but
00:37:01.740yeah i think it is such a i don't know how we fully wrap our heads around around the way that
00:37:08.020that life has changed and the way that basically every single task is now done differently than it
00:37:14.180used to be. Yeah. Nostalgia is how we wrap our heads around it, right? Like that's the simple
00:37:20.020answer is we're like, oh, I can't really like grapple with this reality. So I'm going to think
00:37:24.840instead about like how different things used to be and how I appreciate parts of that. Well,
00:37:30.040and then there's also the parts that we, you know, we forget to appreciate. So this next question
00:37:34.020grapples with that a little bit. This comes from Tom. Is there some bizarro form of nostalgia
00:37:40.200where people need to oversell the challenges of years past.
00:37:44.240The way my parents talk about the 73 gas crisis,
00:37:47.160you'd swear it lasted the whole decade.
00:37:49.460I feel like I'm even beginning to see this a little bit
00:37:51.720with how people talk about the early COVID lockdowns.
00:37:54.840Do we just feel a need to remember the trials of our past
00:37:58.160in the same overstated fashion we do our fond memories?
00:38:01.660Am I going to be lying to kids about how downloading off LimeWire