Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a longing for a feeling you had in the past, not the trappings that prompted the memory.

My obligatory rock star crush in my twenties was Mark McGrath, the lead singer of Sugar Ray. Not only was he unabashedly a smarty-pants (he destroyed the competition on Rock and Roll Jeopardy), but Sugar Ray's music was the soundtrack to my life. In my first adult apartment, listening to their song "Every Morning" became part of my getting ready routine. When I hear its cheerful notes starting, I immediately flash back to the tiny galley kitchen with the laminate countertops and linoleum floor. The light streams through the windows while I bop around to the beat, and the smell of sourdough toast makes my mouth water. I want to bite right into that buttery, tangy crunch. I feel that rush of hope and certainty of everything being right with the world, just as I felt in my twenties. Even when the song is being piped over tinny speakers in a grocery store.

Listening to that song makes me feel nostalgia. It makes me miss that time in my life. Except I know it's really a desire for the underlying feeling of security, because I decidedly do not want to go back to being a clueless twenty-something in a crappy apartment.

A core assumption of economics is that people act according to their desires, even though they can be hard to model. Sometimes we don't know what we want, let alone understand how to fulfill those desires! Economists generally just model the utility (happiness) of consuming a market good or service, since that's what we can buy and sell, ignoring the voluntary exchanges or personal efforts for ourselves. We model this mathematically as a utility function. The assumption is that we are happier (get more utility) the more we consume, but there are diminishing returns. Hearing a song is nice, but maybe not the 20th time that day, and we can put a price on that.

The basis of all economic models is a person who maximizes their utility subject to their budget constraint. That constraint could be expressed in terms of money, but it can also be expressed in terms of time and effort. We don't have unlimited resources to get whatever we want. We have to choose. After we get air, water, food, and shelter, the very next thing we want is security. Getting security requires us to treat each other like we matter. It's a constant effort to understand how to act humanely because we're constantly inventing new ways to interact. Those innovations are what give us a growing economy. That's why it's so heartbreaking to see unhappy people assume the way to feel secure again is to roll back policies to when we were less humane to each other.

The Washington Post recently examined when people thought was the best time period for a number of different measures, like the best economy or music. What they found was that people's perceptions of what good times were was hugely correlated with when they were in their teens. For many people - myself included - that's when we're becoming aware of our own preferences and the wider world, we're looking forward to greater freedom and autonomy, but we still have adults shielding us from the harsher side of reality. Because the Baby Boomers are a large demographic cohort, the 1950s are often chosen as the ideal, despite the lack of opportunity for women and non-whites. (For more, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/05/24/when-america-was-great-according-data/ Accessed June 12, 2024.)

The longing for that combination of hope and optimism is what I believes drives nostalgia. It's not the trappings like music, even though we have that emotional response. It's our outlook. We can never go back to that outlook, because we know more now. It’s still possible to feel hope and optimism, but it is harder. It requires more effort to open ourselves up and take that leap of faith, especially if we've concluded that the world is a terrible place and we need to be on guard all the time. That feeling of security is not something that can be bought, it can only be cultivated in ourselves. When we become reactionary and try to roll back the clock, we're running away from the solution. No wonder we become ever angrier.

Cultivating hope and optimism as a clear-eyed adult means recognizing our own responsibilities to treat each other humanely, with compassion. The world won’t always work how we thought. People won’t always do what we want, because they have their own wants. That's okay, though. As a teen I had no idea the depth of rich interactions that are possible when the light in me sees the light in you, and I wouldn't give that up for anything.