Today I come to you with something different than normal - an academic paper. This is because I know that everyone is just tickled pink to be able to read college writing essays. The truth is, this essay turned out decently interesting and my prof liked it and, well, college has currently stole my brain and writing ability. I haven't really slept in over a week. I'll be back to writing inspirational hoopla next week - but for now, school stuff is all I can give ya'.
The assignment was to write a persuasive arguement about happiness. Also, side note, my brother tried to sing this out loud to me when he read it. So maybe that'll help you to enjoy it too.
Nostalgia - the Key or Hindrance to Happiness?
Paris in the 1930s. This is the picture of bliss that a young American writer has in his head in the movie Midnight in Paris. He travels to Paris with a stuck-up girlfriend just to find this magical pathway to the time he had coveted the most. He tramps around Paris with the likes of Hemingway and Picasso, any nostalgic artist’s dream. The ironic thing is that he meets this girl in the 30s who’s been the lover of men like Picasso and she craves the era of the 1880s. He comes to a realization that there will always be a point in history that will seem better, but in reality, the present is where we need to live our lives and find our happiness.
This poses the question, were the times in the past better than the present or does nostalgia actually inhibit our happiness? Happiness can be altered not only by where we put our happiness, but when we put our happiness. Humans are wired to function in different mental time zones, focused on the past, present, or future and these focuses can impact the way we live our lives (Zimbardo).
If we want to look at not nostalgia impacts our happiness, we must have a clear definition. In market research conducted by William Havlena and Susan Holak, they define nostalgia as follows, “Nostalgia is an emotion contains both pleasant and unpleasant components. This ‘bittersweet’ quality of the emotion is a distinguishing characteristic of nostalgia. It refers back to an earlier period in the individual's life and draws on biased or selective recall of past experiences” (Havlena and Holak par. 3). Nostalgia is looking into the past, often with a overly sentimental view and dwelling on that past.
Typically nostalgia is related directly to our own personal experiences. It’s that mental picture you get when you think of the mother of teenagers who can’t get past her own teen years or Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. While much of nostalgia is based on personal experiences, there is another type of nostalgia that is generational according to Havlena and Holak. “As one generation both privately and collectively reminisces about its adolescence, these memories become, in essence, a new experience for the next generation” (par. 14). This leads to the historical nostalgia like the type seen in Midnight in Paris where a person is longing for a time that they have never known.
This view of the past affects how we view history and where we can go in the future. “Whereas progress looks forward and attempts to improve upon the past, nostalgia looks back, regarding the past as the ideal which must be reproduced.” (Greenwall pg 3) There tends to be an attitude that says that our present day and age is the most evil, worst age to ever exist and everything would be better if we went back to the way things used to be. This view is found in the essay “About Love” where Danielle Crittenden shows a nostalgic view of how things were done in the past in regards to romance and marriage.
What many people fail to note is that the past has many of the same problems of our modern age - they were just packaged differently back then. With the advancement of technology and media, it’s easy to blame things such as women’s body issues on our modern age while failing to look at history and seeing how women have always put extreme and at times reckless value on their outward appearance. Instead, people will just look at how women weren’t diagnosed with anorexia or bombarded with heightened sexualized images.
Our current age has a lot of benefits to it that those in the past could never dream of. We have rights for people of all color and gender - a feat that has only come to fruition in the last fifty to one hundred years. Our lives have been made extremely easier, though at times busier with pointless things, due to the technological boom. We also have more freedom to chose what we want to do with our lives, freedom to practice whatever religion we so chose, and the freedom to pursue our happiness - so therefore, happiness sought in the present and future makes the most sense.
If we look at the past with a mentality that it was perfect, we in turn tend to the folly of the past. When that happens, we are prone to make the same mistakes that they did in the past. This also happens with our own personal past as we can focus on the good aspects to such a level that we fall flat on our faces in the present. Despite the fact that reminiscing can be a temporary surge of happiness due to fond longing, the reality can be the harshest part as shown when taking a look at the way our culture handles the past. “Nostalgia makes people feel good. Nostalgia helps soothe the worries of the present (if only for a short while) by incorporating the warm memories of the past. The desire to escape the turbulence of the present is often such that they will spend money, a lot of money, to achieve it” (University of Virginia).
Nostalgia is used as an advertising method because it creates a pleasant emotion that does not last long and therefore requires constant supplementation. Despite the temporary high, when it wears off, it simply leaves us discontent with the current state of our life. In a study done through American Studies at the University of Virginia, the results of relying on nostalgia for our happiness as listed clearly:
"The refuge sought in nostalgia is an attempt to escape the present for a more comfortable, recognized past; but the more one tries to escape the present through nostalgia, the more the eventual (and impending) return the pain of the present is amplified. Like a downward spiral, the need for nostalgia seems to grow with the more that is consumed. To this effect, commercial enterprises that survive on the commodification of nostalgia attempt to build the experience of moving into the past more real and more complete”
Nostalgia has been linked in the same study to poor morale of soldiers and homesick college students.
Even though nostalgia can give us a spike in our happiness with warm fuzzy thoughts of either our own past or a past time period in history, the hangover of a nostalgia trip is one that makes it an unreliable method to finding our happiness. In order to find happiness, you need to balance your focus on the past with a focus on the present and on the future. When you get a harmonious balance between the three, then you get a realist view that you can work with. If your view of happiness is moving forward with your life, that cannot happen if you only live in a rose colored past.
