Sounds Like A Cult - The Cult of Nostalgia

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

For our ~true followers~, behold a wee bonus episode to tide you over during our mid-season break, while host Amanda is on book tour and in production for the new MAGICAL OVERTHINKERS podcast (coming May 15)! Nostalgia is a warm-and-fuzzy coping mechanism for when the present feels painful, BUT it's also a key ingredient in sooooo many modern-day "cults," from Disney Adults to tradwives. How dangerous a weapon is nostalgia, really? That's what this episode, featuring an audio excerpt from Amanda's new book The Age of Magical Overthinking (an instant New York Times bestseller!) aims to find out. Regularly scheduled SLAC episodes will return Tuesday, May 21—thanks for sticking around til then! 💫 Get The Age of Magical Overthinking audiobook here! Purchase the book in hardback. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from THE AGE OF MAGICAL OVERTHINKING by Amanda Montell, read by the author. Copyright © 2024 by Amanda Montell. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Catch Amanda on book tour! May 9: Portland, OR — Live Wire Radio Festival (tickets here) May 11: Columbia, MD — Books in Bloom Festival (free, RSVP here) June 11: Mill Valley, CA — Mill Valley Public Library Author Talk (free, register here)

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And the Frida Fertility Ovulation Test Kit is a reimagined tracking and The views expressed on this episode, as with all episodes of Sounds Like a Cult, are solely host opinions and quoted allegations. The content here should not be taken as indisputable fact. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. This is Sounds Like a Cult, a show about the modern day cults we all follow. I'm your host, Amanda Montell, author of the brand new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, which thanks to many of you listeners who've already bought a copy became an instant New York Times bestseller. I'm also the author of a book called Cultish, and every week on this show you're going to hear about a different group or guru or ideology from the cultural zeitgeist, from

Trader Joe's to the self-help industry, which I discuss with a charming special guest to try and answer the big question, this group sounds like a cult, but isn't really. ["The Greatest Showman"] Greetings, culties! It has been a little hot second. Dispatch from a cabin in the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina, where I am currently having a planned nervous breakdown.

I am mostly kidding. I am in the middle of the second leg of my book tour right now for the Age of Magical Overthinking. I was just in Atlanta where I got to meet a bunch of you Atlanta culties where I got a real cultural education in the love and importance and cultural touchstone that is Waffle House. Thank you for introducing me to your culture. This week I am flying back to Portland for the Live Wire Radio Fest. If anyone is in the Portland area on Thursday, I am doing a panel there in the evening and then I fly back to Maryland where I'm giving a talk at the Books in Bloom Festival in Columbia, Maryland, Hometown Glory. So that is what I'm up to at the moment. And I had like four days to kill

in between Atlanta and Portland. So I decided to come here to Asheville, which is one of my favorite places in the world to relax, commune with nature, say a little incantation for me that I don't get murdered in this cabin. It feels like a culty town, Asheville. Very new agey, spent some time

in a Himalayan salt cave yesterday. Yeah, just trying to get grounded. Anywho, Sounds Like a Cult is currently on a little midseason break while I'm on this book tour and also while I am in production on my new podcast, Magical Overthinkers. So in the same way that Sounds Like a Cult was inspired by my last book, Cultish, I decided to launch a new show. In addition to Sounds Like a Cult, don't worry, the show is not going anywhere, but I am launching a new one to pair with the Age of Magical Overthinking. LOL, I keep joking that starting podcasts is my personality disorder. Um, no. It has been so sparkly and magical and delightful and brain-tingling to work on, the Magical Overthinkers podcast is a show for thought spiralers about the buzzy, confounding subjects we can't stop overthinking about. so every episode is

formatted like overthinking about blank, overthinking about blank, overthinking about blank subjects from narcissism to monogamy to imposter syndrome to cannibalism. On every episode I interview a charismatic brilliant scholar. I've gotten to talk to astrophysicists, philosophers, psychotherapists, authors. I get to film in a beautiful studio so the podcast is also going to be on video on YouTube and it will air every other week because I'm also doing Sounds Like a Cult. So lots for your ear holes. The Magical Overthinkers podcast launches Wednesday May 15th wherever you get your pods so

be sure to follow Magical Overthinkers on Instagram so you don't miss updates and giveaways and little BTS moments and cute pics of my cats. Not too many cat pics, but enough. The perfect amount. Not me overthinking how many cats are appropriate for a podcast Instagram presence. Anywho, that is what I'm working on during this sounds like a cult midseason break, but I wanted to pop in here today with a little bonus episode of sorts. A few weeks ago I aired an excerpt of my Age of Magical Overthinking audiobook in the episode that went live on the cult of manifestation, and the feedback on that episode

was so lovely my publisher let me know that I could share another excerpt from the audiobook. So I went and chose a chapter that I thought would be of interest to you culties. It's about the cult of nostalgia. Now those who've been listening for a while have probably noticed this pattern where nostalgia is actually a key ingredient or weapon of influence for many of the cults that have been discussed on this show or that we will be discussing in the near future from Disney adults to tradwives to MAGA zealots. There's a nostalgic undertone to many celebrity led cults that we've covered like the cult of Dolly Parton

which was a live your life. Just have to get that right out there. So no one is confused. Sorry, spoiler alert. When the present feels painful and uncertain, the human mind naturally tends to glamorize the past as a coping mechanism, which is a healthy thing, but there have been several points throughout history when populist culty leaders from politicians to spiritual guides to now wellness influencers will catastrophize the present, make it seem like end times are really upon us once and for all, as a way to glamorize a past that

never existed. and with that they're able to sell their flock on their vision of the future. but nostalgia can also be very positive and warm and fuzzy. it is culty and delulu for better and for worse. So that's what this chapter of the age of magical overthinking is all about. It is called nostalgia porn, a note on decline-ism, which is the cognitive bias that sort of powers nostalgia. I really hope you enjoy this chapter and if you do, I kindly invite you to purchase a copy of the Age of Magical Overthinking audiobook which I do narrate myself and is

available wherever you buy audiobooks. You can find it on Spotify, you can find it on Audible obviously. Libro FM is a wonderful audiobook retailer. It's basically an indie bookstore for audiobooks. Writing this book was a great highlight of my life. Getting to record the audiobook myself was a dream. The fact that it became a New York Times bestseller is a dream I never even dared to have. So the fact that it happened is like, I mean, it's amazing. So thank you so much to everybody who's purchased a copy. Sort of even more heartwarming than the New York Times bestseller list. The book has also been on the indie bookseller list every week since it came out, meaning

that you angel readers have decided to purchase it from your local indie bookstores, which is so glorious. It's great to support your small independent local book businesses. And so I just wanted to thank you so much. So without further ado, please enjoy this culty excerpt of The Age of Magical Overthinking, and we'll be back with regularly scheduled Sounds Like a Cult episodes on Tuesday, May 21st. Again, this chapter is called Nostalgia Porn, and in the first minute or so I mentioned someone named Casey.

That is my fiance, my partner, my betrothed, whose work you also know because he composed the theme song for Sounds Like a Cult and the theme song for my forthcoming Magical Overthinkers podcast. So to take us into today's excerpt, here's that music. Simon & Schuster Audio presents The Age of Magical Overthinking, Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montel, read by the author. In his discussions of flow states, Mihaly Csekosetmihaly pointed out that since the 1950s, the percentage of Americans who report their life is very happy has gone basically unchanged. When I shared this stat with Casey, he responded with surprise.

It's just the overall quality of life has gone up so much since then, like exponentially, he said. More startling to me was the number itself. Casey guessed this very happy percentage was around 33. I'd have predicted somewhere closer to 15%, shows my attitude. But he was right. Aside from a brief dip in 2021, the percentage of self-reported super-content Americans has hung around 30%.

We've indeed come a long way since the 1950s. People are living longer and hurtling toward more opportunity and convenience than ever. But collectively, we don't seem to be getting happier. There's something about that emotional calculus that doesn't check out. If we're making exponential progress, but not feeling better, then what, one might ask, is the point? This stat doesn't exactly inspire hope for the future,

but you know what does? Nostalgia for the past. My favorite neologism of the century so far is Anamoya, which describes the feeling of nostalgia for a time you've never known. The term was coined by John Koenig, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, an enchanting compendium of imagined words for previously unnamed emotions, like loose-left, the feeling of loss after finishing a good book, or rubitosis, the disquieting awareness of your own heartbeat. Anamoya references two words from ancient Greek,

anemos, meaning wind, and nuos, meaning mind. It was the perfect language to borrow from, I think, since ancient Greece has long been romanticized in the very spirit of Anamoya. Even ancient Greeks themselves must have glamorized certain bygone eras. Perhaps ancient Egypt for its egalitarian attitudes, or the hunter-gatherers for their transcendentalism.

Nostalgia is a timeless feeling. Though it certainly has its collective spikes, periods when civilization feels like it's changing too quickly. People get overwhelmed by the present and disappear into the past. Ancient Greece saw the whole Bronze Age. It saw the invention of the city-state, the Olympics, cartography, geometry, philosophy, so much so fast. I can easily see how the ancient Greeks, like us right now, might have craved simpler times they never knew.

Anamoya. Idealizing the far-off past, while very much enjoying the modern comforts of the present, simpler times they never knew. Anamoya. Idealizing the far-off past, while very much enjoying the modern comforts of the present, has become a curious cultural pattern. I've watched tradwives on Instagram hand-dyeing 19th century-style prairie dresses in front of anamorphic iPhone lenses. Short for traditional wife, tradwives are a contingent of 21st century women who choose to kick it old school by assuming normatively feminine responsibilities like cooking, gardening,

tidying, and rearing children. My favorite kind of tradwife takes style notes from Laura Ingalls Wilder and Snow White. Floral peasant dresses, flouncy aprons, sort of an anti-Cardashian. The trad wife is not a boss babe. She is too busy preserving figs and folding linens to worry about conquering the world. I've patronized Etsy's extensive cottage core category.

Thousands of modern products optimized for nostalgia. Magical mushroom LED nightlight. Curated gift box of vintage curiosities. In the thick of the pandemic, I spent $32 to have a lady in rural Vermont ship me a grab bag of ostrich feathers, crocodile teeth, petrified wood, and a pocket-size herbology booklet so I could cosplay a Victorian forest sprite. Maybe the more anxiety-provoking the current moment, the further back in time we feel the need to go.

Nostalgia softens an era's harsh edges, so we can sink back into a warm bath of fantasy. Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Tales from Earthsea, "...past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it's then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty. Maintaining honesty about the past is so exhausting, many of us opt not to try. I'm a sucker for Anamoya personally.

Call it escapism or outright denial, but I've spent the past few years adorning my house in vintage toadstool tchotchkes and writing periodically by candlelight as if I'm a spinster in the French countryside or maybe a Manson girl living on LA's dusty spawn ranch before the shit hit the fan. I've cherry-picked my own oddities box of erstwhile practices, focusing on the best of every era I've never known to avoid facing the worst of this one. It might make more sense during times of discomfort to dream about the future, since that's actually where we're headed.

But the future is unknown, unsettling. The future doesn't have any tangible artifacts. No prairie dresses, no vinyl records. Most of us would rather experience something familiar, even if negative, than take a chance on the unknown. Nostalgia is an effective quirk, but it has a cognitive analog. Plenty of everyday moods pair with a respective bias. Envy, for example, is to zero-sum bias, as paranoia is to proportionality bias,

as nostalgia is to declineism, the false impression that things are worse now than they were in the past, and it's all downhill from here. Cognitive psychology research has revealed that memories of negative emotions dwindle quicker than the positive, a phenomenon known as the fading effect bias. Memories of traumatic events which can stalk a rememberer and involuntary flashbacks are notable exceptions.

Because most of us prefer reminiscing about happy times, our cheery revisions grow stronger, while bad memories wither away, leading to a general idealization of the past. our cheery revisions grow stronger, while bad memories wither away, leading to a general idealization of the past. Declinism explains why one might thumb through old photos of themselves, longing to be 19 and baby-cheeked again, even if they know that age felt miserable and directionless in the moment.

In my own life, Declinism shows up mostly in daydreams, when work obligations feel so overwhelming that I start to consider trading my apartment in Los Angeles for a remote cabin and my synthetic sweatsuit for a bell-shaped crinoline petticoat to live like it's 1849 again. Never mind that everyone was dying of tuberculosis then, and women had no rights. In 2023, I saw the poet and memoirist Maggie Nelson speak on book tour for her essay

collection On Freedom, where she addressed the trend of feminists turned tradwives. She suggested that the phenomenon of progressives gone little house in the big woods might have emerged from a generation of women feeling like they were promised a kind of liberation that didn't pan out as they hoped. So they decided to swing back into a form of aesthetically updated puritanism. Plus, they had the spare resources to opt into a more laborious lifestyle, hand-making their own oat milk and all. In the process, they wound up running into a demographic of right-wing anti-feminists who arrived in the farmhouse kitchen for different reasons, darker reasons, but that's horseshoe theory for you.

Declinism gives us psychological as well as cultural permission to normalize the belief that life was inarguably better, or at least more spiritually bearable, in the good old days, whenever those were. The brain is perennially odd about time. It defaults to hyper-dramatizing the present, glorifying the past, and devaluing the future. Related to declinism, a deception labeled present bias describes our propensity to blow out of proportion events that are currently happening, while undervaluing what will come in a few years or even days.

A 2015 UCLA psychology study found that people conceive of their future selves as strangers, which is why we often procrastinate our homework and put off saving for retirement. We find it hard to care about those random nobodies, even though there are soon-to-be selves. Coco Mellors, author of the novel Blue Sisters, hates nostalgia. She got sober about a decade ago and harbors little sentimentality for the years prior. Nostalgia feels dishonest, she told me. The past is inherently conflicted and nuanced, but nostalgia reduces it to its most benign.

I agree that reminiscing, or dwelling if you prefer, can turn maudlin and self-destructive. It certainly doesn't jibe with the one-day-at-a-time ethos of recovery." Mellors went on, "...As an addict, it's dangerous to look back and remember your greatest hits, that night you drank exactly the right amount and were charming and funny. Because that was never the reality. You have to remember what those times were really like, in order to remember why you don't want to go back. Romanticizing the past can have an odd tempering effect on art, too.

Throughout the sociopolitical upheavals of the late 2010s and early 2020s, Hollywood comfort fed us a buffet of nostalgic jaunts down memory lane. The casts of Friends and Harry Potter reassembled for tearful reunion specials. Disney turned its canon of animated classics into a cash cow of live-action remakes. 2019's freaky CGI version of Lady and the Tramp continues to haunt me. TV rewatch podcasts where former co-stars of The Office and the O.C. rehashed on-set memories, launched by the dozen. In COVID quarantine, I lost myself in a swirl of insipid cinematic reboots, whose titles

I won't betray because I loved them despite their mediocrity. Or maybe because of it. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottam said, Nostalgic celebrity is a neutered artist. We like that. These remakes were, as Cottom pointed out, apolitical, shallow, and comforting. Who wants to be challenged by something they're explicitly seeking out for warm fuzzies?

Nostalgia blunts the politics that produces all art, especially middle brow art, wrote Cottom. Would Disneyland still be the most magical place on Earth if we acknowledged that the park was originally built to offer Lily White suburbanites a shrine away from the urban racial and sexual upheavals of the mid-century? Cottom's comments were specifically directed

at the cultures we knew to embrace of Dolly Parton. For a 2021 essay titled, The Dolly Moment, Why We Stand a Post-Racism Queen. She wrote, even if you remember that 9 to 5 was part of a mainstreaming of big tent working woman feminism, you cannot feel the urgency of the time. There is no petition to sign, no march to attend and fight to be had about whether women belong in the workplace. Nostalgia shamelessly revises our attitudes toward public figures. I think of the triumphant comeback stories of celebrity bombshells like Britney Spears,

Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Pamela Anderson. During my Y2K adolescence, the tabloid-driven consensus was that these women were has-beens and harlots. But less than 15 years later, they each experienced a stunning, synchronized career resurgence, awarded Broadway stardom, Netflix movie deals, and emancipation. Come 2020, these formerly tyrannized figures weren't viewed as bimbos single-handedly ruining wholesome American femininity, but instead undervalued angels, sights for sore eyes. As soon as the pandemic hit and cravings for the great before spiked,

Pam in Paris served a once-ruthless mob mashed potato comfort, like when you run into a former high school nemesis but feel all sweet and sentimental for old times' sake. I don't credit feminism for audiences' reassessment of these women. I chalk it up to nostalgia. Weaponizing delusions of the past is an age-old populist marketing tactic, both a political campaign ploy and capitalist tool. Where revisionist history is concerned, declineism arguably does its dirtiest work

during election seasons, when candidates blur history's sharp corners to radicalize a restless public and win their votes. Far-right nationalists are known to harken back to their country's supposed golden age, hiding xenophobic and exclusionary policies under the promise of restoring the nation to its former glory. France's ultra-conservative National Rallye Party has long romanticized its colonial history,

backing policies that prioritize the interests of native-born French citizens over immigrants and refugees. The far-right Alternative for Germany party has downplayed the atrocities of the Nazi regime, calling for stricter immigration policies while stoking fear and resentment toward outsiders. During the Nazis' initial rise to power, Hitler used the slogan, Make Germany Great Again, which sounds familiar not just because Donald Trump used

and claimed to have invented it, but because American presidents including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton also invoked the tagline. For generations, politicians have cashed in on the narrative that their nation once enjoyed a time of utopian prosperity and that only their agenda, brutal or not, will work to reinstate it. The world is declining in at least one significant way. The climate crisis, which outshines so many other issues that are actually improving,

like clean water and education. Failing to focus on the positive in the face of an ongoing global disaster makes intuitive sense. But even when challenges are objectively small, like a misplaced sweater or snippy email from a co-worker, they have the capacity to feel equally stressful. For this, we can partially think negativity bias, the tendency to assign greater weight to unfavorable events.

We internalize the scorch of rebuke much more powerfully than the warm glow of praise. A slap in the face will likely have a stronger short-term impact than a hug. That we could receive 100 genuine compliments but register only the backhanded outlier, might have an adaptive explanation. An insult in a litany of compliments is today's rattlesnake in a field of flowers. Learning to ignore a meadow of pleasant magnolias in order to zero in on the

deadly snake, even if it turned out just to be a stick, had survival benefits, and evolutionary habits die hard. Primed to hyperfixate on present negativity while glossing over the distant past, we naturally landed at Declinism. Declinism predicts that every generation will remain convinced that life is only getting worse. Outstandingly differently worse. I notice it in language.

Since the Trump presidency, I've heard talk of doomsday outstandingly differently worse. I notice it in language. Since the Trump presidency, I've heard talk of doomsday trickle its way from fringe message boards into quotidian pleasantries. In my community of well-cushioned Californians, opening a conversation with, how are you? I mean, aside from the world burning and all, is practically good manners. The world is burning, everything sucks, doomsday vibes. Fatalistic hyperbole has gone trendy vernacular. I too have invoked the end of the world in casual conversation, even though the earth is still very much beneath my feet and I don't

find it helpful to act like it's not. I have to wonder if there's any danger to this deadening of our emotional vocabularies. What does it do to us to overuse this defeatist rhetoric, perhaps only ironically at first, but then so cavalierly and with such frequency that one day we forget it's not earnest, each of us the boy who cried apocalypse? Sometimes it seems like people almost want the end of the world to show up already, like addicts who pray to hit rock bottom so at least they know it can't get worse. The attitude that things used to be nice are currently shit and will keep on trending downward might carry a certain blasé neoliberal cachet, but it risks self-fulfilling prophecy.

Agreeing that the world is burning and there's nothing to be done means giving permission to engage in behaviors that stoke the flame. In his 2012 co-authored book Catastrophism, Eddie Ewan wrote about catastrophe fatigue in the context of climate activism. Quote, the ubiquity of apocalypse in recent decades has led to a banalization of the concept. It is seen as normal, expected, in a sense, comfortable," he said. It's mordant timing that the mainstreaming of dystopia, everywhere from TV series to small talk, has come to serve as a perverse pacifier, an excuse for inertia, exactly,

quote, as the contours of the multi-pronged environmental crisis are coming into sharp focus. Now, said Ewan, scientists with their measured action items are having to, quote, compete in this marketplace of catastrophe in order to be heard. John Koenig might categorize catastrophe fatigue as a wai tai, defined in the dictionary of obscure sorrows

as a feature of modern society that suddenly strikes you as absurd and grotesque. In 2016, Oxford economist and philosopher Max Roeser wrote a piece for Vox titled Proof that Life is Getting Better for Humanity in Five Charts. He wrote, The media does not nearly pay enough attention to the slow developments that reshape our world. Most people think world poverty is on the rise, but surveys show it's been dropping exponentially for decades.

Newspapers could and should have run this headline every single day since 1990. The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 130,000 since yesterday, said Roeser. No time has ever been better for literacy or civil liberty, fertility or life expectancy. My mother swears the cure for cancer is just around the corner. More people than ever can access infinite knowledge in seconds and with practice, they can even hope to remember some of it. They can have psilocybin chocolates delivered to their front doors in time for their appointment at the Getty.

Regarding her hopes for the feminist movement, Maggie Nelson said on her 2023 book tour, I'm an optimist, so sue me. She quoted James Baldwin, who declared 60 years earlier, I can't be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. I continue to marvel, though, that we can peruse chart after chart illustrating how much better life is now than it was in the past and still feel in our animal bodies that the opposite is true. Some of this intuitive dissonance may spring

from Chekhov's and Mihaly's observation that while wealth and overall quality of life may be improving, happiness is not. Accounting for inflation, median household incomes more than doubled in the US between the 1950s and 2020s. But unless someone went from below the poverty line to above it, their happiness didn't necessarily budge. You can find that the lack of basic resources contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources does

not increase happiness," said Czekoszemichaj. Freedom, conversely, tells a different story than money. It's hard to OD on freedom. Generally, the more one has, the happier they'll be. All kinds of freedoms, including speech, thought, bodily autonomy, and I have to believe freedom from consumerism. In the U.S., happiness gradually increased among marginalized populations, albeit with a lag, after the gender and civil rights movements awarded them more liberties. Currently, the demographic with the bleakest outlook is less than college-educated white

men. According to Carol Graham, a Brookings researcher and public policy professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, out-of-work white men are overrepresented in the crisis of deaths of despair, suicide, drug overdose, liver disease. Financial hardship does not explain this despair.

Studies find that when women lose their jobs, they aren't as negatively affected. In his book, Sedated, How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis, medical anthropologist James Davies noted that when our basic human needs for safety, economic stability, loving connection, authenticity, and meaningful work are neglected, materialism is usually offered as a quick duplicitous fix, quote, a culturally endorsed coping mechanism that ultimately backfired. Perhaps our anemoya for simpler, less consumerist times helps us generate hope for a simpler,

less consumerist future. Brain scans show that when we think back on pleasant memories, the same cranial regions light up as when we daydream about days to come. No wonder I've been so into dinosaurs, cottagecore, and Harry Potter reunions. Perhaps we shouldn't begrudge the Disney adults too much. Modlin as they may be, nostalgia helps us tolerate the present in order to warm ourselves up to what's next. It's how we cope with what John Koenig called Avenor, the impossible desire to see memories in advance.

We take it for granted that life moves forward, but you move as a rower moves, facing backwards. You can see where you've been, but not where you're going, Koenig wrote in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. He continued, Your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It's hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way. Casey loves nostalgia. Because we grew up together, the feeling is always humming somewhere in the background

of our relationship. Sometimes I'll hold my fork or scrunch my nose a certain way and he'll burst out, that's so high school Mandy. There's Anamoya and Casey's music too. I can hear it in his melodic contours, which even in high school had a dreamlike 1940s quality to them, layered with all the eclectic textures afforded by digital music making. So every composition sounds like a song he knew in a past life, played on an instrument from the future. Nostalgia is a powerful creative tool, because it sits at the border of real and imaginary.

It lets you turn events from your own life into fantasies, Casey said. An Ella Fitzgerald song will come on his Spotify, and he'll cry out from the other room, I was born in the wrong era. Then the playlist will serve him a James Blake track, then Childish Gambino, John Mayer, Ariana Grande, Michael Buble, and he'll reconsider, never mind. Like that toadstool LED nightlight, there's magic in crossing visions of the past and future in a way that could only be possible right now.

Toward the end of each interview I conducted for this audiobook, I posed my sources a personal question. If time travel were possible, was there any period other than the present they'd want to live in? Not a single therapist, historian, or behavioral economist answered yes. Even with all the challenges of now, I couldn't tell you another time I'd prefer, said Linda Sanderville, a DC therapist specializing in support for women of color. She continued, I'm not someone who's like, oh, look how wonderful everything is right

now, but just look at dying in childbirth. That's still a major issue in the black maternal community. I'm a mother of two little boys, so that's definitely important to me. And 2022 taught us just how shaky women's rights still are in general. But the past was way worse in almost every way. I know it's hard to believe, added language psychologist David Ludden, when we spoke in early 2022. We've got a worldwide pandemic going on,

and it doesn't seem like the best of times, but actually it is. I mean, look, you're in Los Angeles, and I'm on the other side of the country, and yet here we are talking about these ideas. Last year, climate activist and author of The Intersectional Environmentalist, Leah Thomas, told me that there's been a shift in her field

away from attitudes of pure dismantling and toward radical imagination In the past she said it was always easy for her to identify the oppressors She was fighting but if someone were to ask about the future she was building she couldn't answer with as much clarity and That made me sad said Thomas with as much clarity. And that made me sad, said Thomas. So I've been spending more time thinking about the future and about joy, because joy is such a powerful motivator,

when shame can never motivate you in the same way. To tap into her most radically imaginative self, Sanderville frees up periodic slices of time not to consume any media at all. Not the internet, not television, not even books or audiobooks. It's hard to consume and create in the same state, she told me. If you value any kind of creativity, and I don't just mean art, give your brain a break from consuming, because that gives you space to process all that you've been reading or

watching. We must afford ourselves this space actively," said Sanderville, because at life's current pace, it won't happen by accident. She continued, Ask, how can you figure out a way to be grinding less so that you can be more creative, more influential? How can you spend your energy on the things that deeply matter to you? My all-time favorite nostalgic TV rewatch is the early 2000s HBO series Six Feet Under. During bouts of distress, I'll flick on an episode or two of the dramedy about a family-run funeral

home, and it feels like an embrace from a macabre fairy godmother. Let's just say, if there were a six feet under theme park, I'd be an annual passholder. I'd pile my family into the station wagon to spend every other weekend riding bumper hearses and slurping strawberry milkshakes out of upcycled embalming fluid bottles. Anyway, the show is probably most famous for its iconic series finale. Spoiler alert. But the family's father and eldest son have already died when the 22-year-old daughter, an aspiring photographer, decides to move to New York City to try her luck at a new life.

Before leaving, she gathers her remaining family members on the porch to snap a final portrait for posterity when her brother's ghost appears beside her and whispers, You can't take a picture of this. It's already gone. I swear, every time I watch the finale, that line means something different to me. I've been thinking it might be a comment on nostalgia for the present. We're still missing a term for that obscure sorrow. a plaintive longing for what's happening right now, a futile hope that it never ends. I think we need one. Maybe coming up with a word to describe that feeling will help us feel it more. I propose tempesur, a portmanteau of the Latin tempus, meaning time, and susurrus meaning whisper tempestor noun an elusive

nostalgia for the current moment so precious in its ephemerality that the second you notice it it's already slipped away well that is our little bonus show today I think we can probably all agree that nostalgia is a watcher back. It's too broad a category to be able to say definitively that it's a get the fuck out. It's definitely not, no way. But the ways that cultie leaders are exploiting

our natural tendencies toward nostalgia these days definitely scooch it out of the live your life category. So I hope you enjoyed this excerpt. Thank you so much for listening. Stick around for a traditionally formatted episode of Sounds Like a Cult in two weeks. Stick around for the debut of the Magical Overthinkers podcast next Wednesday.

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