Why the Past Feels Safer Than It Really Was

Hi, this is Shay Taab and I'm going to sort of do a soft launch here of a new idea that I have. It's in honor of my mother. Aha Shalom. May she rest in peace. We just concluded the 7day morning period for my mother a couple of days ago. My mother was my first teacher. My mother taught me how to think. My mother taught me how to speak and write and communicate. And moreover, she gave me the confidence and the belief in myself that I had ideas that are worth sharing. In fact, it wasn't just me. I mean, they say, what's the definition of a of a genius? An average student with a Jewish mother. Okay, so yes, she was a Jewish mother and she definitely really really really loved all of her children, but she believed in everyone. Uh she was a speech pathologist. She herself as a young girl was severely speech delayed. She could not speak. She told me many times that when she was a little girl, she would cry because nobody could understand her. And she would go outside and speak to the birds. She would listen to the birds tweeting and um have imaginary conversations with them because she was so lonely. Then later when she learned to speak, not only did she become extremely eloquent and dynamic as a communicator, but she basically devoted her life to helping other people find their voice and to communicate and uh strangers, friends, family, and yes, her own children. So, what I want to try to do in this series is share some ideas. ideas that I've been kicking around in my head [snorts] that I've been mulling over. Uh things that have enough substance or I've developed them enough that I feel like they're ready to share, but not necessarily are these things that are like completely sketched out every single step of the way. You'll see what I mean. It's it's a little bit behind the scenes, but it's a it's not overly raw where it's like, why did you have to record that? Uh or you know what, you'll be the judge of that. Let me know in the comments if you felt like uh this was food for thought. Okay. So, I want to talk to you about about nostalgia. Nostalgia. Everyone knows about nostalgia. Let's talk about the good old days. Okay. So, what is nostalgia? Why does human nature gravitate toward nostalgia? Why do we idealize the past? I'm going to take you to I am a rabbi after all and I [laughter and gasps] and I do want all of these teachings to be grounded in Torah. Uh I'm going to take you to a biblical story in the book of Numbers, what we call bameidbar, specifically chapter 11, not the bankruptcy chapter 11, but uh the book of numbers chapter 11. And there's this wild line that the Ben Israel, the children of Israel say. They say, "We remember the fish that we ate for free in Egypt." And they are sort of reminiscing about how how good it was in Egypt when we ate that free fish. And it's bizarre because, okay, these are the people who left Egypt. They were slaves in Egypt. They knew what Egypt was. It was terrible. It was brutal. It was torture. And all of a sudden, they're in the wilderness and they're remembering the good old days with the free fish and Egypt. Okay. Now, Rashi is the foremost commentary on Torah. He says that what they meant was free from mitzvah. That although they were slaves in Egypt, but they had not yet received the Torah. So they were essentially morally on their own. They weren't bound yet by a divine code. So that's why they were sort of yearning for the quote unquote good old days of Egypt. But I want to share with you another thought which is as far as I know my own original thought and it and it helps us to understand what is nostalgia and why we nostalgize. If you look in the context of that verse, what is happening right then, the man or in English they call it the mana, which is bread from heaven. This was a superfood that would rain down in the wilderness during the 40 years in the wilderness and it could taste like anything you wanted it to. It was this like [clears throat] miraculous uh food. It came down in like these little pellets, little uh like glass-like crystal pellets. And it was perfect nutrition. [clears throat] Perfect nutrition in the sense that there would [snorts] it there was no waste from it. Person who ate uh the mana did not have to excrete and uh and it and it tasted like whatever you wanted it to taste like. The only catch was that it would only stay good for a day and you couldn't therefore you couldn't store it up. So there was no such thing as of stockpiling the mana. You had what you had for that day and then the next day you had to rely on Hashem that he's going to cause the mana to fall to rain down again for another day. Follow this. Nostalgia is not really thinking about a better time. It's not that the old days were better. The reason that we idealize the past is not because it was better, but because it's finished. Follow me here. What's stressful about the present? The present is unknown. It's unresolved from uh just from a the standpoint of of one's nervous system. You're processing new stimuli all the time and you're having to make decisions how to react. So, you can't really enjoy the present because there's a lot of stress that goes with it because you have to figure out what to do. It's it's it's a it's a it's an open loop, so to speak. The past is a closed loop. There's a there's a saying variously attributed to different sources, but um somebody said that nostalgia is like a grammar lesson. You find the present tense and the past perfect. >> [gasps] >> Why is that though? Why is the present tense and the past is perfect? The past wasn't better than the present. It's just complete. So there's no stress associated with it. In other words, nostalgia is the opportunity to reexperience reality with all of the stress extracted from it for no other reason than that. It's finished or I'll use a term it is narratable. There's a story. There's a story. A beginning, a middle, an end, resolution. This is what happened. The present is unfolding as you're you're living it. And it's not narratable. You don't have that same feeling of there's a clear trajectory. There's a clear uh timeline. You know, even when something's very very difficult, but if you know how long it's going to be, it's more tolerable. But the present is very very open-ended. Okay. So here's my thesis. We idealize the past and experience nostalgia not because the past was better than the present, but because simply it's preferable to the nervous system in as much as the past is a closed loop. It's finished. So when did the children of Israel start nostalgizing about the good old days in Egypt? Oh, remember the free fish? precisely when they were dealing with the mana because the mana represents not just God's kindness, God delivering superfood right to you without having to prepare it, without having to, you know, to farm and to to harvest. So such it's such a wonderful kindness that God is doing. Uh but it's very stressful because you only get a day's worth each day and you don't know what's going to be tomorrow. So when they were experiencing the stress which mana is the archetypical stress that's why mana is like the the symbol of livelihood that really even the person who has a big uh big a big bank account really that's only you can't you can't really rely on anything really only all we have is what hashem is giving us at this moment and with the mana that was like in your face. You really only have what you're being given right now at this moment. You don't have that false security of being able to stockpile the reserves or the surplus. So when they were put into that situation where they were really feeling the open-endedness of the present, that's when they sought refuge in the closed loop of the past. Think about it. Egypt was terrible. It was slavery. It was torture, but it was finished. It was really finished. Meaning, they hadn't just left Egypt at this point. Pharaoh and his armies, remember when he went chasing them, they the Pharaoh and his armies were drowned in the in the Yamsu in the Sea of Reeds. So, they were gone. There was no Egypt to go back to, which is for nostalgia purposes the the the ideal. It's really finished. It's really complete. It's really a finished story. Think about it like this, okay? I'm So I'm 51 years old. I'm Gen X and I consider myself pretty typical Gen X actually. And I think it's funny the Gen X nostalgia. [sighs] Um, when we were kids growing up, there was a lot of 50s nostalgia, which is funny because I realize in the 80s they were nostalgizing about the ' 50s, which was really the real 50s, what they call, you know, the happy days 50s was really the late 50s, early 60s. I realized they were nostalgizing about something that was 20 years prior. And imagine someone nostalgizing now about 2006. Doesn't even happen. And I'll speak about that in a moment, God willing, about what happened with nostalgia, why there was so much nostalgia in the ' 50s, the ' 60s, '7s, ' 80s, 90s, and then like after basically Y2K, nostalgia kind of doesn't happen anymore. I I I'll reflect on that in a minute. I'll get back to that. But I remember as a kid, all the nostalgia, the baby boomers were nostalgizing about the 50s, 50s music, 50s diners, the whole 50s aesthetic. Um, but now that we grew up, Gen X grew up, we nostalgize about the 80s. Oh, it was so awesome. It was so wonderful. It was so perfect. We didn't have phones and we just rode our bikes around all day. Okay, that's true. We didn't have phones distracting us. We did ride our bikes around all day. Those things are good. But really, you think it was so awesome growing up in the 80s? I'm I'm going to tell you what it was really like. Thank god I had two loving parents, but half my friends parents were divorced. Um, the ones who were not divorced, they were working. The latch key kid that was like the like as far as Gen X, you know what latch key kid is? That's the kid who comes home and both parents are out working and he has to let himself in the house and there's no one there. like there was a lot of loneliness and just being feral and untended to and that was like really rampant in that era. And if if you were actually there, by the way, it seems like uh it seems so trivial today because again, because it's resolved, because it's over, but when we were kids in the 80s, do you know how constantly we would be told about nuclear war? Like that was a real threat. That was a real thing. Like that was a real concern. And there was a lot of stress in on a micro level, meaning in in our homes, on a macro level, meaning geopolitically. But we don't think about any of that. When we think about the 80s, the '9s, it's all beautiful. Why? Not because it was actually beautiful at the time. It was stressful at the time, but because when we relive it in memory, we get to experience it as a finished story. We survived it. And what's the proof? We survived it. We're here to remember it. We're here to tell the tale. Now, you may be thinking, and you'd be right, that there's a major survivorship bias when it comes to nostalgia. for sure. You know, the survivorship bias. I mean, the the like classic example is when the in in World War II when the army was looking at the planes that where do the planes take the most bullets? Where are they shot when the planes would come back from a mission? And they would say, "Oh, that this is where they they get shot the most." Well, actually, they were looking at the planes that made it back. That wasn't that you shouldn't be looking at the planes that made it back. should look at the planes that didn't make it back and figure out how to strengthen those areas of the planes because those are the ones that that got shot down. At any rate, it's called survivorship bias where you're studying a known set that made it through a particular ordeal and therefore it skews your whole perception of things. Nostalgia definitely has a survivorship bi bias because by definition, if you're here to tell the tale and you're here to nostalgize about something, it means you made it through. Um, so when we think about a time in our life that we survived, even if it was awful at the time, there's a certain comfort that we on a very primal level associate with those sights, sounds, memories. just because there's nothing that needs to be decided. There's not no reaction that needs to happen and therefore we get to have the experience with all of the tension of the nervous system just completely extracted from it. Um I'll give you another example by the way. So posts Soviet era nostalgia after the fall of the Soviet Union there was this ridiculous surge of Soviet nostalgia. People were saying, "Oh, Soviet Union was so great." The people who lived through it, it was so great. It was great. Standing the bread line was great. Secret police KGB was great. But the point was once it was finished, there's something that associates safety with the closure. There's a there's an expression that when one door closes, another door opens, but it's hell in the hallway. So, what we're really talking about is the present is often a hallway. Sometimes in life it's more so a hallway period of life or what what we might call a liinal period of life. You know, there's that concept of limonality of things that are transitional like uh liinal spaces, you know, like uh a a gas station at the side of an interstate that people only stop off on their way from point A to point B. It's not it's not anyone's destination. There are uh and and there's a whole aesthetic liinal aesthetics which I actually happen to enjoy in a sort of uh somber way. But think about limonality when you're going through a liinal phase in life, meaning a transitional phase where you're in between point A and point B. In other words, you're going through the hell in the hallway. That is when nostalgia spikes both in the micro and the in in the macro. When a person is going through liinal phases in life, there's a lot of nostalgizing that happens. Also, when society is experiencing transitional or uh tumultuous phases of going from one system to another system, there's a lot of nostalgia that occurs. Um, and if you think about our original story, you know, the the book of numbers, the wilderness, and the Hebrew name for the book of Numbers is Bameidbar, which means in the wilderness. The wilderness is like the biblical ultimate limonality par excalance. In other words, they left Egypt. So that's that's closed. And like we said, Pharaoh and his armies are destroyed. They haven't entered the promised land, meaning their destiny. They're in this liinal space and this liinal not just space in in in in spatial terms of physical location, but their whole mode of living is liinal. Like I said, their sustenance was the mana, which on one hand is God's kindness and it's miraculous, but on the other hand, it's severe limonality because you literally only have a day's worth at a time. So, you're constantly quote unquote living out of your suitcase, right? You understand? Like you you you're the person that has no permanent mailing address. And when you're in a phase like that, which obviously was necessary in order to make the transition from slavery in Egypt to being a free people in the promised land, there had to be that liinal phase for 40 years. It was actually a turnover period going from one generation to another generation. But in order for that uh to be survivable, what happens is the the organism craves the safety or the feeling of safety associated with closed stories. Even if the story is about a time that was awful, but at least it's finished as compared to the present which is open-ended and therefore stressful. Now I will offer one sort of limitation or boundary to this thesis and that is sometimes people experience severe trauma and they never nostalgize about that time in their lives. But that's sort of the exception that proves the rule. I said before that by definition, nostalgia has a survivorship bias. Survivorship is a relative term. Survivorship can mean you're still alive, but you didn't really survive it. In other words, you never really got over it. So, if somebody's still traumatized by something, they're not going to nostalgize about it because it's really not over. It isn't finished. So, if you were in the back of your mind thinking, "This sounds compelling, but uh yeah, what about whatever example it is in your life or someone you know uh in their life?" Yeah, if if it if it's not really closed, then you won't nostalgize about it. But if it's a closed chapter, even if it was terrible at the time, you will nostalgize about it because at least there's stability in the closure. Now based on this I'll share with you a ancillary thought. We can actually understand why people sometimes don't leave dysfunctional situations. You know sometimes people are they seem stuck in a dysfunctional situation [sighs] and you know people will say sometimes well you know the because you have a victim mentality you got to learn to stick up for yourself. You got to believe in yourself. You got to know that you deserve better. And all those pep talks are probably well intended. But sometimes it's not so simple, not from a practical level, but from an emotional level to leave a dysfunctional situation after the pattern has become predictable. You see where I'm headed? If you're in a situation that's awful, but it's predictable in its awfulness, that in a weird way also provides something akin to the stability of a closed chapter. Not that it's a closed chapter. It's it's [clears throat] actually ongoing. It's happening now. But in a in a in a grim sort of way, it's already a feta compli. already sort of I mean God forbid cuz to say that something is is a done deal because we believe that God can change anything at any moment but I'm saying when a person has that sort of um learned helplessness god forbid of being in a really dysfunctional situation where they've resigned themselves to that fate. So actually from perspective of the nervous system that can actually be somewhat of a comfort or or feeling of stability in a sort of a twisted way. So you would understand why a person who's sort of entrenched already in a messed up situation would gravitate toward that rather than something that's unknown. Even if it's demonstrabably better, but it's unknown. And if it's unknown now, I have to process all the stimuli that are going to come at me that are going to be unpredictable and new and I'll have to process new things. Um, and and then it's going to be sort of that liinal hallway experience. And even if it's going to be better, but I'm just, you know, my nervous system doesn't want to have to process all that new stuff. Okay. Now, I'm just at so far I'm just describing human nature and I'm just describing the way things are. This is descriptive, not prescriptive. I haven't given you a prescription yet. Um, but I have a prescription. I'm not a doctor, but I have a prescription for you. Um, not a medical prescription. I have an idea of how we can sort of hack the human propensity for um favoring closed loops and we can use that to better experience our present. If you're following my thesis and if you agree with it, um, you understand that in a nutshell what I've said, and I know it took me a while to get here, but I can say the whole thing in a sentence. We nostalgicize about the past not because it was objectively any better than the present, but simply because we prefer its status of being resolved and closed. Okay? In other words, it feels safe because it's resolved and closed. And by the way, even if it res resolved unfavorably, even if the even if the end was not a happy ending, it was a sad ending, it was even if it was a disastrous ending, but it's an ending. An ending. And an ending provides stability. Okay. But how can we use that? How can we uh sort of tap into that to use that to live life in the present in a in a better way? So, please forgive me for using rabbitic buzzwords, but there's a concept called beten. Ben means trust. Trust. Well, really, you can have bken in anything. You can place your trust in people, but you're going to be you're going to be sorely disappointed. You can place your trust in systems, in patterns, in nature, all types of things. They're all essentially false gods. Or you can place your trust in the one Hashem, the creator. And in Hashem, trust, security, confidence in Hashem really means another way to translate it. What what does it really mean? It means being able to feel that the situation is resolved even when you haven't yet in time space gotten to the resolution. From Hashem's perspective, who transcends time, the story is complete. Now you are still going through it in real time but you have knowledge that from Hashem's perspective the story has already been complete. There's a there's a quote I didn't read the book but it's a book called Out of Africa novel. It was a famous movie in the 80s ' 80s nostalgia. I didn't see the movie, didn't read the book, but the quote is um anything can be survived if you can tell it as a story. And I think that's really what we're saying here. It's a it's similar also to what Victor Frankle said in Man's Search for Meaning, which I did read um one of the few psychological books that I read. People think I'm wellversed in psychology. I probably read, you know, a handful of books here and there. Um but in man's search for meaning so so uh Frankl says that he actually quotes Nichi I think in saying you can survive any how if you have a why meaning if there's purpose if there's purpose so I'm sort of conflating purpose with narrability but I do think the two are connected because when we say there's a story we don't just mean that sequentially this happened and then that happened. We mean a real story. A story has to have I mean a good story has to have uh structure to it. It has to have growth. It has to have conflict and resolution. It's not just three acts where this happened, then this happened, then this happened. There's conflict, there's resolution that should coincide with some type of character arc uh for the protagonist. uh and and so basically what we're talking about narrability and and meaning or purpose being somewhat synonymous. What we're saying is that although we have not yet lived to see the resolution and gained knowledge of what the purpose of the [snorts] journey was, we have faith that Hashem is telling a story. The story has conflict. Yes, we're well aware of the conflict, but the conflict also will be resolved even if it has not yet been. And that this this conflict resolution is somehow necessary for the character arc of the protagonist who is in each and every one of our own lives. We are that protagonist. I've often thought that life is a is a story that God is telling you about you and you're sort of there to show up for it and experience it with as much curiosity as possible instead of horror or or or dread, but just sort of watch the story unfold even in the scary parts, especially in the scary parts cuz that's what makes it a good story. wouldn't be a good story if it didn't have some type of conflict. And that conflict is inherently interlin with the character development of the protagonist. In other words, in order for you to become the person that you were meant to always be, you know, some would call it maybe the hero's journey. Uh but for you to reach your destiny on a personal level, it requires going through certain [snorts] experiences. And that we believe that God is uh has there's a certain pristine economy in the way that God arranges these these stories. There's no gratuitous or superfluous experience. Everything is meticulously engineered for for the purpose of the the character arc. So what I'm saying is this. Although we are in the present and we are dealing with things as they occur and we do not know what the next moment will bring, we can at least conceptually start to attach ourselves to the idea that from God's perspective, the story is resolved and the story is a meaningful story, profoundly meaningful story. about you and about your your journey and about your claiming your true self. And when we can begin to imagine that conceptually, we can contemplate it further until we can integrate it emotionally. That's a little bit more uh grounded than just conceptually, which is more abstract. And then ultimately the goal is to integrate it viscerally in our in our kishkas in our guts. In other words, on a physiological level, um I should actually be more rested, more at peace, um less cortisol, less adrenaline. Um because although I do have to be lucid and alert in the moment because there are decisions that need to be to be made um I'm not as on edge as I would have been without this without this perspective. And therefore what happens is to a degree I can experience the present with some of the pleasantness that we attribute to the remembered past. Which if you recall my whole thesis here was we attribute that pleasantness to the past not because it was any better than the present but simply because the unknown factor has been removed just because it's already completed. And when we have beten, we have trust in Hashem and in our story and in the perfectness of our story, then we can experience the unfolding of the present moment with a I'm not saying entirely, but with some degree of [sighs] warmth, um, pleasantness. safety, security that we often attribute to the to the remembered past through uh that phenomenon we call nostalgia. So that's uh the thought that I wanted to share or I think uh as a wise man once said, you know, what would you do if you knew that the good old days is really now and you're in the good old days right now. Um yeah, so right now is the good old days. That's my thought. If uh this sparked any thoughts in you, I would love to hear in the comments what this makes you think of. If you have your own ideas, if you want to take this into a entire an entirely other direction, that's fine, too. I'll I'll check out the comments. And uh thanks for listening. I'm sorry I forgot to mention. I said I was going to come back to it. Why we don't find so much nostalgia anymore. Very interesting. Remember I was speaking about limonality and about how the wilderness was a liinal era. Well, we're sort of in a liinal era right now. In fact, uh it's interesting. There's a term the modern era. The modern era doesn't mean now. Go Google it. Find out what modern art is or modern aesthetic or modern philosophy. The modern era is basically uh the 1900s. We're in what's called the postmodern era. At least that's the, you know, conventional term for it, which basically means we don't even have a name for the era we're in, which is it's just modernity, [clears throat] which seemingly means the current time right now. No, the current time stopped. That was then. Um, what's interesting is during the the the the 20th century, the 1900s, there definitely was a feeling of time is marching on and there's a trajectory of history and we're going towards something. And then there was sort of this feeling of and now it's done. In fact, there's a whole thesis um the end of history uh Fukiyama who who basically says that history reached its climax. This is it. Not that events will cease to happen, but his thesis was that the form of society that we have basically now and he's writing in the 1990s, that's the final form. That's it. And now it's sort of like, all right, but we're still here and and things are still happening and we're still living lives. What's what's what are we evolving into now? What is what's the endgame now? So, we're very much in an era right now of limonality. And that's why I think Elon Musk pointed out actually that you can see discernable differences. You see a picture of people from the 70s, you immediately can tell they're from the 70s. You see a picture of people from the ' 80s, the '90s, you can immediately tell what decade it is. And today, you see a picture from someone from 2006, 2016, 2026, you wouldn't even be able to tell which decade it is. Um there is a certain blending and uh running together of of the days, the weeks, the months, the years in this weird liinal time that we're in. And that's why like we can't we can't identify the recent decades in order to nostalgize about them. If you think about it, 50s nostalgia, I mentioned earlier they were nostalgizing about the the 50s. In the 80s, I I I was actually looking it up, American Graffiti was like basically you you can go Google it. It was like 15 years after the time that it's supposed to take place in. So back then when there was a feeling of discernable decades, discernable steps in the journey, it was easier to label them and nostalgize about them. In other words, based on my thesis of nostalgia being it its advantage that it or its perceived advantage that it offers is it's being closed. When a decade is a closed era, then it's nostalgia worthy. Today everything's open. It's just all blending in to each other. Okay. So, we need to know that since we're in this very liinal phase, which is a time when we are more likely to feel unsafe and to crave um resolution, to crave safety. It's all the more important. And I think we're seeing a resurgence of of spiritual consciousness because of this. It's all the more important that we use our faith to ground ourselves. And it's not like a lot of people think that faith is escapism and that faith takes you out of the present. To the contrary, um without faith, we can't show up for the present and then we just end up being nostalgia addicts. we just tune out and uh this is an important period of time that we're living in for for the world and also you know God is so skilled it really everything coincides and dovetales so it's not just on the macro it's also in the micro this is an important time in your life in my life and everyone who you know in their lives so we really need to strengthen our ability to show up for the present as it's unfolding. And as I mentioned, the way to show up for the present is through developing our ability to connect to the story that God is telling us. Even if we don't know the ending, we know that he's the perfect storyteller. Okay, we'll uh talk more about that. Again, comment below and tell me what you think.