Clay Routledge | Why meaning and agency matter now more than ever

[00:00:00] Beatrice: Thank you so much for joining us, Clay. It's really nice to have you here. Let's just dive straight into it. Could you maybe start with just telling us who you are, what are you working on and what got you started on this path? 

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[00:00:15] Clay: So I'm what's referred to as an existential psychologist, which really that means that I'm interested in how humans approach the big questions in life.

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And so there are a lot of characteristics about our species that make us unique. And then, and and a lot of different things make us unique, but one thing that I'm particularly interested in is in our unique ability to really introspect about the nature of our existence, our self consciousness or self awareness, our ability to like move the self through time.

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We can think about the future and the past. We have this relationship with ourselves that we think is fairly distinct relative to other organisms. And these sort of self conscious abilities, these like introspective abilities, and that has tremendous implications for how we live. And, whether we're talking about mental health or whether we're talking about economic dynamism.

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You can think of all sorts of topics that might seem on the surface unrelated, but I think are all connected to these existential questions that drive human activity to inspire our goals and endeavors. And so that, that's what I'm interested in. I was an academic for many years. I was a professor, so I really started out my career studying these questions in the laboratory.

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Doing kind of cognitive and motivational psychology and just doing basic research, scholarly research, being a professor, teaching classes on human motivation and personality and existential psychology and the self and things like that. But several years ago, I started doing more writing for the general public.

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And what that did is it caused me to realize, A, how interested people are in psychology, which shouldn't be surprising, we're interested in ourselves, and, but B, how little access the average person has to evidence based psychology, there's a ton of self help Content out there and some of it's good and some of it's not.

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And there's a ton of different opinions and ideas out there, but, and some of those are good and some of those aren't, but really there is this kind of barrier, this wall between the Academy and the general public. Obviously, now we have TED Talks and, other, other ways that researchers are doing outreach to, to get their ideas out there.

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But most of the scholarly work is either paywalled or it's written in technical jargon or it involves a lot of statistics and things that, the general public just doesn't have the training or, the time for. And but has an, a kind of an intuitive interest in. So that got me going down the path of, that was one of the reasons I went down the path of saying I like doing this work in psychology, but there's so much great content that researchers have done, scholars have done.

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That we need to make it more applicable to everyday life. So I started doing more writing for the public and then eventually ended up leaving academia and moving into the think tank space where a lot of my job really is to translate that work, to make it more accessible, to apply it to real pressing challenges, to connect it to, more interdisciplinary approaches.

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Cause of course, psychology is this one piece. of human life. There's economics, there's social and cultural life, there's institutions, there's law, things like that. So connecting the psychology into those pieces with really the goal of, helping people use the scholarship, use the research, use the ideas that so many great behavioral scientists have discovered, but use them in a practical, applied way.

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[00:03:46] Beatrice: I have to say, I'd never heard of this thing of the field of existential psychology before I came across you. It like, is it a scientific field? Did you invent it? What is it? Tell us 

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[00:03:56] Clay: more. I did not invent it. It is, you could say it's a sub discipline of psychology that really is at the intersection of social psychology and positive psychology, in the sense that it pulls from different, disciplines, right?

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And there are people who what really makes someone an existential psychologist is they're interested in these questions of meaning. freedom, free will, like these kind of big, these big philosophical questions that we thought for a long time were really just something that philosophers, maybe theologians, studied.

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That they were maybe even inaccessible to empirical methods, right? That these are too abstract. But when social psychologists and motivational psychologists and personality psychologists and positive psychologists started approaching these questions, what they discovered is you can use some of the tools of modern behavioral science, cognitive, and social psychology to study how humans approach these questions.

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For instance, we can't tell you what the meaning of life is, that is a more philosophical endeavor, but what we can tell you is what are the things that people do that tend to be associated with or to increase or decrease perceptions. of meaning, right? And so we can study how people approach these questions and sort of the outcomes of that.

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Is it, and so there are ways definitely to put these things under the empirical microscope that are agnostic to the philosophical questions, but really help us understand how humans navigate these questions. So no, I didn't invent it. It's And it's a very much a, it's just, I guess you'd say it's a small subfield of psychology, but it isn't specific to like social psychologists, for instance, there are cognitive psychologists, there are neuroscientists that study existential, there's a whole like existential neuroscience, like subarea that's interested in the brain processes and, cognitive architecture that's implicated And people's awareness of self and their like concerns about meaning.

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[00:05:54] Beatrice: Yeah, that that's really fascinating. Like I said, I didn't know it existed but it makes a lot of sense also. And it seems very useful to, to come at it from this angle as well, not just like the philosophy angle. But you're also the director at the Human Flourishing Lab. Do you want to just share a bit about what that is and what work you're doing there?

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[00:06:15] Clay: Yeah, for sure. Like I said, I was a professor for a long time doing this stuff in the lab. And then I started working with the Archbridge Institute, which is a DC based, nonpartisan think tank that has done a lot of work more in the policy, economic kind of space, so focusing on what are some of the artificial barriers to human well being and flourishing.

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But a lot of that, a lot of that work in the think tank world is around economic policies. But, but what the folks there realized was that economics is part of the story, but it's not the whole story, right? Humans are psychological organisms. We have psychological needs, we have social needs.

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We're cultural at our core. We have spiritual interests and pursuits. So there's this whole of these whole other dimensions of the human condition that are important for flourishing that can't be just like minimized to economic policy or public policy. And so I started working with the Archbridge Institute and we decided to launch the Human Flourishing Lab to really focus on those.

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More non economic questions, connecting them, where it's appropriate to those policies, just as one example, you might think of something like we, we've done some work in occupational licensing, and it turns out there's a lot of things that maybe people want to do, entrepreneurial kind of activities, but there are these sort of artificial barriers oh, you have to have a license to do this, and there's not really, in some things you can think, oh, there's a good reason for public safety or something like that.

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But in a lot of these things, there's not really a great reason to, do you really need to have hundreds of hours of training to cut hair or something? Or can we just let the market sort that out? If you cut hair bad, you probably get to get bad reviews online and your business isn't going to last very long.

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They focusing on things like that, but then, we can connect that to like human potential and meaning, because if there's barriers that present people that prevent people from really, if there's artificial barriers that prevent them from pursuing their. Aspirations, their goals, cultivating their talents.

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We see a connection there between economics, policy, and then psychology. But a lot of what I work on is not that stuff. It's more in a lot of ways, when there's no artificial barriers, we become our own. barriers, right? There's nothing stopping us from doing something except our own anxiety, our own distrust of others, our polarization, or, these sorts of things that are more about our social life, our cultural life, and our psychological life than they are about like, government policies, for instance.

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And so we decided the Human Inflation Lab should really focus on those things because we often do create Barriers to flourishing through these more cultural or psychological means and we want to remove those barriers to just like we want to remove economic barriers to the flourishing and also on the growth side of things, it's not just things getting in the way of us living how we want to live.

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We also are very progress oriented Institute. So we, and of course, psychology has a lot to do. I think it's an underappreciated component of progress because behind every invention or discovery are human beings or human brains. What inspires people, what makes us curious, what makes us explorative, what makes us take risks, what makes us want to improve the world, what makes us believe the world can be improved.

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These are fundamentally psychological questions that Relate to other domains education, the societies we live in, individual rights and, other institutional forces, but at the heart of it is human motivation and human interest and human aspiration. And so we're very much interested in the psychology of progress as well.

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[00:09:53] Beatrice: Yeah. I'd love to, to dive more into that as well. Do you have do you have a definition for what you mean when you talk about human flourishing, for example? And are you seeing that there are this, yeah, are there like the same key ingredients that keep returning both on an individual and a societal level?

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[00:10:12] Clay: Yeah I think so. So one thing that I, I'm not saying this makes this totally unique, but when I see a lot of people talk about flourishing, they almost talk about it as a. As being synonymous with well being or even happiness, or so something that's an end state have you achieved flourishing?

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You know what I mean? Like it's a static end state. Like when everyone's flourishing, then we've won. If you look at the just the word flourish, divorced from human flourishing, just the word, it has, it's very much about activity, about action, growth, like moving towards something. And that's why I think of human flourishing, I don't think of it as we've achieved well being, I think of it more as we're pursuing that, and we never achieve it, like there's always a potential for improvement.

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I agree with others who see, for instance, human flourishing as multidimensional. Like you can have human flourishing and you're like. psychological in your spiritual life, you can have flourishing in your economic life, you get physical health, there's these other your social life, your relationships.

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So there's different dimensions of flourishing. I totally agree with that, but what I would emphasize is the action. I see flourishing as movement towards something, as action, as advancement, as growth. And again, I'm not saying other people don't, but a lot of the talk I see around flourishing almost thinks of it as more of a passive state, like you either achieved it or you haven't.

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Or you're at different levels of flourishing, whereas I think it's more like the activity, the action, the movement towards it. And that's what we really emphasize at the lab is, one of the. One of the challenges, something that can be like a real barrier to us as a species, is that we're never satisfied.

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In fact, this is why it's really good to develop the state of contentment. People will talk about, it's good to be content, right? Because if you're never satisfied, then you're in a bad mood, you're frustrated. And that's true, there's definitely a downside to our dissatisfaction. But there's an upside, too.

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The fact that humans are never satisfied It's what drives us to always tinker, to always try to make things a little bit better. We would still be living the way we lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, maybe, if we were just like, okay, we're content or satisfied. Again, I connect flourishing to the idea of we're always trying to make things a little bit better.

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And of course, we need to be careful about that. There's a downside to never being satisfied, never living in the moment, never just being content. But it's also contentment also is a barrier, potential barrier to making things better or to improving things. And so again, I see that flourishing piece as part of that movement towards growth, towards advancement, towards positive change.

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[00:13:05] Beatrice: And like, how do you think we're doing on that front? Are we as a society Are we improving? Are we moving in the right direction? Are there positive trends that you're seeing or negative trends that you're seeing? 

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[00:13:17] Clay: So I like the work of like humanprogress. org and some of these organizations that look take a like step back and take a big historical view.

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And from that perspective, there's definitely tons of stuff to celebrate in terms of progress, in terms of movement in the right. Direction, whether we're focusing on, increase life expectancy and, improve the literacy rates, human rights around the world, there, there are definitely things to celebrate.

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Of course, you can focus in, you can get a little bit more microscopic and look and find areas in which we're going in the wrong direction, even, or we're stuck. Or there's some new thing that we, you know, one of the challenges of progress, as is we make a discovery or an improvement that, solves one problem, but unintentionally creates another.

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And getting back to the, we're never satisfied. And part of that is because of that, right? We create something new and we're like, Oh, this is pretty cool. And this has made life easier in this way. Oh, we didn't realize that this is actually like causing damage, causing environmental damage, or this is, this is doing something in another domain that we didn't anticipate.

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And so if you think about that, there, there's always ways to find things that are going in the wrong direction. I think, but I think it's worth looking on the whole and saying, if you had, for instance, like if you had the ability to live, to trade today, living today for living a hundred years ago, at some intuitive level, a lot of people will say, yeah, I'd rather live in the past.

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The past was better, but then if you drill in a little bit and you say, okay, that means you have to give up the medical advances that are available today. So you get this disease, you don't have vaccines, you don't have these different treatments. Do you still, you want to live a hundred years ago?

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Oh no. You'd have to give up some of the rights that, would you want to raise your daughter a hundred years ago or is it today, which she's got more or women have more rights, so you start getting into the specifics of progress. And then you, and people very much changed about, how the past was better.

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And that comes, I think, from taking that big picture view. That being said, obviously there are, we do face some challenges. We do face some challenges today. And, one thing that I'm focused on, we face some geopolitical challenges, of course, environmental challenges, and things like that.

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And some unknowns, or, like the advances in artificial intelligence. I'm excited about those advances. But people have, concerns. We, there's a lot of unknowns around that, but one of the challenges, we're really focused on at the lab because I'm a psychologist and, so that's the domain of expertise we're focused on is some of the growing, mental health issues that, you know, the attitudes.

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It's interesting that at the same time that we've made so many advances in people today, especially in the West United States Europe, Britain these places, like in a lot of ways, life is so much better. And we have so many more opportunities to do what we want with our lives. We have so much more autonomy and so much more potential.

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We know so much more about the about, human behavior and motivation. And yet at the same time, we're seeing growing pessimism, particularly among younger generations. We're seeing growing rates of depression and anxiety. We might have a lot of material progress, but it seems like, this is a debatable issue, there are people that think that mental health, that we're exaggerating this problem.

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Not. Me personally exaggerating it, but our conversations are exaggerated around it. But there does seem to be something going on with the attitude of people and maybe particularly younger generations. And, we do a lot of survey work at the lab. And as with others, and our results converge with the results of other people doing national surveys where we find, for instance, that a lot of young people do report higher levels of poor mental health than older generations, higher levels of loneliness or social disconnection than older generations, greater pessimism about the future than more pessimism than optimism, for instance.

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So I think those are real challenges where we're going in the wrong. direction and we definitely need a more a different psychology around these issues. I think that's more hopeful and positive and aspirational and more positive some. 

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[00:17:44] Beatrice: Yeah, I guess so, that's what we're trying to do.

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What, do you have any what do you think are the most major opportunities that you see for advancing human flourishing? 

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[00:17:56] Clay: I think that will a theme that's really big for us. is agency. And, this idea that part of what makes humans so cool isn't just that we're smart, I think.

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It isn't just that we're creative. It, it isn't just that we're able to have, dominion over the planet and manipulate the material world in ways that no other organism can. All those things are incredible, but the reason we do those things is important. And this gets back to that existential question.

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It's our self consciousness. It's our ability to reflect on ourselves and ask questions like, Who am I? What is my purpose? What can I do to make a difference in the world? How can I be part of something that transcends my brief time? On this planet, as far as we know, we're the organ, we're the only organism that seriously grapples with an awareness of our mortality, for instance, and that can be terrifying, but it can also be inspiring because it means we might say, I know I'm only going to be here for so long.

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And if I'm lucky, we're talking maybe a hundred years, but I could get hit by a bus tomorrow or, anything can happen. There's lots of things outside of my control. But what can I do with the time I have to be part of something transcendent, part of something bigger? Of course for many people there is a spiritual and religious dimension of that.

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How am I part of something larger than myself and the, how am I connected to the divine or, something that is literally transcendent. But also for, for others who are less religious or not religious at all, and for even for people who are religious, for all of us.

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There's this more like what's referred to as symbolic immortality this idea of like I want to even when I'm gone I want to have made a difference where I you know in some way I went and this doesn't have to be grand when you say these things people think oh you want to Have buildings named after you or cure disease or you know those are aspirations But even just you know making a positive difference And your family, like living on in the memories of others who know that you were here, that you made a mark, that you did something important.

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It doesn't have to be grand. It's just making that contribution. And that is connects to the theme of agency, because when we ask these questions, when we pursue these aspirations, we're only able to really do them and to achieve our potential. When we recognize that at the end of the day. We have to take responsibility for that.

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Like we have to say, I, can, I can't control the fact that I'm mortal, at least not currently, like I'm, but I can control how I live. Like I can't control the decisions I make to do something positive, impactful in this world. And that's empowering. That's true empowerment, right?

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To be like, I can't, there's a lot of things that I can't control my parents are where I was born. There's a lot of things outside of my control, but I can control my thoughts and my actions. And that, that sense of agency, I think cultivating that regardless of the culture you're in, regardless of the community you're in, regardless of the career or trade you pursue, regardless of your, all these other little ways of the influence, how we organize our lives.

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To me, that's at the, that's fundamental to living productive and meaningful life. 

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[00:21:23] Beatrice: Yeah, I can imagine. There's definitely I think that's something that has come up for us many times with the existential hope project, like agency being one of the things that if to have people feel hopeful about the future, they need to have some agency over it.

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And also on the aging thing. There's. There's definitely people that are trying to take control and use the agency that they have to make sure that they can continue living and so on. Yeah. 

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[00:21:49] Clay: And even those of us who don't have grand aspirations of, living hundreds of years or beyond, or having our consciousness uploaded into the cloud or anything like that, like things that seem sci fi, even just, taking care.

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For instance, there's research showing that people who have a strong sense of meaning tend to live longer. And part of it is because when you feel meaningful, you do feel more agentic. You feel motivated, and you feel like you have a reason to exist. And when you feel like you have a reason to get up each day, you're just more likely.

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It doesn't mean you're immune from bad choices. But what it does mean is you're more likely to make good choices. You're more likely to say I have a reason to be here. I should probably take care of myself. And meaning is one of the strongest predictors of all sorts of things, such as vulnerability to psychopathology.

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People who have a low sense of meaning are just more likely to suffer from depression. And it's not just to suffer from depression, but in terms of being treatment compliant. If you do have depression and you want to get better, meaning is critical. If you can, whether you're seeing a therapist or engaging in some other type of intervention, it's when you feel a sense of meaning that you're motivated to be treatment compliant, when you're motivated to do the hard work to get better.

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And a lot of things that involve, whether it's addiction, or depression, or, phobias, or, a lot of things that can be barriers to mental flourishing, require hard work. They're not, they're not easy fixes. And you're just more motivated to want to put that hard work in, to persist, to be resilient, if you have a sense of meaning.

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You're more motivated to go to the gym, you're more motivated to do all sorts of things. And one other thing I'll say about that, connecting that agency to the theme of progress and maybe broader societal health is it turns out that meaning actually pushes you outward. And so when the biggest predictor of meaning is feeling socially significant, like feeling like I matter, like I have a place in this world where I'm making a difference, positive impact.

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When you feel that you feel meaningful. And but the, but that's a very outward oriented thing. To matter means you're in the game. You're doing something you're involved with others, you're engaged in social life in some way, in community life in some way. This can be parenting, this can be work, your work.

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This can be philanthropy, this could be volunteer work. There's lots of ways in which you can matter in lots of domains of life, but that pushes you outside of yourself. People think, often think of meaning as like this philosophical endeavor. And it's true that it's our ability to introspect, to ask these questions about the nature of our existence, that makes us a species in search of meaning.

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But that's not how we find meaning. That's why, that's the why. That's why we need meaning. Because we can reflect on these things. But the way we found, find meaning actually is getting out of our head. And going out and doing things in the world and making a difference in the world and I think that's that and so another way of saying thinking about the connecting this to agency is agency and flourishing and meaning all these variables these concepts we've talked about all involve activity and they all involve outward oriented activity and turns out this is actually when we focus outward it's actually good for our own mental health so In interventions that have focused on improving mental health, they have found that doing kind acts of kindness towards others often works better than, cognitive behavioral therapy things where it's focused on self work.

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It's not to say that's not important. A lot of times people really do need to work on their schemas about the world. in their life, but it's when you focus your attention out towards the outer world and doing something to make a difference, to make, to improve someone else's life, you actually get the results too.

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You're like, Oh, like I, I'm doing something important and that helps us develop that resilience that's good for our own mental health. 

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[00:25:46] Beatrice: Yeah, it's, that's a good reminder. I think I, I feel like we often end up talking about like how we can feel meaning or something, but maybe not so much like how, what we can actually do that is meaningful.

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So it's nice if you start in that end, because then as a bonus, you'll probably feel a lot of meaning as well. But yeah, I guess it's starting at the philosophy angle rather than the psychology angle of it I'm gonna skip in the conversation a little bit now because you also Wrote a book on nostalgia and I actually remember coming across your book and being like oh Wow.

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I have to read this because I feel like I, I enjoy feeling nostalgia, but it's a bittersweet feeling, but it's a little bit addictive, but it's, I don't feel good about feeling nostalgia because it feels like it's not productive or I, how do I use this? But it's nice to hear you say that it's actually it can be used as a vehicle for progress.

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So tell us more about this. What do you think, like what role does nostalgia play in guiding us toward a better future? 

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[00:26:46] Clay: I've been studying nostalgia for almost 25 years, about 25 years. When I first started doing research in nostalgia, my view of nostalgia was, it must serve some kind of function, it appears to be universal, it appears to be something that people do regardless of their background and even age it probably does something for us.

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And what I thought was, I thought of it as what's sometimes referred to as a psychological defense. Which is, people face some type of psychological threat that makes them feel uncertain or anxious, and unhappy, and they turn to these memories from the past that are comforting. And so it's good for us because it's restorative.

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That was my, it provides a defense. That was my first thinking on it, and we started doing studies looking at that, and we found evidence for that. If we had people, think about an anxiety provoking or threatening topic, whether it's thinking about a time where they were rejected by somebody, or thinking about their own mortality, or thinking about where they really failed to reach, to achieve a goal.

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that increased nostalgia. People became more nostalgic after those experiences of psychological threat. And then nostalgia did in fact seem to restore their mood. But then what we started to discover is, it seemed like nostalgia was more than a defense. So for instance, one of the things we did, and this was when I was a professor at the University of Southampton, which is in the southern coast of England.

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We, we, in Southampton's a city that 90, over 90 percent of it was destroyed by German bombing during World War II. And we were going out and we were collecting nostalgic narratives from older adults in the community. And this was about 20 years ago or so. And we were just having them share with us, write down, like we were giving them paper basically, and write down a nostalgic memory, like detail it and how it makes you feel.

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And a lot of these people were writing about memories from, their childhood during the war. that were, these aren't things they want to go back to. It was a very unpleasant time, but there were life lessons in there. They would say things like, our family was really close, and we realized, how precious life is, and how important family is, and things like that.

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And then an interesting component is oftentimes we'd see, not just if they were writing about that time period, but writing about all sorts of parts of their life, we'd often see this In the narrative, a mention of hope. This makes me feel hopeful for the future. Or this makes me grateful. And we started to think of, nostalgia doesn't just provide comfort.

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It actually might be inspirational, in a way. Because when you think about, when you're living in the moment, when something's going bad, or the world seems like it's chaotic, or everything's in the wrong direction, And then you look to this past and you pull from it the memories that you think were good or meaningful.

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It takes you out of that moment of despair and says we've had good times in the past. We've had experiences of love and, connection of Achievement, rites of passage that feel meaningful. We've had these things in the past, so we could have them again. There's nothing magical about the past.

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And so then we started to, it was really like studying these narratives that made us think that we should start doing experiments. We're not measuring the potential, positive or growth side of nostalgia. We're just measuring the defense side and you can only discover what you measure, what you choose to measure.

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And so we started looking at nostalgia, not just as a psychological defense, but perhaps as as a source of growth. And we, indeed, we found that when we induced nostalgia, when we had people spend, a few minutes reflecting on nostalgic experience, they actually became more optimistic about the future.

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They actually reported a greater motivation to pursue their goals and actually thought more empathetic. Towards others. We've done research showing that nostalgia makes people more, people come up with more creative solutions to problems after nostalgia. And so that made us think that, oh wow, nostalgia isn't just a source of comfort.

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It actually is a source of inspiration. And then, you, once you have that kind of epiphany, then you start looking around and you're like, Oh yeah, look at all the entrepreneurs out there that are creating things and they have memories from their childhood or from their youth that inspired them.

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Look at all the people in the space of progress. Look at all the futurists, the people that were really focused on the future. And go talk to them. They've all got memories of the science fiction they read when they were kids or the experience they had that made them think, Oh, wow, that we could solve problems.

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We can build technologies that improve life for people. Everyone that I've met this in the space of, of progress, even the ones, which there are many that are actually quite skeptical of nostalgia. Don't realize how nostalgic they are and how much they're using their own nostalgia for pot for progress.

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I went to this event one time and there was a person talking about all these barriers to progress and they listed nostalgia as one of them, not even two minutes later, the same individual, and I won't call it my name, but the same individual was talking about how there was a period of time in our country where we were optimistic.

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And where we built things and where dynamism thrived and where people weren't so cynical about everything and where we saw ourselves as, as aspirational. And, it's funny because it was like they were engaging in a kind of historical nostalgia just moments after criticizing nostalgia with no self awareness.

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Of how nostalgia for progress is so important and so that's, whether we're talking about personal nostalgic, which is our own autobiographical memories or more of a historical or collective nostalgia, which is like this broader type where we look to past errors. Same thing with like social activists, people talk about like civil rights and they'll have like a nostalgia for that and say, oh, we achieved all these things and that can inspire like current efforts to advance human rights.

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And so I think that we often just neglect that side of nostalgia because the kind of stereotype of nostalgia is it's just getting stuck in the past and you're just looking at the glory days and, or you're romanticizing the past in ways that. Become barriers to progress. And certainly that, that can obviously happen.

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People can take nostalgia in an unhelpful direction, but from our research and, from my experience, I think most of the time for most people, what they're doing is they're using when the present is uncertain, they don't know which direction to take. When they feel overwhelmed, when they feel despair, when they feel disconnected in some way, when they lack a sense of, purpose.

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They pull from the bank of nostalgic memories and nostalgic inspiration. Not to hide from the present or to avoid the future, but to find like the confidence and the inspiration and the motivation to to move forward. With courage and with inspiration. And so that way I think nostalgia is a critical ingredient.

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It's not a barrier to progress. It's actually critical ingredient of progress. 

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[00:33:54] Beatrice: Yeah that's really interesting. And I felt like I've been at a lot of these, I recognize these conversations as well, where yeah, it's like, we need to look forward and. 

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[00:34:04] Clay: And it's not that they don't have a point, it's not like it's not black and white.

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It's not, you can see a weaponization. of nostalgia, and there are red flags, like if someone starts saying things like, Oh, the past was so much better, then you, I think then there's definitely, it's important to have some nuance and say, okay, what is it about the past specifically that you think was better?

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And maybe you're wrong about that, or, life's complicated. There are elements of the past that maybe we can draw from and we can improve. And, certainly in the creative space, we've done some work looking at how young people, Gen Z in particular. uses historical nostalgia. And it turns out it's really fascinating.

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Young people are actually some of the most nostalgic people for past before their time. And this is what we call historical nostalgia. And whether it's fashion or music or film or analog technology you see a lot of interest in the past before, especially before the digital era. And it's not that young people are saying, Oh, we want to go back to the past and give up our like cool gadgets and the progress we've made.

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What they're really saying, I'm not saying they're saying this consciously, but what they're doing is they're saying, no, there's interesting elements of the past. There's wisdom in the past. There's things that we can learn from that we think are fascinating. And also we want to be connected. Like we want that cultural continuity.

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Life is changing so fast. There's so many. Culture changes, technology changes, and we want to feel connected to previous generations. And we also want to learn Oh, there's things about tan, like physical analog technology that's fulfilling, that's enriching, but it's not that young people are saying, Oh, I'm collecting vinyl records because I don't want to have Spotify anymore.

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They're saying I want both. All right. They're saying there's something really cool about the advances we've made that make it so easy to access all sorts of media content. I love that, it's great, but at the same time, there is something about the physical, material, tangible, analog experience, and I wanna have that as well I don't think of it as nostalgia isn't something like, oh, I'm giving, I'm rejecting modern life, I'm rejecting progress to go backwards, it's saying, no, there's lots of interesting things from the past that we can pull from, and then we can be creative, And intentional and integrating that into future development and to and that's the creative side of nostalgia really is it's like, for example, there are some car companies, I believe that are moving away from touchscreens and back towards analog knobs because people really like that, they don't it's hard to like always look at stuff when you try to think people like to feel things.

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And there's something about that tactile experience. And so progress is always this sort of back and forth between let's experiment with this, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't work. And sometimes you're like, Oh, it turns out like in the past, they figured something out, like we can integrate that in and maybe it just needs, a little update or upgrade.

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And so that, I think that creative side of using nostalgia and innovation is, and creativity is really important. 

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[00:37:09] Beatrice: Yeah, do you think that what, how do we best use nostalgia for existential hope? Do you think there's anything we could do there? 

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[00:37:18] Clay: When we go, yeah, when we go throughout life, we collect these experiences that are meaningful, that we see as self defining, often they're triumphs, when we've really accomplished something, especially if we didn't think we could, or it was really difficult.

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And we're proud of that. And we can pull on those experiences where we're going to something, even that seems. Totally different. So maybe you're in your forties or fifties and there's some, you're at work and there's some technological change happening and you just feel old and oh, I can't keep up with, what the young people are doing.

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And you lose your confidence. Your nostalgic memories can re energize that. The sense of youth that like, Oh, when I was younger, I had to do all sorts of new things that I had never done before. And it was scary and it was difficult and I made mistakes and maybe made a fool of myself, but I kept going and I triumphed.

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And that improved my life in some way. And so our nostalgic memories. Even in other areas of our life can often help us like feel young and energized and creative and inspired. And we can pull from those to, to help us generate hope. It just really, it's really useful to step out of the present.

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Again, earlier we were talking about contentment. And oftentimes, there's a real focus on living in the moment, understandably, because we live in such a distracted, modern world, when there's so many different things competing for our attention, it's often hard just to take a breath and look around and appreciate what's going on, so that's definitely important.

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But one of our superpowers is mental time travel, which is not living in the moment, but instead saying, I'm going through something difficult, or there's something coming down there, something I fear about the future. And I can step out of that, I can step out of the moment and look back and pull from these meaningful memories.

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And not to mention the fact that, progress and, very much hinges on our ability to travel mentally into the future to say, Oh, this is the life I want to live. You don't, save money every month. You don't take money out of your paycheck every month and put it. In a retirement account, because you hate having more money right now, you do it because you can mentally time travel to the future and you're trying to plan, right?

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So that ability, that goal striving ability is very much about our mental time travel. You don't get up every day and train for a marathon. Because you just like running at 5 a. m., you do it because you're thinking, oh, there's this end goal that in three months or six months or whenever that I hope to accomplish.

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And so that ability to mentally time travel to the future allows us to be a goal oriented species. Likewise, traveling to the past allows us to pull inspiration and wisdom and connection and love and guidance that can be really helpful for promoting hope. Even something as simple as You move to a new city, you don't know anyone, you feel lonely.

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Loneliness is one of the biggest drivers of nostalgia. When people feel lonely, they become nostalgic, because nostalgia involves, so often involves relationships. And so you become nostalgic for your friends and family, you miss them, you're thinking about these memories. Often what that does is that gives you that confidence.

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It's oh, I've, I've built relationships before, I had people that care about me. I can form new relationships. I can go out in the world and meet new people. And so nostalgia can give us that sense of competence. That's really critical to hope. 

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[00:40:53] Beatrice: Thank you. I think that's, yeah, some good advice.

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On, just moving on to talk more about existential hope, what's your what's your take on the future? Are you feeling optimistic about humanity's future? And do you think that also, since you're an existential psychologist, be interested in hearing do you think that it's important that we feel optimistic or like hopeful about the future?

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Is it important to have that as like a zeitgeist in society? 

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[00:41:22] Clay: Absolutely. So first I am optimistic and it's not that I have some belief that life just is, things just always naturally get better. Quite the opposite. I think progress requires a lot of work or requires humility or requires a recognition that we're.

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Biased them are prone to make mistakes that, no, no single person or philosophy or group has all the answers. So it revolves a lot of progress involves a lot of work and understanding and cooperation and compromise and all that stuff. And it's not easy, but I'm optimistic because for one, like I, like we already talked about, you look back in time and you're like, wow, like we've really.

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We've created some problems for ourselves, but we've solved a lot of problems. We've made it much easier for people to live longer and healthier lives. Again, we have some barriers, and we definitely have a ways to go, but I am optimistic. And yes, I think that is important. Not just optimism. Researchers often get into the weeds about the difference between optimism and hope.

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And there is, I think, a critical difference. They're both important. But optimism is more of a, just an attitude. It's more of it's like a dispositional attitude. Oh I just think things will be better. And that's good. But hope is adding in an agency component. It's, and then the research on hope that sense of agency, is actually critical because when you feel like when you're hopeful for the future, Yeah.

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Yeah. What you're saying is you're optimistic, like that you, you think the future will be better, but you're also, there's more of an appreciation that, that actually requires doing the things that make it better. So hopeful people are more motivated. They're more inspired, they're more resilient. And so without hope, there's no.

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You don't see that, going back to the idea of flourishing, being movement or being towards something without hope. You often see passivity. You often see people like throwing in the towel or like hedonism prioritized as a goal. It's if I can't do anything to improve the world, I might as well just get mine.

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I might as well just in, have a good time and enjoy my life. Hope is saying, no, there are things that, Can improve the world, which is going to require some efforts. I think hope and positive, like optimism, hope, like a positive attitude about the future or you are critical, like for any culture that's going to flourish, any society that's going to advance human progress.

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If you want the world to be a better place, here's another way of saying it. If you want the world to be a better place, you have to believe. It can be a better place, and you have to believe that people can make it a better place. It's not just going to happen automatically, right? Like that it requires work.

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And I think hope is that hope has that self regulatory dimension, right? That motivational dimension of okay, let's roll up our sleeves and let's do the work. 

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[00:44:24] Beatrice: Yeah, I, there's a really great article that I'll link from the resource page for this episode. And it's literally called.

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Hope is not optimism, and it's by a hope psychologist named David Feldman that I found really useful when, just starting to dive into this. 

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[00:44:38] Clay: Yeah, that's awesome. And also we have a, just to promote the labs work a little bit. One of the things we try to do is make research more accessible to the general public and not paywalled in an accessible language.

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And so we actually have a, we published a paper called the science of hope, which is a pretty comprehensive literature review on all the behavioral science around hope from people's how it affects our personal lives to our communities and to the broader societal flourishing. And it's, so if you're just interested in the science of hope, it's something that anyone can, it's a general audience read but it's comprehensive and it's a good way for organizations or direct service groups or anyone that's Oh, like we would like to inspire hope among our students or among our clients or the people we're working with.

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It's a good starting point. So that's just, again, just to promote a lot of the work we're doing in the lab. That's one of the things we're trying to do is take this important research. Cause you're right. There is a difference between optimism and hope. And it's important to help people realize that how they, how they could be a bit more surgical.

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I think in a, as in a general, in general, a lot of people in either the progress space or people who are just trying to improve the world understand that a positive attitude is important. But then it's. It's useful to get into the nuances of the research and to be like, okay let's get it a little bit more precise, a little bit more surgical about what are some ways, what are the specific types of positive thinking that are useful and how do you cultivate that and how does that relate to the action part of it?

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And hope definitely has that action orientation. 

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[00:46:11] Beatrice: Yeah that's a really good point. Yeah, and also very relevant promotion, I think. Very well suited. And yeah, I would love to hear could you share a vision of a future where you would say human flourishing is maximized? And what would that look like?

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What what's a really exciting future for you? 

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[00:46:33] Clay: I think a future in which More people all over the world have the opportunity to pursue, like some of where I'm operating from a position of privilege in the United States where, of course, there are still barriers, but there's a lot of opportunity for people to say, if I believe in myself, if I understand my potential, I can pursue it.

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But there are a lot of places in the world where, that people live in authoritarian dictatorships. They live in, there aren't healthy institutions where it's hard for them to realize their potential. I think one thing is more of that, that global perspective on flourishing is advancing human rights.

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dancing. Essentially what I would think are, the sort of the foundations of classical liberalism, whether we're talking about free speech or free trip, like our free markets. Things that really give people the opportunity to identify and pursue their talents, cultivate their potential, and, live fulfilling lives.

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So that, that's at some basic level, but then even once you would, let's just say you have an optimal We never will, because, like I said, humans are biased, we don't have all the answers and we need a certain level of humility, we're always going to have important debates around policy and politics and all these different things because there aren't simple solutions, we're complex.

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So that's always going to exist, but even if we reach some sort of place where it's we figure out how within reason to optimize our society in terms of the institutions, in terms of the regulations and things like that, where people do aren't, there aren't artificial barriers to people.

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Everyone has access to good education and good opportunities to pursue their talents and so forth. Even in that world, you still need that psychology piece. You still need, and this is what we were talking about earlier, about the depression, anxiety, and like the pessimism. And some of the most affluent, most free countries in the world, you're seeing, these negative attitudes these, you might say like a negative vibe, a pessimistic or cynical vibe.

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So even if you can optimize the, the institutions in society or, those sort of external things, which, again, you will never reach perfection, but even if you can improve those, you still have to have a psychology piece. And so another component is not just people have the freedom. To pursue the lives, but or, but also we have that culture of where we champion and we celebrate human potential and meaning making and agency and connection, social life having connections and things like that.

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So I think there is a healthy psychology that also needs to be a healthy cultural attitude that also needs to be part of. Addressing these other challenges that people are, and the important challenges people are focused around. Whether it's, salt curing diseases or improving the solving issues related to climate change, developing AI in a way that's aligned with our values increasing civil rights, human rights, all these things.

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Like those are all important endeavors that are still pressing in a lot of parts of the world or for the whole world, but also that psychology piece, I think is.

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[00:49:53] Beatrice: Yeah, and do you have any resources that you want to point people to, and I think this could be something that maybe something that's just inspired you and your vision or if you think. Someone who maybe wants to explore these topics that we've discussed today deeper what would you recommend?

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[00:50:09] Clay: So I'll just throw out the cringy self promotional stuff first, which is only, on the Human Flushing Lab website, which is just humanflushinglab. org. We're trying to build resources that, on these themes. But, the, there's a, people, supposedly people aren't reading that much anymore, but what I would say is there's a book called Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

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It's short. It's accessible, it's powerful, and I think that really gets to this theme of agency and flourishing that's critical, and I would encourage anyone to read that, especially if you find yourself disposed to pessimism or hopelessness, if you feel like there's, if you see the world is so corrupt, so problematic so hopeless, that you doubt your capacity to achieve your potential or to make a difference in the world.

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I think that's a great book that can really put some things in perspective because it shows you what a belief in agency, how that can exist even in some of the most dire circumstances. In addition to that, because people don't, because a lot of people may not want to read books, especially maybe like classic or philosophical books that you might think of.

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Find the people, here's a simple thing you can do, I think, people can do if they're interested in these ideas. Just do some observation. Look at the people that you really look up to, that you think, and these could be, people in your personal life, but they could also be athletes, or celebrities, or entrepreneurs, or people that you think are good examples of mentorship, or inspiration.

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And look at how they approach life and you'll find some commonalities related to agency, related to positive thinking, related to the idea of growth and self improvement related to, to hope. And so I think that's another way of thinking about things is, people like us might be more disposed to go read books and think about these things, but there's a lot of different ways to find this kind of content and even just observationally in your life.

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I, I watched this show on Netflix called Chef's Table, and it's, just shows all these people all over the world that are doing really cool culinary innovative work, they're starting restaurants, they're becoming experts in that, and they're doing something really inspiring and creative.

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And people from different backgrounds and different cultures overcoming, all sorts of like personal challenges in their life, tragedies and hardship and barriers to their success, stuff like that is, is like really inspirational because again, you will pick when it's once you start thinking about agency, once you start thinking about meaning and like human potential, you start to see it everywhere.

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And I think that and there's real lessons, I think, to learn from that, that you don't have to go read, philosophy books to to do that. And yeah, and then I think there's a lot of great, there's just a lot of great resources on the internet, I think a few, whether it's positive psychology websites or, people that are just, I'm glad to see for all the negativity that exists on the internet, you can find these places where people really are focused more on what's going right.

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In the world ways in which humans are awesome. We're doing things to help each other and to improve our lives to grow as people and to improve our communities. And so you just have to go look, it's all out there. You just have to, I think. Really, actualize your own agency and start looking for that stuff and regardless of how you prefer to consume content, I think it's, the stories are out there.

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[00:53:58] Beatrice: Yeah. I feel like Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning should be mandatory reading, but if not, I'm sure, it's such a classic. I'm sure there's a good audio book production of it as well by this time. 

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[00:54:08] Clay: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's a good point. It should be. It should be. It should be something that high school students, I think, read, certainly before, I would say, certainly before university, I would think, or just before, all young people should read.

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Yeah, I agree with that. And it's short, 

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[00:54:23] Beatrice: it's short. Yeah. 

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[00:54:24] Clay: You can definitely consume it quickly. 

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[00:54:27] Beatrice: Yeah. Great. My final question for you is just could you share the, like your favorite piece of advice that you ever received? 

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[00:54:37] Clay: Yes a great piece of advice that I received multiple times, probably regularly when I was Younger is in different forms, like the, I guess the, like the most blunt form of it was mind your own business, when your parents teach you these things, but, at the core of a lot of this is take responsibility for yourself.

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And I think one of the things that I find discouraging and a lot of like online discourse is the constant like finger pointing and here's all the ways this other group or this other, or these politicians or these people. or doing bad things. And it's not to say that there's nothing there, but it's like what I don't see much of is here's what I can do.

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Here's what I'm doing to take responsibility for my own life. And so I think that's a, that's an important life lesson that it's just much easier to focus on how other people are. Causing you problems instead of how you're causing your own problems and what you can do to solve your own problems.

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And I don't say that in some sort of like anti social way of like people shouldn't do anything cooperatively or shouldn't focus on like these external social forces, but a lot of work can be, there's a lot of self work to be done. I think and that actually helps these other things because it's like when you start to take responsibility for your life and you start focusing on that, It actually makes you better suited to dispassionately look at the world and be like, okay, here's the real challenges that exist.

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So I think it reduces bias. It reduces like these kind of like hostile emotions that get in the way of progress. So it's a good point to start with yourself and take responsibility for your life. And that was a lesson I'm sure it's an ongoing lesson. I'm, I am 48 years old. I'm sure it's, I should say I'm almost 48 years old.

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It's, I'm sure it's an ongoing lesson that I can keep. Learning, but I remember hearing that when I remember my parents told me that when I was very young and then hearing that throughout my life. And I think it's a good, it's a good life lesson. 

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[00:56:41] Beatrice: Yeah. Good to keep in mind and good for, all these like points on agency and everything we've gone over today as well, I think to keep in mind that, yeah.

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Clay, thank you so much for taking the time and yeah, pleasure to have you here. 

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[00:56:54] Clay: Yeah, it was good to be here. Thanks so much for letting me come on and talk about the work we're doing at the lab and talk about existential psychology, which I'm always excited to do.

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