EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW A well-known American psychologist speaks about "declinism," a word that sounds pretentious but fits the political and social situation in Romania 100%.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW A well-known American psychologist talks about "declinism," a word that sounds pretentious but perfectly fits the political and social situation in Romania. Opinion polls in Romania indicate a strong nostalgia for "a glorious past." "But if your nostalgia means thinking that the best days of ours are behind us, then you are actually practicing decline, not healthy nostalgia," explains American psychologist Clay Routledge in a dialogue with HotNews. Politicians exploit this "and then offer the nostalgic solution: if we could just go back to how things were, it would be better." Routledge formulates ideas that are rarely said so directly in an interview. A few examples: "Politicians use nostalgia as decline to make people anxious, stressed, fearful, or angry." "How it comes to the point where 'the professors have difficulty taking the mental health of their students seriously' due to exaggerations." "As part of modern life, families become smaller, people have fewer children, are more worried, and have more concerns for them. Children are, in a way, more precious, which, ironically, makes them less resilient." Clay Routledge is a psychologist specializing in existential psychology, leading the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C. When nostalgia is good and when it stops being so. – HotNews: Mr. Clay Routledge, you have done research related to nostalgia, from which you derive the benefits of this emotion. When can nostalgia become harmful? Because we see political leaders using it to manipulate and divide people. – Nostalgia, like anything that makes you feel good, can be practiced in unhealthy or unproductive ways. The good news is that, based on almost 25 years of research, not only mine but that of researchers from all over the world, nostalgia is a very healthy activity for most people. It makes them turn to fond memories from their lives, which make them feel loved, which make them feel valued, which give them a sense of competence, the feeling that their lives have meaning and that they find inspirational for the future. When the world seems uncertain, when you try to figure out what to do, what will give your life meaning, what you should focus your attention on, how to cope with the challenge, you turn to life experiences that have been useful to you. "People do this all the time in sports: you have nostalgia for your team." We also observe something else, which was a bit of a surprise: in recent years we have discovered that people can do this even if it's not about their personal memories, because people are social and cultural beings and share memories with each other. There is also a type of nostalgia that can be thought of as collective or group nostalgia, where you can still obtain some benefits by appealing to positive associations with a group. People do this all the time in sports: you have nostalgia for your team, which increases the feeling of solidarity with other supporters and brings people closer. Nostalgia used "to increase social conflict." But the problem arises when you couple this type of nostalgia with conflict and hostility between groups. And what you see now in many countries is the use of a national or group-oriented nostalgia to increase solidarity between certain people, coupled with the idea that "these immigrants are not part of your nostalgic history, they are not part of your group." Therefore, it is used to increase social conflict. This means using, intentionally or accidentally, well-known psychosocial phenomena, such as favoring one's own group and disfavoring the other, and using nostalgia as a motivational tool to fuel or contribute to social conflict. So I believe you are absolutely right. I still say that nostalgia can also be used as a solution to this. "If your nostalgia means thinking that the best days of ours are behind us, then you are actually practicing decline, not healthy nostalgia." In the United States, which has a history of thinking for themselves as a juggernaut, a country of immigrants, everyone here has come from somewhere, except the indigenous populations. And that type of nostalgia, if you make people think about a nostalgic America, about that juggernaut, can actually make them more open-minded and more tolerant of immigrants. Therefore, it depends a lot on how the message is used. And I believe you are right, politicians use it. One concrete thing that I find very, very useful for distinguishing between a healthy and an unhealthy form of nostalgia is whether people practice or not what is called decline. There is now research that makes a difference between nostalgia, defined as those warm feelings for the past that people experience as growth-oriented, which improve them in a way, and decline, which is a positive attitude towards the past based on the idea that the world is taking things down and that everything is deteriorating. I often tell people: if your nostalgia means thinking that the best days of ours are behind us, then you are actually practicing decline, not healthy nostalgia. A kind of "It was better before." To go back to what you said, politicians often confuse the two and use decline to make people anxious, stressed, fearful, or angry. And negative emotions tend to make people more nostalgic. Therefore, they use this divisive message, a zero-sum game type, to increase the negative emotions rooted in decline, and then offer the nostalgic solution: if we could just go back to how things were, it would be better. "A greater awareness of mental health has done a lot of good." – I want to talk about a reality in Romania, where there is a stigma regarding discussions about mental health. They are indeed more concerned about the topic, more ingrained, living in big cities and having more access to information, but very few have access to any kind of mental health services. – It's not just about Romania; even in the United States, this tension exists in different parts of the country, because, similarly, we have more cosmopolitan, more urban areas where the stigma is certainly smaller. There, the stereotype is that everyone has a therapist, regardless of whether they need one or not; therapists have become almost a symbol of status or a part of someone's relationship portfolio. But then, there are other parts of the country where not only is access to good mental health services reduced, but there is also a very serious cultural stigma: it can cost you relationally or professionally to be perceived as a person with a psychological deficit. An important thing, and I tried to emphasize this in the New York Times article, is that we must tread carefully. Because a greater awareness of mental health has done a lot of good. It has helped reduce the stigma. It has made people who really need help more likely to seek it and receive it. Even in the United States, many people who have committed suicide have never seen a mental health specialist. So we have people who go to specialists for what we call the usual stressors of life, but we also have people with very, very serious mental illnesses who do not receive any treatment. "It has become frequent for American students to use mental health as an excuse not to come to class." There are many other cases where someone can benefit from therapeutic intervention, even if they are not that sick. So it is very delicate. But the challenge is that the areas of our culture that pathologize everyday life (no. mentioned in the first part of the interview) risk to worsen the stigma in cultural parts that still struggle to recognize that it is a real problem, in the extent that they trivialize it. Even in American universities, which are among the most progressive institutions in the country, professors have begun to have difficulty taking the mental health of their students seriously. Because it has become so frequent for American students to use mental health as an excuse not to come to class or not to do the homework. So mental health is trivialized in many ways, which makes it very difficult for people who really need help to be taken seriously. Stress and the fitness analogy. Why do we need adversity. – I would like to talk a little about stress, about adversity. To what extent can stress be good for us and, on the other hand, what are the situations where stress can be harmful to us? – I think the analogy with physical stress is very good. Everyone knows that the best way to improve your physical condition is to put your body under stress. You get allergies, you do cardiovascular exercises, you lift weights, which breaks muscle fibers, which then repair and grow larger. Something similar happens with the mind or the brain, this is one of the reasons why, at least in the United States, there are growing concerns about what is called helicopter parenting, meaning parents who fly above their children and never let them face any adversity. Because, just as you need to be exposed to different things to strengthen your immune system, or to do difficult physical things to become stronger physically, your brain needs to experience a certain level of stress, challenge, uncertainty, adversity, rejection, and fear to develop into a psychologically resilient individual. The challenge is, staying with the fitness analogy, that you can accidentally get hurt. Similarly, some stressors are too big, too overwhelming. And the problem is that, as I said, there is no blood test. There is no simple method to diagnose or identify the moment when something becomes too much stress. About the level of stress. The other problem is that it varies from person to person, because people really have personality differences that make them more or less susceptible to mental illnesses and which are probably determined genetically. Some conditions are hereditary. Some people simply have a higher score for anxiety and negative emotions. Some people are more physically sensitive to things, some are more sensitive in general. The same level of stress that you say is good for person A may be better or worse for person B. "People are much more resilient than we believe." But, to offer some useful information on a complicated topic: there is good evidence that people are generally, again, with nuances, because some individuals are more vulnerable than others, quite resilient. There seems to be something incorporated in the human brain, with evolutionary value, that makes us capable of overcoming difficult things. There is a concept called affect fading (n.r. in original fading affect bias). This tendency means that emotions from negative life experiences tend to fade from memory faster than those from positive experiences, which may also contribute to the tendency to be nostalgic or sentimental about the past. The negative aspects of the past do not carry the same emotional weight as the positive ones for most people. It seems we have a psychological immune system that needs to be developed through the development of resilience. There is research that suggests that people are much more resilient than we believe. "Children are, in a way, more precious, which, ironically, makes them less resilient." – How does modern life affect us, where it seems we have everything, but we have everything at once? – Humans have evolved in a much different world, in smaller kinship networks, where there were many other challenges. Very, very difficult physical challenges related to survival, satisfying basic needs for food and security. But currently, as you said, we are often overwhelmed by options. Moreover, all the world's problems become, through technology, part of our daily diet. Our brain is not prepared for this; normally, we focus more on immediate, nearby challenges. There is also the argument, although there are debates about it, that technology has made us even more disconnected. People are very social. Having healthy social relationships is a very important part of good mental health. It is one of the most powerful protective factors: if you have good relationships, if you feel socially supported and connected, you are less likely to develop a mental illness. And you are certainly more likely to recover from something or have good outcomes. About the dimension of families. There is the argument, and I believe there are arguments on both sides, that modern life, making us more prosperous, has made us less directly dependent on others. You can simply pay someone to do something for you, or you can spend your time alone, looking at your phone. And this has made us more socially disconnected, which is an obstacle. There is also interesting research about the decrease in family size. When families have fewer children, they give each child more individual attention. It doesn't mean they will love less if they had more children, but they will simply have literally less time and less attention to give to each child, which means they could have more opportunities to be independent and develop more resilience. If you have one child, all your attention goes to them, which increases the probability of helicopter parenting. This is another argument: as part of modern life, families are becoming smaller, people have fewer children, are more worried, and have more concerns for them. Children are, in a way, more precious, which, ironically, makes them less resilient. "One of the prices of prosperity is that you have more time to sit in your head, ruminating." It is hard to know for sure, because we do not have good data on what mental health looked like 100 years ago, but there is a theory that I believe can be sustained: when life becomes more physically secure, you will certainly have more time to worry about your happiness and your dissatisfactions. One of the prices of prosperity is that you have more time to sit in your head, ruminating. This is the basis of the idea "Head Out": regardless of the cause, in the modern world we certainly have more things that pull us towards ourselves: higher levels of individualism, greater prosperity, technology that encourages passive consumption instead of active, productive engagement. All these forces push us more inward. But the more time we spend trapped in our own heads, the less time we have in the world, making the things we know from empirical studies that are very good for mental health: physical activity, going to work, volunteering, creative activities, religious and spiritual practices. These are the things that distract you from your own dissatisfactions and frustrations and direct your attention towards productive action. And productive action has the effect of increasing your psychological well-being. "We tend to find our way back." – We have spoken before about our comfortable way of life, but it seems to be quite threatened in our days, because there are wars, the planet is less safe now because of climate change and extreme phenomena. And we seem unprepared for survival. What are the risks of this situation? – One of the things I find encouraging in people is that we tend to find our way back. It is a film considered a classic, although not very old, WALL·E, in which robots do everything, and people have gotten fat, become lazy and practically incompetent. But the movie doesn't end like that. The movie ends with people realizing this, getting up and returning to Earth, saying: let's learn to plant things. I believe there is a desire in people to learn to be more autonomous and to develop the types of relationships and skills that support this. At the same time, one of the challenges we have now with the big global problems is the development of artificial intelligence. And young people, in particular, have all sorts of worries. One is very practical: will we have a job in the future or not, because computers take everything and robots take everything? But they also have a deeper, more existential anxiety, closer to that related to climate change: will these robots kill us? So there is this kind of worry that is present all the time. "Global problems become more personal." While in the past you had immediate concerns about survival or the immediate problems of your community, now you have something that develops thousands of miles away, elsewhere in the country, in Silicon Valley, and you are worried about how it might affect life here. Global problems become more personal, and this contributes to a certain suffering or at least the feeling of people being overwhelmed and not knowing what to do. But I believe there is a growing recognition, a growing desire to find more balance between being dependent on the comfort that has made us, certainly, a better life, and developing some skills and abilities that would make people feel a little more autonomous.