"The most effective product you can sell a parent is guilt."

I'm told that this cover of the New Yorker is inspiring parents to leave their phones home tonight. As Bud Caddell puts it, the most effective product you can sell a parent is guilt.

While it's not something I've had to experience yet, all conversation would indicate that the main draw to having kids seems to be the chance to recreate the 'magic of childhood.'

Of course it's quite like us to look back and romanticize the years of being 'carefree, innocent and full of wonder.' My experience has been that not everyone thinks back on growing up with longing eyes, but for the most part nostalgia is a big part of how we operate.

Project: Nostalgia

Perhaps this is yet another appropriate time for some reflection on Phillip Zimbardo's idea of time-orientation? My experience has certainly been that those who are a little less moved by the magic of childhood are a little more moved by the magic of delayed gratification.

At any rate I feel that thinking of this cover in terms of guilt is spot on. It's a guilt driven by our deeper need to fill our own children with 'perfect' memories of their own. Those of you who are parents: is your phone coming out with you tonight?

Project: Nostalgia - a memory-driven webapp

When we think of the most influential and powerful emotions, love, anger and fear are all common but I'm always surprised by how infrequently nostalgia comes to mind. We have such relatively little understanding of memory to date but it's becoming increasingly more clear just how instrumental it is in shaping our perception, preferences, attitudes, and beliefs.

I've been entirely curious to see what kinds of things we can remember together by sharing pieces of our own nostalgia, whether it's shared or deeply personal, general or specific.

Truly meaningful memories are tough things to get at, but I've been putting together something of a "nostalgia engine" in hopes that through a shared collection of memories we can all get a little closer to understanding the way we think of nostalgia and the things we miss. Check it out, the full webapp is here:

Project: Nostalgia

Right now it's at the stage where everything is ready for some live trial entires, so I'd love to have a few memories of yours added to the collective. Let me say that I've loved everyone's submissions to date - some are simply hilarious. Keep them coming.

Over time I'll be developing some interesting ways to visualize and organize all the entires, so if you have any thoughts on anything you'd like to see, certainly let me know. You guys rock.

"Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson. You find the present tense and the past perfect."

- Owens Lee Pomeroy

(what do you miss or remember?)

time, perspective, and decision-making

There's a lot of profound thinking packed into these 6 minutes. Phillip Zimbardo of the 1971 Stanford Prison experiments has some very wise things to say about happiness and decision-making in relation to our perspective on the past, present, and future, all solidified in years of behavioral research.

Interestingly enough, he also briefly alludes to the idea I've be taken by lately, that our decision-making is far more outside of our conscious control than we ever care to believe.

And I of course love the key idea that perspective determines our reality, particularly as applied here to forming habits and having the discipline to achieve goals.

memories, tangibility, and the nostalgia project

So I've sent out some beta information this weekend on the nostalgia project I've been working on. For some reference, it's a simple submission-based database webapp that tries to get at the idea of nostalgia and meaningful memories by asking the question: "what's something you miss?"

Chances are that a lot of the readers here already recived an email from me about it, but if you'd like to check it out over the next week as I integrate feedback and smooth the rough edges, leave me a message in the comments or email kylestudstill@gmail.com. I've limited these original invites to 100 handpicked people, but mostly because it's running off of an old iBook of mine until I move it to a real server next week. If you're here, I'd love to have you join in the fun.

Already some interesting thoughts coming in: how necessarily connected are our memories to tangible things? We've definitely developed a kind of "on the cloud, we can store anything, forever" mentality, as if this kind of archive is some ultimate human goal. Will digital memories continue to satisfy us 20 years in the future? I think in some way we'll miss the tangibility of things that represented intangible memories. Not quite sure how that will develop just yet.

webdev, nostalgia, and a preview

So now that I'm an entry-level web developer (read: finally started building my own servers/SQL databases/writing php/finally understanding what Dreamweaver ACTUALLY does ha) I've started to recognize the potential of my new-found internet superpowers. (That's actually a bit inaccurate; understanding the potential of what we can really do with a few basic tools is what drove me to pick them up in the first place and I highly recommend it. I started at xampp. not that it's necessary but it's nice and packaged.).

I promise I'll use my powers for good.

What I've chosen to begin with is some kind of repository/tool/application that will categorize/visualize/organize submitted entries of things that we consider meaningful, nostalgic and generally just miss. Since the prompt will be something as simple as "I miss: _____ " these things can be profound or simple, and I'm looking forward to seeing what responses I can end up with because they are sure to be fascinating.

The question I'm working on now is: "what's the best way to visualize a list of memories and nostalgic things"? My initial thought is to think of ways to apply tags and categories. Probably some kind of BuzzFeed-like set of pre-determined tags, as well as a quick prompt for the submitter to make up their own if they so desire. Those tags can be cross-referenced with each other for some interesting analysis. More thinking on that needed. Any thoughts?

Anyone want to do some beta-testing once I set up a domain and all? Let me know, you'll get an exclusive peek.

Or if you'd rather, here's a quick way to help: what's something you miss?