Frequency Illusion

I have recently been having a frequency illusion ever since I started looking for my guitar (Fender Stratocaster Richie Sambora model in Lake Placid blue). I’m sure you’ve heard of the concept that if you decide you want to buy a green Chevy Silverado you start feeling like you are seeing green Chevy Silverados everywhere. This is known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but instead of seeing green trucks it has been happening to me in the form of podcasts. Specifically ones about people who are connecting with objects from their past. Needless to say, I’m loving it, but wish my guitar journey was half as interesting as these episodes.

The first podcast episode that jumped out at me recently was Hyperfixed – Pheobe’s Origin Story. Hyperfixed is created and hosted by Alex Goldman , formerly of the wonderful Reply All podcast. If you are familiar with Reply All and you remember the super tech support episodes where Goldman would try to solve a complicated tech-related life problem for someone, Hyperfixed is in the same vein. The description on Hyperfixed’s website states, “The help desk for life’s most intractable problems: Maybe it’s just a quiet annoyance you’ve grudgingly learned to put up with, or a life defining issue that makes it hard to move forward. Whatever it is, Alex Goldman – reporter, radio producer, and overconfident idiot – will get to the bottom of it (if there’s a bottom to be found. Results may vary”.

In episode Pheobe’s Origin Story, Pheobe is trying to identify a computer game that she remembers in detail from pre-school. Her piece of lost media is something that she believes may have been instrumental in guiding who she became as an adult. This episode was great for a slew of reasons. Mystery? Check. Nostalgia? Check. Connecting with an object from the past? Check. When I was listening to it I was thinking that this was written just for me.

Goldman states that he is not a particularly nostalgic person, to the extent that he has no childhood toys, drawings, or even many photo albums (this is absolutely crazy to me by the way). This leads into a conversation with psychologist and nostalgia expert Clay Routledge. In contrast to Goldman, Routledge speaks from his home office where he is surrounded by nostalgic “artifacts” including a Robotron:2084 arcade game and a King Kong poster. He explains that the term nostalgia as we know it today is a fairly new discipline. The term was re-evaluated within the past forty years and rebranded by not only psychologists, but by advertisers to sell more things. Even more surprising, Routledge explains that nostalgia was coined in the 1600s and was viewed more as a mental disorder of sorts.

I particularly loved the connection that nostalgia has to both the past and the future. Routledge states that by looking to the past and recalling your successes or cherished memories, this can help you to be confident in the present or future and that you are not using nostalgia to hide in the past. For me in my guitar search journey, I am sure that this object from my past shaped my present. I still actively play guitar today and this is the guitar that I used primarily when learning. I don’t know if my object guided my life as much as Pheobe’s object shaped hers (mine didn’t influence my career), but I know for sure there is a connection. I don’t want to give away the entire episode. You have to listen to it yourself. It’s compelling, funny, inspiring, and fascinating. Check it out!

The next podcast that scratched my nostalgia-chasing itch is the long-running program, This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass. For the past twenty years, This American Life chooses a theme for their weekly episode and tells stories based on that theme in several “acts”. This week, episode #871 titled The Thing About Things included stories about “the strange power inanimate objects can hold over us”.

As a longtime listener of This American Life, this particular episode hooked me during the prologue segment and didn’t let go. This was an instant classic episode for me. It even featured a segment from the fantastic Heavyweight podcast created by Jonathan Goldstein which is currently airing new episodes at their new home Pushkin Industries. In this segment of The Thing About Things, a gentleman named Nunzio tells the story of a scooter he found when he was 13 years old. He dreamed of fixing up the bike and cruising around with his buddies in the neighborhood. The bike unfortunately required entirely too much maintenance and repairs for a 13 year old to handle with a salary earned by mowing neighbors’ lawns. So the bike sat in pieces for the next twenty-four years. In 1999, he collected the pieces of the bike from his parents’ house and relocated them to where he currently lived with the goal of finally getting the boke running.

Nunzio spent a year working on the bike and just barely got it running before deciding that the engine needed a complete rebuild. He took it to a mechanic nearby and after getting the run-around for a few months, the shop abruptly closed. With no sign of the engine or owner, Nunzio refused to buy a new one. He instead embarked on a quest to find his engine to keep the bike all original. He stated that it was important to him to keep that piece of time intact when he was of a certain age hanging out with his friends. After giving up for a few years, Nunzio searched online for the guy who owned the shop that had his engine. Much to his surprise, he finds that the guy is in jail on an illegal dumping charge, and Nunzio goes to visit him at the prison the next day. After explaining that he was there to track down his old scooter engine and that it was important to him, the guy immediately tells him the address of where he could find it. When he retrieved it he found that it was still in the same box he used when he dropped it off and that absolutely no work had been done to it. Nunzio spent the next year rebuilding the engine and the rest of the bike. He finally finished the project after decades. Host Ira Glass asks Nunzio how many times he has ridden it to which he guesses thirty or maybe forty. The point of the bike was no longer about riding, but about the journey and the power that the object had over him to make him see this through.

Frequency illusions are considered a cognitive bias where people create their own “subjective reality” based on their own thoughts and perceptions, but that is ok with me. I want to hear more stories of nostalgia and people connecting with objects from their past regardless. Whether it is frequency illusion, coincidence, or an omen from the universe it doesn’t matter to me. It’s all a part of the mystery.

Be sure to check out Hyperfixed and This American Life for more great stories.