Nostalgia for young adulthood? Rethinking the ‘reminiscence bump’

Some years ago, I found myself sitting out a blinding snow storm in a diner on a rural Maryland highway. It was bitterly cold outside, so I ordered soup and coffee and sat on a stool at the counter. I was the only customer for more than an hour, so I struck up a conversation with the fellow working there.

He was in his early 40s, I’d guess. He was friendly and did most of the talking, telling me about his high school days. His school was just a couple miles down the road. He had been an All-State linebacker on his championship team, and ran track as well. He had been popular and had lots of rich and entertaining stories about his escapades with his buddies and various girls, most of whom had left the area. He got married right after graduating, took some business courses at the community college, and now he owned this diner and was fairly successful. Still, the best years of his life were behind him.

I remember being saddened by his life story. Here was a man at middle age, still looking back nostalgically at his time as a boy. Had nothing else happened in the intervening years to eclipse his youthful fame and popularity? Was it all downhill from these peak experiences of high school?

It turns out he’s not alone in his vivid recollections of young adulthood. For others, it may be their college years, or even a little later. Most middle-aged adults, though, men and women, have a similar “reminiscence bump” when they look back on their past. We all have more — and more vivid — memories of young adulthood than we do of any other time of life, no matter what personal and professional ups and downs we have along the way.

Why would that be? This memory phenomenon is so common and robust that psychological scientists believe it is more than just nostalgia. Indeed, the prevailing wisdom is that the reminiscence bump has biological and cognitive roots, reflecting the basic workings of autobiographical memory. According to this theory, our power to encode lasting memories is strongest at this stage of life, peaking before a steady decline into middle age and beyond.

However, new research is challenging this widely accepted view. Two Danish scientists, Annette Bohn and Dorthe Berntsen of Aarhus University, were unconvinced that the reminiscence bump is simply a consequence of better memory storage and maintenance. An alternative explanation is that the phenomenon is cultural, reflecting widely embraced life scripts — shared expectations about the order and timing of life events. According to this view, the period of young adulthood is so important in the way we generally think of life’s journey that it also shapes the way we think of, and recall, our personal lives.

Bohn and Berntsen tested this idea in a clever way — by having children imagine the futures that lay ahead of them. It turns out that looking back on the past and imagining the future are very similar in their neural and cognitive underpinnings. Imagining the future, however, obviously has nothing to do with encoded memories. Therefore, if kids’ imagined futures also show a significant bump in young adulthood, that evidence would favor cultural scripts, rather than memory, as an explanation of the phenomenon.

To test this, the scientists asked a large group of school children aged 10-14 to write their future life stories. They were not instructed about the kinds of events they should include; they were merely told to imagine the life ahead of them. When they were done, two independent readers analyzed each of the life stories, categorizing and dating every event, including both transitional events like marriage and incidental events like a memorable dinner.

The results were clear. As reported by Psychological Science, the majority of events that the children imagined were transitional life events clustered in young adulthood: buying a home, getting married, and so forth. There was also a bump, though a smaller one, in incidental life events, probably because the kids were embellishing the major events provided by the script. For example, kids often imagined getting a dog, but this was almost always linked to buying a home. In other words, the kids were using their broad cultural expectations as a “narrative scaffold” for a more detailed imagining of the future.

The scientists wanted to clarify these initial findings, so they ran a second and different kind of experiment. This time they gave the kids word cues (e.g. book, chair, telephone) and asked them to respond to the cues by imagining future events in their lives. They were also asked to date the events. Importantly, the imagined events sparked by these cues were mostly incidental events, not major life transitions, and they showed no bump in early adulthood. These events were imagined without activating the cultural script, so the bump disappeared. But sometimes these words did trigger thoughts of important life events. When this occurred, the events again clustered in young adulthood.

It appears that we all live by the same overarching script. Young kids use life’s script as an outline for what to expect, and when. It gives the future some certainty and structure. The man I spoke with in the diner was using the same basic script as a guide for selecting which of many past events to include in his autobiography — the life story he tells himself, and others passing through.

Comments

I don’t agree with this. My BEST years were 20’s and 30’s and I am now 68 okay

Also, my 20’s were taken up with business/philosophy in University and my 30’s were fun in advertising but I worked very hard!!

In my pre-teens I remember vividly the anticipation of junior high, high school and college, particularly around football and basketball events. I would say that my anticipatory feelings, as well as enjoyment at the time, was so heightened that my feelings of nostalgia in later life were much paler versions of those experiences. I still live near the high school I attended and still get a mild thrill from hearing the marching band practicing early in the morning.
Still, as I approach my 65th birthday, the only period of my life for which I have nostalgic feelings are the childhood and teenage years. The reality of an event is always a demotion from what you anticipated. After the first disappointments of that sort, I believe that we begin to be more “realistic” in our expectations. Yet, we pine for those years in which we were so easily enchanted by possibilities. I think we are trained to “curb our enthusiasm” in order to confine ourselves to goals set by others or to the disappointing reality we find ourselves in. How many times did we hear references to the “daily grind” of adult responsibilities.
As a pre-teen and teenager, I never fantasized or planned for an adult occupation. It never really interested me. In truth, I could not imagine myself living to age 21. I don’t know why, but I have heard others say the same. Perhaps my parents’ representation of adult life was so uninspiring that I could not really aspire to much. In reality, my adulthood was, on paper, far greater than I ever imagined. I have traveled the world, met world leaders and top corporate executives, had a successful and stimulating career, married the girl of my dreams and had a wonderful son. I have had great friends and great times with them. Yet, somehow, I would not say I feel much “nostalgia” for those times in earlier adulthood. I remember so much fear, anxiety and strife. There was so much financial stress. Perhaps responsibility makes feelings of nostalgia impossible. For another thing, it all seems so recent! Perhaps our conception of time steals the magic of post-childhood memories.

I think it is more related to responsibility. When I was 20ish I only had one job – college. No expectations to earn money. No social class. Everyone around me was doing a similar thing. I had so many friends, and time to spend talking with them… Now at 30, I have a 40hr/week job, really a 50+hr/week job. I get home mentally exhausted. By the time I feel good its Sunday night. Bills and saving money are my biggest concerns. I don’t enjoy talking to anyone anymore. Everything that used to make me feel excitement got the volume turned down or disappeared. I’d rather sit at home by-myself anymore.

I can empathize. I am also in my early 30’s and bills and repaying a loan and saving up are big on my list. I do not like to go out as much as I used to these day either. I do spend time with friends but it is usually a quiet night out now.

My nostalgic feelings and memories regarding my years between 10 and 15 started in my 20s. In my 40s I started to long for my years approximately between 20 and 25. In my 40s I started to feel old and adding to that a sence of sorrow of getting even older.

I came back to this article after having read the comments which stood out to me, so thanks to you all above for your input. I can really identify with Rick Alexander’s post, save for maybe the lackluster feelings he has on the achievement of family or career. But largely, I do think the strong sense of potential, excitement and memory comes down to that age bracket of 10-20. If this were a generation of more responsibility earlier in life, perhaps it would be ages 8-17, but even so those are really close likely due to pure biology. After age 20 it seems to me that most of the excitement would only be due to what you think is finally going to go on directly before it is replaced by a stable career. Although I had aspirations as a kid of what I currently do (and on paper it has been impressive), and am very grateful for the opportunities I have had, I would agree that the fulfillment is much less overall. Perhaps it is due to a grind and a forward looking plan of aging into the twilight, but in a sense that’s what it has to be when new generations are coming behind you, or you are raising them.

What I have found, and it is actually the main point of my posting here (so tell me what you think) is more that you get a smaller number of friends, people turn inward (I don’t blame them) due to family and natural distance, and it becomes much clearer that your vision of friends and relatives was far more optimistic at younger ages, and now is more disappointing. I say this as an optimist and having grown up completely healthy and again, very grateful for it – I have no ill feelings or spite. But you see that people are inertia driven, easily manipulated, not all that thoughtful unless in their own self centered sphere, etc. What wasn’t as clear at younger ages in your life is really clear in many ways now. A lot of that is learned experience, much of it is wisdom, and even more is paying attention – something a lot of people don’t do. Frequently it’s not their fault, I chalk it up to biology and the rat race, especially in America.

In any event, I find that the hard truth shows you that people are largely disappointing. In a certain sense, it has given me appreciation and humility for life in general, knowing I have my transgressions too. In an odd way it reinforces my belief of the theological concept that God is our Father and we are all children in the grandest sense of the word (although we deny it all the time): it is funny to me that even though we can fake it better and have more responsibility, most of us are still just kids. Lord have mercy


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