Nostalgia Is a Shield Against Unhappiness

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

Ever since our earliest days together in our mid-20s, my wife has known about a mystical place called Lincoln City. It’s a modest beach town on the central-Oregon coast, but for me, it holds a Shangri-la-like mythos. Lincoln City is where I spent one blissful week each year as a boy, combing the rough beaches for agates, fishing off the local pier, and playing with matches in the firepit outside my aunt’s trailer home. These are the very happiest of my childhood memories.

So it was with great anticipation that, not long after marrying, I took my wife to