The Burn of Fireside Nostalgia

A friend of mine once described “fun” as looking forward to an event and reminiscing about that event. Anticipation and nostalgia, he thought, were more important to explaining our experience of fun that the actual experience. Daniel Kahnman’s research, including his most recent book Thinking Fast and Slow, gives some credibility to this claim.

Through this lens, nostalgia is pleasure, derived from looking back at a memory that once inspired a positive feeling. The danger, however, is intellectual inertia. In a sense, nostalgia leads us to hold rigid ideas of how things should be, leaving us biased by the conventionality of how they could be.

Being aware of, and correcting for, irrational tendencies like nostalgia makes us smarter.

For example, there is nothing better than the feeling of taking off cold, wet socks and plopping yourself down next to a crackling, glowing fire. It is viscerally refreshing, plus it connects our experience, however indirectly, with pre-historic humans. Wood fires feel innate to humanity.

Problem is, some studies suggest that being around such fires is likely worse for you than cigarettes. Because household wood fires release tiny particles that we cannot smell, we are ignorant to the damage it does to our pulmonary and cardiovascular systems. It releases carbon sequestered in the wood, which exacerbates climate change when scaled to a national level (although electric and gas “fireplaces” may be worse still).

Worst of all, it is not just hurting the person enjoying the fire: recreational fires in modern fireplaces create an substantial “second hand smoke” effect in suburbs and medium population density zones. One study estimated that 70 percent of smoke released from household fires re-enters other nearby chimneys, with deleterious health impacts. While there is uncertainty about the true health impacts, the possibility of such disastrous side effects should make us critically investigate the status quo.

Our irrational love of wood fires illustrates the flaw of emotionally driven, non-rational decision-making that characterizes most human choices. All of our decisions are determined in large part by emotion, familiarity, and aesthetics. This is often a great way to simplify decision making to save intellectual bandwidth for other activities; however, it also means that when one argues that fireplaces should be illegal except in timber-rich, population sparse zones, people immediately and instinctually defend fireplaces. In fact, you — the reader — likely feel nostalgic about an experience you had near a fireplace and are therefore resistant to embrace my point.

Yes, there are valid arguments against banning fireplaces, like asking, “If there are greater evils out there, why fire places?” Fair, perhaps it should not be the top priority in D.C., but I do not believe that is the primary reason people instinctually defend fireplaces. There is a legitimate health benefit to the policy which, weighed against the mild infringement of liberty, seems comparable to the polarizing soda ban in New York City. In both cases, the small infringement of liberty is a means to correct a market imperfection — the negative externality of fireplaces or of sugar-fueled obesity and diabetes — that could lead to saving vast amounts of lives and health expenditures. The EPA agrees, and has quietly improved fireplace standards across the U.S. this year.

So why are we resistant to banning fireplaces all together? Because we have pre-established positions on fireplaces rooted in nostalgia. The real reason fireplaces still exist in semi-urban zones is that being against fireplaces is like being against hot chocolate and Christmas. Fireplaces symbolize family, togetherness, and relief from the cold. Thus, the archaic technology persists long past its usefulness.

We irrationally associate a secondary element of our memories - in this case, fireplaces - with the relief and togetherness that really made us happy. What makes fireplace memories special is how we got wet and cold and whom you were with when you warmed up, not the fireplaces themselves. Banning fireplaces would just allow for more moments about which to be nostalgic, by lengthening people’s lives. Even if the benefits are imperceivable on the individual scale, society as a whole will benefit.

My argument is not really about fireplaces, but around our willingness to embrace new ideas that challenge conventions and address problems. It is entirely possible that future evidence declares fireplaces safe, and that the new EPA policies are erroneous. But that is not the point: if we are to achieve a world that is connected, cohesive, and provides the fundamentals of human happiness - shelter, food, health, education and hope – it may require embracing non-conventional solutions. It is our responsibility to be open to arguments rooted in evidence, rather than emotion.