Modern Wisdom - #485 - Susan Cain - Why Sensitive People Enjoy Feeling Sad

Episode Date: June 11, 2022

Susan Cain is a best-selling author and speaker. There’s a tyranny of positivity in the modern world. Talking about emotions like longing and sorrow are not usually encouraged. And yet tons of people feel like this and hearing others tell us about their melancholy brings us closer to them, so how can we integrate bittersweet emotions into our lives and what can they teach us about ourselves? Expect to learn whether the world has become better for introverts, why sad music seems to make us happy, whether people are genetically predisposed to feeling bittersweet emotions, how to deal with impermanence in life when everyone we love is going to die, why I felt sad after looking at the moon and much more… Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 15% discount on Upgraded Formulas Magnesium at https://upgradedformulas.com/ (use code: MW15) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Bittersweet - https://amzn.to/3xjy9AE  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Susan Cain. She's a best-selling author and a speaker. There's a tyranny of positivity in the modern world. Talking about emotions like longing and sorrow are not usually encouraged. And yet, tons of people feel like this, and hearing others tell us about their melancholy brings us closer to them. So how can we integrate bittersweet emotions into our lives, and what can they teach us about their melancholy brings us closer to them. So how can we integrate bittersweet emotions into our lives and what can they teach us about ourselves? Expect to learn whether the world has become better for introverts, why sad music seems to make us happy, whether people are genetically predisposed to feeling bittersweet emotions, how to deal with impermanence in life when everyone we love is going to die, why I felt

sad after looking at the moon, and much more. Susan definitely seems to be able to put her finger on an unspoken dynamic that's going on in society. Previously, it was about the power of introverts in a world that seems to be designed for extraversion and how quiet is actually a competitive advantage. And this is also true, this bittersweet melancholic desire that some people have, why it is that we enjoy sad music or barren, sparse landscapes and imagery and stuff like that. It is very interesting. I hope you enjoyed this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Susan Kane.

Susan Kane, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Chris. It's great to be here. I watched your very famous TED Talk a few years ago. And in it, you hoped that the world was going to become a more introvert, friendly place. Doing a sort of analysis of what's happened over the last few years. How do you feel that's gone? What's the post mortem? I think it's gone amazingly well and also that we still have a long way to go. And I think, you know, that's true of any social shift. You can sometimes see changes, but still know that there's still a distance to travel. But yeah, when I compare things to the way they were 10 years ago, I think it's been a pretty seismic shift just in terms of the

the degree to which people are aware of the fact that we are introverts or extroverts or maybe somewhere in between and that that shapes so much of who we are and the willingness of companies and schools and organizations to talk about it. But I would say most of all, the biggest shift I've seen is individual humans. You know, all the letters that I get from people telling me that they once had felt like they didn't have permission to be their true selves, and that now they do, and they embrace it. And there's this amazing paradox at the heart of so many of these letters, which is that the more people embrace their true quiet nature,

the more successful they become in the outer facing world. I see this over and over again. It's very difficult to compete with somebody that's being themselves, right? No one can beat you or be you. Exactly, exactly. And I think humans really like truth most of all. And when you feel like somebody is telling the truth about who they are

and living that truth, we like it, you know, and we want to be with them. Yeah, I did a TEDx talk the start of last year and this was the entire topic of it, who's about embracing your weirdness and about the fact that Dali was this, Salvador Dali was this unbelievably unique human. But if he hadn't embraced everything that he was, we weren't going to get Dali out of Davinci, and we weren't going to get Dali out of Michelangelo. It was important for him to embrace all of the elements of him, the ones that got him locked in a deep-sea diving suit that he had to be wrenched out of in the middle of a talk and the one where he was throwing himself down the stairs at nine years old, because he just liked pain.

Like you know, he was a bizarre guy, beyond the facial hair. And yeah, it's very, very right. There is a resonance that you get when you can see somebody just being themselves and just being truthful. And it's very l lowering, which is bizarre, because a lot of the time, especially with introverts, that's exactly not what they want. They want, like, be allure to kind of come and go

as they please, and some of the people that are the most engaging are the ones who are not necessarily looking for it. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I do think introverts want to be able to, yeah, they may just not always want to talk about who they are. I think there are many different ways of expressing it, or to be able to just take time off. I think that's the thing. It's in a 24 or 7 on society, they want time off. I agree. How do you go from talking about introverts to thinking about feelings of sorrow and longing

then? Well, it's very interesting in that I thought that talking about sorrow and longing in this book, Vitter Sweet, I thought when I started this project that it was a pretty big departure from what I had done in the past, you know, just like a completely new topic. And it is, but what I'm finding is that so much of the way people are reacting to it is it's very similar to what I heard with Quiet in that so many people saying, oh yeah, you know, this is who I really am. This is speaking to a deep truth about myself or about the way I perceive the world, but not one I had put into words before or not one that I felt like I could put into

words before because you're supposed to be so upbeat and so positive. You're not supposed to talk about these kinds of things. So in that way, there was this real parallel that I could completely not been aware of when I first started. What are the emotions that you're talking about in Bittersweet? Well, I am talking about sorrow and longing. I'm talking about, I'm really talking about as joy and sorrow, though. I'm talking about the way in which the nature of reality

is that joy and sorrow are forever paired and light and dark are forever paired. And so we have to embrace both of them and accept both of them and look at both of them in a clear-eyed kind of way. And to understand that everyone and everything that we love most is impermanent, not gonna live forever, but that there's something about really living deeply

in that perception, in that apprehension, that is a kind of gateway to creativity, to connection, to transcendence. And you can feel this. You know, I mean, what got me down this whole garden path in the first place is just my lifelong love of sad music and what sad music unleashes in us. I mean, certainly in me, but then I started to realize that there are all these studies that find the goose bumps and the chills that we get from music. It comes from sad music. It doesn't come from the happy and upbeat tunes. It's like there's something that that music is conveying to us about the nature of reality that makes us feel kind of electric and alive because it's speaking some deep truth.

What do you think is going on there? How is it that music can evoke an emotional response in that sort of way? I think that the musician is saying to us in a pre-verbal way or in a super-verbal way, maybe. They're saying to us everything that you've ever felt and maybe not wanted to say. I'm telling you, I've felt it to you, I'm telling you everyone's felt it to you and I'm going to take the further step of turning this thing that you felt into something unbelievably beautiful. So there's a kind of, yeah, there's a transformation in it and a kind of union in it. It is interesting to think about the sort of impact that music has on us. I wonder, I would love to speak to an evolutionary psychologist about it and think about how is this adaptive?

How is it that music can cause us to, it can induce this emotional state? Is that a byproduct of something else? Is it that there is something else that we need to be attuned to and it happens to be that music can tap into that as well? Or is there a specific pathway that's causing us to be able to be made crying, weeping messes on the floor by the right song at the right time. I know. It's a very interesting question. And psychologists and neuroscience have looked at what it is about sad music that induces

all these feelings of, you know, pleasure is to, like, simple a word for it, but all these great feelings in us. And I don't know that anyone's ever come up with a really great explanation for it. You know, they talk about how it brings our bodies to a state of physical equilibrium. But what I found more, although it was my kind of bias going into this whole question to be looking at things more from a scientific and evolutionary point of view. And I do that in certain ways that we can talk about the question about music specifically. I ended up finding it was more interesting to think about it in religious terms than anything

else, which I hadn't expected because I didn't really go in as a religious person. Like I think of myself as an agnostic, and I still am. But I think that what... When you listen to music, what you start to realize is that like a huge majority of the songs that touch us the most are tuning into a sense of longing, like an existential yearning for something. That's what the music is expressing. And so it's expressing the exact same thing that religion expresses in its longing for the Garden of Eden and its longing for Zion and its longing for Mecca and its longing for the beloved of the soul. That's one of the deepest aspects of human DNA

and for those of us who aren't used to thinking in religious terms or kind of cut off from that, or cut off from that side of our nature, but that's what music is doing. When you listen to it, you can hear it. And then, and there are other manifestations of that that we have in our art. Like, you know, Dorothy is longing for somewhere over the rainbow, Odysseus in the Odyssey. He's longing for home, he's longing for Ithaca, and that's what sets him off on his adventure.

So, you see this embedded into our deepest works of art. And I think we're not unconscious enough relationship to that longing, even though it's even though it taps our deepest nature. How is Joian sorrow different from something like awe and dread? How is joy and sorrow different from something like awe and dread? Well, I think of awe and dread as being very different. And I know people talk about awe as being somehow in relation to fear, which I don't fully buy. So I'm going to separate those out. I will say that we have in the quiz, in the book, a bittersweet quiz, that I developed with the psychologist David Yeaden

at Johns Hopkins and Scott Berry-Calfman. And it's also on the website for people who want to just kind of take it quickly. It's Susan Cain.Net if you want to just do it in a minute or two. But we did preliminary studies with the quiz. The quiz basically measures how prone you are to this experience of bitter sweetness, this kind of like intense awareness of joy and sorrow. And what we found is that people who are high in their proneness to these states, you know, they spend a lot of time in that bitter sweet state of being, they also are prone

to states of awe and wonder and spirituality. So there seems to be some kind of connection there. I don't know that we know exactly what it is, but I will say that there's also a high correlation between bittersweetness and what the psychologist Elaine Aaron calls high sensitivity, which is a kind of like, high sensitivity, which is a kind of like, it describes 15 to 20% of people who are just intensely reactive to everything about life, you know, the good and the bad. You feel it all very deeply. So there's something about feeling it all, the joy in the sorrow, and therefore being able to take in states that put us into that place of art. Do you find when you've been speaking to people about this that some people kind of just

don't get what you're talking about? I'm thinking about some of the friends that I know much history is as a club promoter. So I've stood on the front door of nightclubs and I can think about a big group of people of a bunch of the Morathletes as well. Where if I started talking to them about this sort of gorgeous feeling of bleak melancholy that I had when I was going through the hills of Iceland on a bus, for instance, and it's just endless, endless landscapes of rocks,

moss covered rocks, nothing, nothing living there that I can see. And the fact that whenever there's a planet earth documentary that gets released, it means I always go to the most bleak landscape. I always want the snow or the ice one. I want the Antarctic a one. And there's something about that that I find sort of

beautiful and terrifying at the same time. And I know that as I was, as I say that to some of my friends, they're just gonna look at me and go, yeah, but why? That sounds like it sucks. And have you found this? Have you found that there are some people that kind of just don't seem to get it or at least don't feel it? Definitely, definitely.

Yeah, and I've had some funny interviews, a couple of friends of mine were, they would say, you know, I just took your bittersweet quiz and I scored a zero. Like on every single one of the questions, zero, zero, zero. So yeah, there definitely are some people like that. And I do, this is what I think. I think there are some people who come into this world with a temperament like a sensitivity that sort of predisposes them to getting into the state. I think there's some people who come to it via life experience. You know, maybe they've experienced enough of life's mix of trials and triumphs that they get to the state. And some people really don't. And the way I think of it all is that if you think of the lesson of all the myths and the fairy tales

and the Marvel movies and all of it, you know, it's basically telling us there's a whole array of different superpowers on offer, right? There's like lightsabers, there's wizard hats, there's some, you know, some people can climb up buildings and stick to the walls, and it's really easy for them. And I just think of this as one kind of power with which to relate to other people and to the world. And it doesn't have to be for everyone. It's strange thinking about the double-sided nature of a lot of the things that we not necessarily

might not like about ourselves, but sometimes Not super proud of it right. It's very easy to wear the badge on your sleeve of being a super outgoing charismatic Extraverted person or the sort of person who can watch a scary movie and not get scared or watch a sad movie and not get sad that there is kind of something sort of cool and stoic and heroic about that. That's not me in the slightest. And it does seem a little bit like on the face of it, you could perhaps take those insights that you get about the world and see them as a weakness. And yet, when

you look at them very, very closely, you realize that they're probably just the other side of something that you really care about. They're the opposite side of the coin that gives you the insights that you genuinely love discovering about the world or it's your curiosity or it's your desire for adventure or it's your desire to connect with people, whatever it might be. And the price that you pay for having the thing that you care about the most is one of the things that sometimes you can be a little bit embarrassed about in private. And yeah, you don't get to sort of pick different characteristics like clothes off a shelf. You just sort of put your entire personality on as a onesie and then slowly over time start to curate it towards something that's closer to what you would like to have.

slowly over time start to curate it towards something that's closer to what you would like to have. Yeah, or I was with you until the very last bit about curating it to something you would like to have. I'm not sure how much of a choice we get. I think it's more a question of using the temperament and the personality and the life experiences and all of it, you know, using it in your best and deepest way. But yeah, I really agree with what you just said. Oh, shoot, I was just going to add something to that. And then, oh, yeah, I know.

With the Bittersweet quiz, what we also found to your point is that there is a mild correlation between Bittersweet types and pronus to anxiety and depression. And that really doesn't surprise me at all. I think these two things go together. I think you could probably envision it as a spectrum and somebody who is right here in the middle of bittersweetness.

They might edge a little farther out along that spectrum, and it might tip over into something very difficult, of severe anxiety or depression, because these things are related. Excuse me. So yeah, if you're the person with that temperament, it's a question of, well, how do you live in a state of what I think of as a happy melancholy,

as opposed to a disabling depression? Those might be cousins, but they're completely different life experiences. Does sorrow and longing come about from pain in your experience? I think they're related to each other. Sure, I mean, you have, I guess it could be physical pain, but certainly emotional pain. I mean, you have, maybe that's the definition of sorrow, that you're experiencing a kind of emotional pain. I think longing is a slightly different state.

Longing has more of a sweetness in it. You know, it's more of like an orientation towards that which you would want to have that you may not have right now, but there's something about the orientation in that direction that brings you closer to the thing that you think is most perfect or beautiful or good or true. So. So, yeah, so longing, in our culture of the word longing, sounds like it's very, like you might be mired in longing. It sounds like it's something very negative, but literally the word, the etymology of the word longing, it literally means like to grow longer and to reach for something. So I think of that as a quite positive state of being.

So I think of that as a quite positive state of being. How can this be transformed into something more like creativity or love? Got somebody that's listening now and thinking, yeah me, that's me. Love that tactic when it comes on planet Earth and bleak landscapes and sad music. How can they transmute that into something more useful? Yeah, well, so when it comes to creating, there's a lot of answers to that. On the creativity side of the question, when you look at what many creative artists are doing,

what they're really doing is they're taking pain and turning it into something beautiful. So it's a kind of transforming process. So I say to people, you know, whatever pain you feel you can't get rid of, make that your creative offering, like that is your wellspring. That's so much of what people go to art looking for. You know, they're looking for someone to express for them in some kind of like beautiful or otherwise transcendent form. To express for them something they felt that they can't really talk about at the grocery store

or you know like chatting with their colleague at work. It's just not right to talk about it there, but art is going to do it for you. So it's the source of our great creative impulses. It's not an accident that the study after study that I talk about in the book, finding that so many of our great artists have been orphaned when they were children. There was one study that took a bunch of unsuspecting people and had them give speeches to an audience of people who the researchers had planted there. And half of the audiences smiled upon the people as they gave their talks and applauded

very enthusiastically. And then the other half looked very disapproving. And so the people who gave the talks to the disapproving audiences were pretty bummed afterwards. Well, they all had to do collages when they were done. And it turned out that the collages done by the people who were in a bad mood, because they had given the talks to the unhappy audiences. Those people made collages that were rated much higher for creativity by a panel of artists than the others did. And that was especially true, that effect was especially

pronounced for people who had a hormonal profile going in that suggested emotional vulnerability. So there's something about tuning into what we can call your Antarctic estate that is connected with a creative impulse. And it's not to say, I really want to say this, again, I'm not advocating for depression. In fact, I think it's really difficult to be creative when you're depressed. If not impossible, it's more about just tapping into some sort of state of imperfection and doing everything you can to transform it in the direction of perfection. That's like the great human undertaking.

What about love? Love. So with love, part of the lesson here, there's a reason, in the book I tell at some length the story of the Bridges and Madison County, which was this blockbuster book and movie about this, about a woman kind of trapped in a pretty mediocre marriage, let's say, in a Midwestern farm town and one day her family goes away for a week and their knocks on the door, this handsome photographer from National Geographic magazine and they fall into a passionate four-day affair. And he tries to convince her to leave her family

and go off with him. And at first, she's actually packing her bags, ready to do that, until she decides to unpack them. And she unpacks her bags partly because she doesn't want to, you know, she doesn't want to abandon her family. But it's also deeper than that. It's because she understands that she and this photographer have already together kind of gone to Eden

and that even if they were just going to stay together, they wouldn't get to stay there. And you start to realize that this is a story not really about marriage and adultery and that kind of thing. It's really a story about longing itself and that that's what the photographer represented. And in our own love lives, I think it's incredibly helpful to understand this about ourselves that it's very helpful for us to understand that we have this kind of emotional

makeup as humans because otherwise what you end up doing is you enter a new love affair and basically you and your partner take each other to eat in for some period of time and then eventually and then you don't get to stay there because you find out that they're imperfect and you remember that you're imperfect and, and yeah. And, and, and if you don't understand this whole dynamic, you might feel like, okay, that's a sign that that relationship was all wrong. And now I've got to go to the next person who might be able to bring me to Eden and then we can stay there for good. But if you understand this dynamic about human nature, I think you approach

your relationships with much more forgiveness and your own self with much more forgiveness. And you can experience love and its human forms and appreciate the moments of Eden when they come and appreciate imperfect love the rest of the time and really derive the benefits and the satisfaction of that. When people talk about somebody completing them, it kind of, it does make a lot of sense when you think about that. It does feel like, and also the stories about being fallen creatures, about there being a part of us which is missing, which is fallen, which is sort of permanently cursed to spend its time trying to fix that, which it can't.

There is something embedded in our experience that does feel a little bit like that it's a hole that requires feeling, something that needs fixing, something that if only we could get it in there. This really interesting line from Robert Wright's book, Why Buddhism is True, where he says that the original reading of life is suffering by the Buddha. The original word, the suffering, duke. Duke, yeah. Yeah, is the translations contested. And some of some people say that it should be

unsatisfactoryness. Yeah. Life is unsatisfactoryness. And when you look at life through that lens, you realize that the holiday you've planned for the last year to go on, when you finally arrive there, there's a bit of sand between your feet, and the sun's a little bit bright in your eyes,

and oh, I should have got this blended instead of on ice, and maybe if I got the shrimp instead of the chicken, that is baked into our existence. And I think that the way that you interpret that, some people laugh it off, some people would complain about it. And some people might see that as an innate sense that there is something wrong, like existentially, that melancholic sort of feeling would come up.

This is the way that life always is. I go away on a holiday and I just, I can't seem to find quite the sensation that I want. And I think a lot of the battle against that is due to the fact that you can't concede that that's a feature, not a bug of life, that looks like this is built into the fabric of our existence. Yeah, no, I love that. What I would say is that the melancholy, to me, the melancholic response to that being the nature of existence is not to kind of like rail against it and

say, oh my gosh, you know, the bug shouldn't be flying around right now. No flies at the picnic. That should never be. And instead to say, oh yeah, this is how it is right here. You know, in this non-eaten world, this is the way it is. And further, like, this is the way it is for everyone. So there's a sense in which I think there's a great love that comes from it like the fact that we're all in this great sense of duke or just satisfaction or whatever we want to call it um there's a great there's a great communion in that sense in in that place if we can recognize it as such in your work on introverts you were talking about how people

ape the beliefs of those that are around them in a little bit of a way. They sort of play the role that introverts sometimes can be made to feel like that's not perhaps the role that is optimal for them to play when they go out into the world, that they should kind of act more like extraroverts if they want to get ahead. And that can sometimes cause people to not fully embrace who they are. Do you think that there's an equivalent here with this sort of melancholy as well?

That definitely, to me, feels like a thread that's drawn between those two pieces of work that you've got this sort of hidden introversion, people acting up as extroverts, and kind of this hidden melancholy with people trying to hide the fact that things affect them so deeply. Oh yeah, absolutely. I know it. I mean, I knew it before, but gosh, if I didn't know it before, you'd know it from the letters that I'm getting now from all the people who are talking about the extent to which they hide it, even from themselves, you know, because I

think people are made to feel that that aspect of themselves is the one that could lead them to depression or the one that's going to lead them away from worldly success or whatever it is, as opposed to learning to integrate it into who they are and really go deep with it in a productive way. Like, I got one letter from a filmmaker who told me that all his life, he had had this exact reaction to sad music, he used to live in New York City and he would go to a party at night and then walk home along the length of Manhattan,

listening to his music and his headphones. And he said he would be overcome by what he came to call, quote, that holy feeling. And I love that. It was like that holy feeling. But he said over time, he kind of learned to mistrust that feeling and to sort of put a lid on it because of all these social signals that he was getting. But he was now starting to let it kind of come up for him. And I think there's a great wholeness that comes from doing that.

There was a guy on the show a couple of weeks ago called Tom Vandalindan. He runs a channel called Like Stories of Old. And if anyone went and watched some of his videos, which they definitely showed, it's great. He is so bleak with his video. I mean, they're beautiful, but fuck me, they're bleak. And the, the, the, always uses dead space a lot in terms of the music and the sound escaping that he puts in there. And he's talking about the myth of masculine purpose or why we can't be heroes anymore.

He's doing analyses usually of, of media. And I wondered why I, want drew myself to his work. And it really is, there's something so melancholic and bleak about what he puts out. And it speaks to something in me. And it makes me feel like, well, maybe other people have this sense as well, that things are kind of a bit sad and a bit serious and a bit lonely, but a bit beautiful and a bit sort of transcendent as well. And it

is this, this big melting pot. One of the things that keeps coming up when I'm thinking about this is the courage and the bravery that you need as somebody to actually embrace this first off, to not be able to hide it from yourself. And then secondly, to put that out into the world, right? Whether you've got a YouTube channel or not, even if it's just speaking to your kids or your friends or the person on the street or whatever, I wonder why people shy away from doing that.

I mean, I have 34 years of examples myself, but my point being that I wonder why it is that something that makes, I love Tom's work, right? It really connects with me. And yet I still see in myself and the people around me a lack of commitment or a lack of courage or a lack of desire to be sufficiently brave to completely open up that area of ourself to others, even though we know that we appreciate

it when others do it for us. Yeah, yeah. I have a, excuse me, a theory as to why we shy away from doing it. And I believe it's because, especially over the 19th century, as things, as we became more and more organized around being a business culture, there was more and more of focus on were you succeeding or were you failing at business. And then if you were a success or failure, was it because people literally started to ask this question explicitly?

They would say, is it because of good or bad luck or is it because of something inside you? And increasingly, people started answering the question by saying, it's something inside the person. And they started like, and they started categorizing people into winners or losers. And this word loser literally, like the usage of it has gone up astronomically over the 20th century and now into the 21st even in the in the great depression there were like newspaper headlines that would say like loser commits suicide in the street after like losing their money Okay, so the more you're dividing people into winners and losers of course no one wants to be on the loser side of the ledger.

And so what you end up doing is divorcing yourself from any of the emotions or affect or experiences that have anything to do with loss. You just don't want to admit to that. So just the way it's such a false dichotomy to say this person's a winner and this is a loser is opposed to saying we all win and we all lose. The same thing is true with the emotions that are associated with those states. All of those emotions belong to all of us and that's like being a really truly whole self.

But in a culture of winners and losers, we don't feel like we can be. Do you know a land of buttons piece about this where he talks about lady fortuna? Oh, gosh. Well, first of all, I love him. I am a huge fan of a land of boton. And I don't know about the piece, but I've heard him talk about how I think he refers to it as cruel that we no longer think in terms of Lady Fortune. Yeah, well that's exactly the use of the exact example, the word of losers that in the past and ancient Greece, there would be called the Unfortunates. That Lady Fortune had blessed them. Right, right.

Absolutely. The people on the street, the disabled, the lame, you know, the people that weren't able to work or whatever, they were the Unfortunates. Lady Fortune and the whole point of this. And that's, all right, is Lady Fortuna represented as the person that has scales? I think so, yeah, I think that's right. It's a concept of balancing scales, not fish scales.

And the whole point of that was that she'd give us and she'd take it away. And I can't remember whether it was Epic Titus when he got his legs broken and they didn't heal correctly. I feel like he'd been a successful trader for a long time and it had wealth or maybe it was somebody else, maybe it was the guy that was the advisor to Nero. I think it was the guy that was an advisor to Nero, he gets thrown away in a jail cell and people are saying to him, this is an injustice, this is terrible,

how your family don't exist without you. And he say, well, I've lived a pretty good life, you know, the lady fortune as she gave, and it's now her time to take away. And the changing of that language to any meritocracy, where if the people that win are worthy of their successes, what does that mean? The people who lose are worthy of, what means that they're worthy of their losses.

Yeah. And you're right, it puts very much on people's shoulders this degree of pressure. And I can see how anything that people fear would be a precursor to something which would be less optimal or less successful or cause them to have less achievement, which would be widely socially applauded. I would think it must not enjoy the bleak landscape, must not cry. Yeah.

Exactly, exactly. I mean, we would literally train children this way. Like in the States, you know, there was the boy scouts and children were trained. You should be cheerful all the time. You should be whistling, you know, being putting on a cheerful face will give you courage, it'll give courage to other people.

The psychologist William James started to observe that it was becoming in the late 19th century, it became bad forum to even complain about bad weather. Like you couldn't even notice that it was cloudy outside because to do that would be to be too down, you know, too much on the negative emotion side of the fence. So this is a fear and a distaste that we have inherited for a long time now. Is this what you mean when you talk about the tyranny of positivity? Yeah, very much so, absolutely. And it's we absorb the tyranny of positivity in so many different ways. So I tell the story in the book of my dear friend Susan David, who is a writer and psychologist

who talks a lot about emotional agility. And her story is that when she was, excuse me, she's a very cheerful person by nature. That's her temperament. When she was 14, her father died of cancer. And because she's so cheerful by nature and because she had all these social expectations, she walked around for the whole next year, pretending that she was okay. Like, she went to school, literally the day her father died, she was back at school, acting okay. And for her, it all started coming out through bulimia. She was like secretly throwing up her chocolate chip cookies and private. And it would have gone on that way until the day that her English literature teacher passed out

blank notebooks to the class and looked Susan in the eyes and told her, write the truth of what you're feeling. Just write it all down. And she said, I the teacher, I'm going to look at it. I might make a little comment or two, but this is yours to write your truth. And she was looking straight in her eyes when she said it. And Susan started finally writing, which she really felt. And she refers to that as a revolution in a notebook. And it led to a lifelong

passion for helping people to just make peace with all the different emotions that we have as humans. Do you think there's something going on here culturally? Is it culturally novel to have such a going on here culturally? Is it culturally novel to have such a obsession with positivity and wanting everything to be okay? Is it something outside of just the success of the individual? Is there something else going on here? Well, there's definitely a cultural aspect to you. In fact, psychologists have compared different cultures to measure how much do they smile, or not smile. You'll be shocked to know in the US they smile way more than in many other cultures. But there are cultures in which smiling is seen as being kind of suspect. Why would you be smiling so much all the time?

It's seen as a sign of somewhere between foolishness, like as if you don't understand how serious life is, or just a sign that you're not to be trusted, because clearly you're not telling the truth. It's a spacious, happy people. You're not to be very, very cautious around them. Exactly. Yeah, it is interesting, especially coming from the UK to America. So we're kind of genetically, perennially a little bit miserable, right? That's when satire and sort of that stiffiffer, palip thing comes from the UK.

I think it's very, very heavily born out of the weather, the fact that we're waterlocked on all sides, the fact that we've got a long history, a spit and sawdust, sort of the earth people, you know, coal mining and working class towns and stuff like that. And coming over here is very interesting to see people. I can imagine that. Relationship to the difficult. And the kind of encouragement that I get, the kind of feedback that I get when I tell different friends about things that I've got that are coming up, it...

If it wasn't for the fact that it was in the same language, it would feel like an incredibly different culture. And perhaps it is, perhaps the fact that it is in the same language makes me think that the cultures are less different than they actually are. Exactly. That's probably exactly what's happening. I've had that thought too when I go over to the UK. How do you find it?

Well, I mean, it's interesting what you're talking about. I think with the UK, there isn't the same emphasis on a kind of manic smiley-ness that we have here, but I do think there's the same, or maybe a greater discomfort with negative emotions or with talking about them. You're not supposed to talk about that, right? You're more supposed to show a stiff upper lip and a kind of resolve and a kind of ironic detachment from all of that. You're never supposed to be earnest, I think. That's very, very true.

That's very, very, the earnestness, if you can get it across in a sort of side eye, critical way, this is kind of like the tenor that I noticed on Twitter a lot. No one actually ever points at somebody and says, that was out of order. You're not allowed to say that, that's something which, it's always, everybody's replied back and forth when they're having a disagreement on Twitter.

It's some witty, this doesn't affect me, quip, that's trying to sort of, smartly dunk on the other person's idea. It's never actually somebody breaking the fourth wall a little bit and going, oh, that's out of order. You don't, you're not allowed to say that, even if you're on the internet. And I think that that definitely gets drawn across into the UK.

It's like a real sort of strange, malignant version of the Steffa Palette thing. It's not quite what it was. That's what I do, you mean? Yeah, but also in the UK as well, you know, there's just, there is a little bit of a, a little bit of a difference in the way that people

show their emotions. I had, I gotta tell you this story. So it was the Luna Eclipse, couple of, last week, I think, middle of last week. And the south of America, especially Texas, one of the best places on the planet to see it. So I'm sat out on the balcony there. Someone texted me and said, yo, you watching this lunar eclipse. I said, shit, I love the

moon. My mom loves the moon. Mom's a raky master. She has been for 20 years. And she's always big into stuff to do with the moon. Yeah, I need to go outside and look at it. So I got outside. Did you see any of the images of this? I didn't. So it's like a fiery orb in the sky. The whole thing is a red hue.

Kind of like rust if rust was lit from behind. It's a very bright sort of rust color and there's different stages that it goes through. And I managed to go outside while it was in. It's full. And I'm sat outside. very bright sort of rust color and there's different stages that it goes through and I was managed to go outside while it was in its full and I'm sat outside and I started having a breath heavily. What's going on here? I was just sat there. Silence, no one else around.

There's a pool below in the courtyard where I'm staying. I started a breath heavily and then I was realized I was like I'm weeping. What am I weeping at? I was looking up and I felt so stupid. What a pussy thing to do. What a stupid thing to do. It's the moon. You see it, it's the moon, it's the moon, not even lit. It's the moon with us in the way of the sun between it.

Okay, whatever, I'll calm down. I'll chill out a little bit in this big pink sky orb and taking some photos and sending them to my mom and stuff. And then I can't remember what it's called, it's not the apogee, it's something else. So as there's different stages to the eclipse and as the earth begins to move out of the way, parts of the sun start to strike one corner. So you can imagine that you have this sort of reverse crescent that starts to come in and it starts to get brighter from the bottom corner all the way up. And there's this still

the same color at the top. And then this sort of line, this razor thin line of super bright yellow light at the bottom. And I just started boiling crying. I was like, what is going on? Like, how can I stop this from happening? And I remember looking up at it and going, it really sort of questioning myself, like, is this something that should be ashamed of? Like, should I, and I felt shame? I was like, why am I, as a man of 34 years old,

who's supposed to reach his millions of people on a podcast every month, what am I doing crying at the moon? Like some sort of really sad werewolf. What am I doing crying at the moon? And it was like, tears streaming down my face. I was like, I just scrunched my face up to trying, like the way that you do when you would sob.

And then I, afterward, when I look back on it, it's a memory that I really, really sort of revered and love, but at the time there was a lot of shame. I felt a lot of shame come up around the fact that I was this guy weeping on my own. So was the shame because I'm not sure if you were watching with a friend who could see you crying, it was just you. Okay, so it was just an internal shame. Yeah. And what do you think the tears were? I've tried to work it out. I think

beauty, I think it was just so awe-inspiring. And it was huge, it's a blood moon, so that was one of the reasons it was extra red. It was the, I think it's called the spring flower moon as well, because it's the final, or it's the full moon of May, which is the last one before we get the most flowers, and something else, and it was all of the words together. It was a full sentence to describe this thing.

And it just looked spectacular. And I don't think I was ready for it either. I think that was a big part of it that I'd gone from working on a laptop to, oh, there's a clip's going outside, went outside and just hit me in the face. And it was silent and beautiful. I don't know what it was, but it happened.

And yeah, it made me think, especially having reading your book at the same time. It's like, yo, this is a bittersweet emotion that I'm feeling. It's something kind of awe and dread and joy and sorrow and longing, all kind of thrown together in this visual representation that seems to be making my face leak. I'm curious if this feels like an explanation to you because there was, there's this one passage that I came across and it was very soon before the book went to print and I felt it was so great I actually made it into a second epigraph because I just wanted to highlight

it so much. So I'm going to read it to you and you can tell me if you think this is kind of what it was. So this is from a professor in the psychology of religion and he says, Gregory the great spoke about what he called the holy pain, which is the grief somebody feels when faced with that which is most beautiful. The bittersweet experience stems from human homelessness in an imperfect world. Human consciousness of, and at the same time, a desire for perfection. The inner spiritual void becomes painfully real when faced with beauty.

And there, between the lost and the desired, the Holy Tears are formed. So I don't know if you tell me if that was me. I think it was Holy Tears for you. That's what I think, and I'm telling you, I'm saying this is a total agnostic, but, or maybe not, I don't know. Yeah, it's a strange one.

It was really, it really was something else. And, yeah, the shame, the shame is one of the most interesting parts of it, actually. I think, why is it that I feel like I shouldn't feel something? What is it that's in me that's making me feel like emotions shouldn't come out at something so stupid or so natural or so far away from me? But yeah, there's, I think there's something about being a finite creature surrounded by infinite complexity. And then when you see a representation of that, it reminds you maybe that the things that you're probably focusing on aren't that big of a deal. There's definitely a sort of a delta that you feel

between the majesty and the beauty and the grandness and the vastness of everything. And then the the smallness that you have definitely made me feel quite small in a beautiful way again. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, the the psychoanalyzing of that, I've spent so much time over the last couple of weeks trying to work it out, and it was very timely that your book came out so that I could. Wow. I mean, was there a pure shame, or was there also a sense of, wow, this was an amazing moment that just happened to me. Oh yeah. So was those two things combined? Oh for sure. I mean, the shame on you sort of came a little bit after. It was overwhelming mostly.

But given the fact that we've got this tyranny of positivity that you're talking about, especially in things like the workplace, how should someone integrate their bitter, sweet emotions when the world is expecting the bubbly positive Susan that doesn't like bleak landscapes, like how are people supposed to navigate that space effectively, do you think? Well, I mean, there's a bunch of things. There's clearly the creating the spaces to just dive wholeheartedly into you know, into these states of melancholy and longing. But before you even get there,

there's something about just engaging with beauty for its own sake. Because beauty will take you everywhere, right? It'll take you to states of just joy and bliss, but it'll also take you to those states of melancholy and self-transcendence that you found with the moon. So I believe we need to be integrating pro-active encounters with beauty into our everyday lives and preferably starting our days that way. So it could be for one person listening to music

or going out into nature or first thing in the morning, whatever it is. Like for me during all the time that I was writing this book, I started following all these art accounts on Twitter and I would began every morning by picking a favorite piece of art and then sharing it on my social channels. And it was it was such an amazing experience because first of all, I was like really attuned to the art because it was going through this process and practice. But also, it was then connected with the whole community of people who valued that kind of thing in the same way that I did. And it was such a grounding way, especially to start a creative day of writing, but really to start any kind of day. So that's one thing I would say. What about when it comes to dealing with other people? You know, somebody asks,

how are you doing? And there's a response that you're expected to give. And it's not always appropriate to say, well, you know what it is? My dog died last night and I cried at the moon and what people did things happened. But what we said earlier on is that there's sort of this people, the things happened. But what we said earlier on is that there's sort of this role model bravery courage thing going forward that sets a standard for other people to feel more comfortable in this space. And if, as I guess that you wanted with the introvert book to hopefully forge a path for introversion to be more effective and more accepted publicly. What about bittersweet emotions, how can those be sort of integrated socially or in the workplace better? Yeah, absolutely. It is the same thing here and it does help when it comes, as always, as with

anything, it helps when it comes from leadership or from admired people to just be, to just find moments to share something that's a little bit true or about the complexities of your life. And it doesn't mean you have to like show up at work and divulge what whatever private emotion athletes fit foot that you're dealing with at the moment or whatever it is, whatever it is. But there are usually moments for those kinds of openings. You know, at Google, there was that famous study called Project Aristotle, where they looked at the top performing teams in the company and tried to figure out what's at them apart from the others. And they looked at all the usual metrics like years of experience and education and that kind of thing.

But it turned out that the factor that mattered more than any other was the ability to communicate openly about whatever with one's teammates to really kind of show up in a full way. to really kind of show up in a full way. And I gave the example of a team leader who opened up to his team about how he had been struggling with stage 4 cancer, which no one had known about, but when he did decide to share that information, really brought the team together and then other people started showing up with their own struggles. So each one of those small actions can have a real cascading effect. And I think one thing that we can be doing is creating spaces for people to do that,

even anonymously. You know, at the start of a Zoom chat, just to be inviting people to to share what they're truly feeling. Again, with the option to not have your name attached to it, but like, you know, the Zoom chats were where the organizer will come in and ask, how is everybody feeling today? You know, everybody's pumped and everybody's thrilled and everybody's psyched to be here. So they say, and that's not really true. So what if a few people went first and just talked about, like gave a more complex answer, would open things right up? I think that there's a resistance that a lot of people will feel,

and that I can feel it in myself, about that opening up thing, that there's a sense where this isn't the place to bring my problems in, that maybe you can fake it until you make it, maybe you can lead with actions and thoughts will follow in a way that if you sort of act in a positive manner that everything else is going to come from that.

But I also think that there's only so far that you can go away from the emotions that you're feeling until they're basically, you're just playing a role. Now it's just a persona. This isn't you putting a spin on what it is that you're feeling. It's you creating something completely separate. And the way that you go forward into the workplace, for the most part, I don't think that's going to paper over the things that you feel. If you've got

some sort of bit of sweet emotions going on, or if you're dealing with grief or whatever. Privacy would be something that I could see as a reason why people just simply don't want to have the questions asked. That to me makes a lot of sense. But if it's you thinking that this is actually a road to rehabilitation and that you do want to connect with people but just not here but just not in this situation, I'm not convinced that that's true. When I think about the friends that I have the best relationships with, they're the ones that have been the most vulnerable, you know, what is it that they say about a friendship? True friendship is telling somebody something that in the wrong hands could be ruinous to your reputation. Oh, that's such a great way of putting that. Yes, that's exactly right. That's exactly

right. Yeah, and listen, there's a part of me that's really sympathetic to all the objections that you just raised. You know, I used to be a corporate lawyer before I became a writer, and I remember very distinctly during those years, it was like I was going through something at home, let's say. You know, you feel like, oh my gosh, I don't feel like going to work today. You get there, you have to put a smile on your face, and then suddenly you actually do feel better, at least in the moment you feel better. But then there's the long term thing of like there's a kind of burnout that comes when you're showing up day after day, not as your true self.

So I think it works to some degree, it works in the short term, there's a longer term question there. And there's also the fact that we put those faces on because we know they're expected of us. But if we were showing up in a culture where they were less expected, we would feel in turn somewhat less of a privacy need that way. I'm thinking of, I looked at a bunch of different case studies of companies where they did this, you know, from oil rigs on the

Gulf of Mexico to a billing department in Michigan where leaders created cultures where it was just sort of natural for people to show up and tell each other about things and come to each other's aid. And they created a culture where that was normal and that was productive. So what we assume to be an unchangeable aspect of how work must be conducted is much, much more amenable to change than we think. When you're talking about grief and sorrow and stuff like that, obviously one of the topics that comes to first of mind is death. How do you think that people should live and deal with life,

knowing that both them and everybody else that they care about and love is going to be gone? Yeah, this is like the big question, isn't it? There's so many different answers. You know, and I spent time in the book with people who are radical life extension advocates, who are, who, where their response to this problem is to say, well, that's not going to happen.

You know, I'm going to work on making sure that that doesn't happen. But for those of us who think it probably will happen, at least in our lifetimes, I have found it to be tremendously sustaining to really immerse in the idea of impermanence. There's a reason that so many different religious sects and the stoic philosophers have engaged in one practice or another of remembering that at any moment they could die the next day, they could die that day. There's something about doing that that really helps you to live in a much more engaged

way in the moment, but also to accept death a little more easily when it comes, and I say this having just whether the death of my father and my brother during COVID, I don't know, you know, nothing takes away from the sheer like horror and nausea of that moment when you lose somebody. And so I'm not meaning to say that this is like an antidote, but it's a mind shift. It's more of a mind shift to really be immersed in the awareness of impermanence.

So the Tibetan monks used to, or maybe still do, I don't know, in some sects, they'd go to sleep at night. They would turn their water glass over before they would go to sleep as a reminder to themselves that they might not wake up in the morning and they might not need to drink the water. So I'll turn the glass over now. And Ryan Holiday talks about how, the great generals, I'm forgetting which ones this was,

but in ancient Greek times, you know, they would have some great victory and they would be parading in front of their cheering people. And there would be a guy whose job was to be stationed behind them as they paraded whispering in the general's ear, saying, you're only mortal. You're only mortal. You're only mortal. And whenever I remember to do that in my life, I truly do find myself living differently. You know, I put my cell phone down, focus more on my kids, focus more on the trees outside, all of it.

Yeah, the impermanence things, an interesting one I had. David, very famous transhumanist, had him on the show three and a bit years ago. And I found- Is this David Sinclair, maybe? No, so he's also been on the show, but not him. I think he would class himself as longevity, not- Yeah, I got back there. Yeah, this David was full upload to the clouds,

right, right, right, intravenous MDMA for the rest of time, levels of flourishing and pleasure, here to unknown by humanity. It was like real, real serious stuff. Yeah. What did you find amongst that group then? You've, you've gone and spent this time at this transhumanist conference, speaking to people that want to extend life, so death basically no longer and impermanence isn't a concern. What did you learn from your time with them? What did you reflect on? Oh gosh, there are so many things. Well one thing was, I guess I went into that kind of skeptical of their project and feeling to that kind of skeptical of their project and feeling that in some ways it was just an extreme symptom of our culture of positivity. Like we're going to be, we're so positive that we're not even going to die, you know, we

can try on for over that too. I ended up feeling really quite sympathetic to their aims, but also it was fascinating to me how little interested they were in the philosophical questions of things like, well, does death give a meaning to life? You know, does the fact that we're not here for that long? They would say that's all nonsense. That's a story that we tell ourselves because we feel we have no choice. It's just a cope. It's a nonsense. That's a story that we tell ourselves because we feel we have no choice. It's a cope.

It's a cope. It's a cope. But as soon as we think we have a choice, then we don't have to go there anymore. What was also really interesting about them was, so I noticed that so many of the scientists who would get up and make their presentations would begin by telling a story of someone beloved who they had lost. You know, or so often like they would begin with an image of somebody bent weeping over a person they had just lost.

And it was like they were so focused on, on sorrow and longing and trying to turn it into something else, except the thing that they were turning it into was this hope, this promise of radical life extension. So it was very interesting. I don't know. One of them gave me the thought experiment. Well, actually, before I tell you the thought experiment, I'm curious, where do you stand on the project?

So I think that transhumanism generally is interesting, which it definitely is. And I think that where the line between what David Sinclair does and the other David, the transhumanist, does actually begins to get blurred a little bit. I asked David when I sat down with him, and I'm like, could you conceive of a world where humans live for a thousand years with the bodies that they've got and with different types of regenerative treatments?

And he said, yes. You go, okay, well, I mean, what's the difference between those two? I think some interesting things, having thought about this for a long time, some interesting elements are, if you have a life which is a thousand years or 10,000 years long, I think that you tend towards a type of culture which is insanely risk of us, because if you're 40 years old and you die, you've only lost 40 years. If you're 40 years old in the future and you die, you've lost 960 years. Yes. So the way that we view how life should be spent, the risks associated with the things that we do,

I think that that would change, which is a really interesting thing to think about. I do think that it just copes on all sides, right? This is people's inner-sittered-ells that they're retreating to. I definitely do think that there's an element of us saying that, you know, death and impermanence is an inbuilt part of human life is a great way to deal with losing people and to say that it gives life meaning is a really good way to kind of just ameliorate the fact that you're going to go at some point in the future. I don't know, I don't have a position on whether or not if you live forever life would

have no meaning. I'm not convinced yet by the fact that death is what gives life meaning, that the lack of it at the end is what's going to make it purposeful during the existence. Mainly because I think that the type of mindset that we have isn't going to account for the fact that we're going to live forever. Now if you're a species that had always been alive forever, you might actually act in a way that you didn't, but the fact seems to be... But we've evolved not to live forever.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So human nature is going to, going to win out. And you're going to exist in the way that you do now, but just that line at the end of it is going to continue going. I can't see what if you woke up woke me up tomorrow and said you're going to live to be 10,000 years old, I might change some of the time horizons that I think about doing things on, but I wouldn't stop doing stuff. And I think that's the implication that a lot of the time is given for, oh, if we get rid of death, then life's not going to have any meaning. It's like, well, because you've got an infinite amount of time to do stuff, you're just going to Parkinson's law your way through. It's going to take you three days to have breakfast because it just

doesn't matter. There's no urgency anymore. I'm not convinced that that's the that's the case. But I do so, I mean, is it Ray Kurzweil that is trying to recreate his father in a he wants to meet his father in a virtual reality an AI computer system. I'm pretty sure he's trying to do that. It's fascinating. And it might be Max Tehmark. It's one of the I'm pretty sure it's one of the two. And you think a lot of this just comes down to people dealing different ways of dealing with grief and sorrow and impermanence.

Yeah. I think that too. And also that I've never believed that immortality is really the only thing we're deeply, deeply longing for. I think as well as that, we're longing for a world of pure love, a world in which there wouldn't be strife, there wouldn't be conflict, there wouldn't be sorrow at all. It's just not true to say that all the sorrow comes from the fact that we're going to die. There's all kinds of sorrows that happen along the way. At this conference that I went to, there was an assumption that if death could be cured then all the other stuff could be cured too. That work could be cured and strife could be cured too, that war could be cured, and strife could be cured, and all of it could be cured.

But I think that there's a greater longing, when we talk about the longing for heaven, let's say, that's not only about the wish to live forever, it's the wish for these more perfect states. And that- And that- And that doota in the now as well as the theory of finishing in the future. Exactly, exactly.

And I haven't heard anybody talk about that or to the extent they're talking about it, it's it's as a kind of like afterthought that doesn't really make sense. It doesn't really add up when you look at it. What was the thought experiment? Oh, the thought experiment was this was meant for people who are skeptical about the whole project. People who would say, well, I really don't want to live forever. And the thought experiment is, do you want to die tomorrow? What's your answer? No. Okay, what about next week? No. What about the week after that? No. Next year? I daily not. 10 years. No. Next year? Ideally not. 10 years.

No. 50 years. No. So you keep going out like this and it becomes almost impossible to say the day would come when you would actually push the button happily, like assuming that you're healthy because obviously once you become decrepit and ill, that's a whole different thing. But assuming health span, assuming an infinite health span, it becomes really difficult to imagine.

You would ever press that button. That's the thing to think about, especially given that a lot of the foundation of this podcast was built on sort of productivity and optimizing our daily routines and stuff, think about the fact that one day you will have a to-do list that just never gets completed. You know, there will be things on that list on that day that forever are left undone by you.

I feel like my to-do list looks like that today. Yeah, some of those things, maybe stuff that's on there now. I don't know. Look, Susan Cain, ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate this. I really love the work. I liked the fact that it's a subtle dip into something that a lot of people sense, but kind of nobody's prepared to stand and stare at head on. So if people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do and see some of your art postings, where should they go?

Yeah, best thing, come to my website, which is seasonkane.net, and you can sign up for my news letter. And then I'm also on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and the book Better Sweet is anywhere you usually buy your books. Thank you, Susan. I appreciate you. Thank you so much. It was wonderful to get to know you.