Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 398: The Right Kind of Suffering | Paul Bloom

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Is there a good kind of suffering? Paul Bloom says, yes -- there is a kind of suffering that you choose. This voluntary suffering can reduce anxiety and make your life more meaningful. This episode explores that idea, along with: why we are hardwired to worry about bad things (and why that’s ok); the difference between chosen and unchosen suffering; post-traumatic growth and why it’s not always true that what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger; benign masochism and the blurring of pleasure and pain; and cognitive empathy vs. emotional empathy.Dr. Paul Bloom is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. He is the author of six books, the most recent of which is called, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.Subscribe by December 1 to get 40% off a Ten Percent Happier subscription! Click here for your discount.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Alrighty, hello. Welcome to the show. To say the least, suffering has some pretty negative connotations, especially in Buddhism where the whole goal is to uproot suffering. But is there a good kind of suffering? My guest today says, yes, there is a kind of suffering that you choose a voluntary suffering

that can make your life more meaningful and also reduce your anxiety. Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and the Brooks and Suzanne Reagan professor emeritus of psychology at Yale University. He's the author of six books, the most recent of which is called the sweet spot, the pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning. In this conversation, we cover why hedonism is not our natural state, why we are hardwired to worry about bad things, and why that's not such a bad thing,

why paradoxically, people who strive for happiness are often the most unhappy. The difference between chosen and unchosen suffering, post-traumatic growth and why it's not always true that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, benign masochism, I love that term, and the blurring of pleasure and pain, why suffering can be fun and pleasurable, the brain as a difference engine, suffering as an escape from the self and the overlap with and distinction from meditation practices. And we dive into Paul's previous book to talk about the difference between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy.

Before that, one quick item of business. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you may have noticed that we've had a lot going on. Over on the 10% happier app this fall from meditation challenges to the brand new 20% happier podcast. There's never been a better time to join our community of meditators on the app to make sure you have a chance to try it out. We're offering 10% happier subscriptions that are 40% discount until December 1st. We don't do discounts of this size all the time. And of course, nothing is permanent. So get this deal before it ends by going to 10%.com slash 40.

That's 10% one word all spelled out. .com slash 40 for 40% off your subscription. We'll kick it off with Paul Bloom right after this. 4.0 for 40% off your subscription. We'll kick it off with Paul Bloom right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. family and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace?

Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. to meet you, having listened to you many, many times with our mutual friend Sam Harris on his show. The other Harris. The other Harris, yes. My nemesis, actually, the opposite of nemesis. So the sweet spot, the pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning, the pleasures of suffering, what on earth does that mean? Yeah, it sounds crazy. Paradoxical or just weird. You would think suffering is the opposite of pleasure, opposite of happiness. But what got me into the book was I was really interested

in cases where that didn't seem to be true, where we seem to seek out suffering. Some of us like spicy foods are hot bass, scary movies, endurance exercises. And we take pleasure in a BDSM, take an extreme. Somehow, for some sort of pain, some sort of anxiety, some sort of struggle, we seem to like it. And that was, you know, I was very interested in mystery

why that could be so, and I was impetus for my book. And then once I got into that, I had started to become interested in suffering that we want, but doesn't seem to add pleasure, but more adds meaning and purpose to our lives. You know, raising children, endurance, rock climbing, you know, starting a business, that sort of thing. And so I argue to suffering is good in two ways. It could give you pleasure, but could also give you meaning. So how are you defining suffering? Because I think there's a universe of suffering that might come to the mind of the average person that might go beyond what you're talking

about because I think of suffering. It can include raising children, especially since my six-year-old is now in the habit of calling me jerk. So it can include raising children, but it can also include getting hit by a car or getting a cancer diagnosis. Yes. So there's a good distinction here. One distinction that runs through my book is the difference between chose and suffering

and unchoice and suffering. And my book is about suffering you choose. You choose to engage in related relationships, certain activities, unchosen suffering, getting assaulted, getting hit by a car, getting cancer, is pretty much bad for you. People are more resilient than we think we are. There's not to be said about that. But for the most part, those are not events you should welcome. Just common sense that they seem bad for you and they are bad for you The sort of suffering which I think carries benefits and joy are The types that we opt for and a lot of my book

Talking about pleasure deals with what's been called benign massacism. I love that phrase. Yeah, it's not minus Psychologist Paul Ross and it's a lovely phrase and I'm a. Right. And we're not talking about chopping off our fingers here. We're not talking about something heavy-duty, but we're talking about, you know, your ankle is sprained and you put a little bit of weight on it. You poke your tongue and your tooth where it hurts a little bit. You like to cry when you see a certain movie or get terrified. It's pain, but it's under control and it's not that severe. get terrified. It's pain, but it's under control, and it's not that severe. You do often hear people who've gone through unchosen suffering say that it's added

an enormous amount of meaning to their lives. I mean, Victor Frankl, quite famously, a man's search for meaning, Victor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, talked about finding meaning in the suffering of the concentration camps. My wife had breast cancer and talks about how, you know, there was a, I don't think she uses this term, but I think it's a popular term, this kind of post-traumatic growth that she experienced. And, you know, I've heard it many times. What's your take on that?

You know, for a guy who wrote a book in favor of suffering, I'm somewhat skeptical. So you're right, post-traumatic growth is big these days. This is supposed to, and the idea is that post-traumatic growth isn't just resilience. It's you go through, you struggle. It's in some way similar to PTSD, but you come out the other side of a better person, maybe with more meaning in your life, more connection to God, more gratitude, maybe kinder. And people certainly think they do. And often I wouldn't doubt that this could happen sometimes. But when people do a deep dive into this, they discover two things.

One thing is, although people say their lives have been transformed into different people, and a lot of objective measures sometimes they're not better at all, sometimes they're worse. And then the second thing is, when you do a study with a control group, it turns it at people who have terrible things happen to them, often say they benefit it hugely and are much better people, but people who didn't have terrible things happen. People just went through life normally, also tend to say they're better people. So we're powerful storytellers, and I don't want to be too skeptical.

I think in some cases suffering really can transform us in a positive way. But I think unchosen suffering for the most part doesn't have reliable benefits. And you know, the good news here in George Bonanno has a new book on this called End of Trauma. The good news is we're a lot more resilient than we think we are. So it used to be thought that you know, you have trauma, you're going to be messed up inevitably. And actually, that's the exception. Resilience is more to rule. But let me see if I can sum up your thesis here on this narrow aspect of the book, which is that unshowsome suffering. It's not something we should be going to look for, but it's

possible in these cases that it can lead to pro-stramatic growth, but sometimes it doesn't, and it's just a story we're telling ourselves about it. And sometimes actually it just leads to your life sucking even more because something terrible is happened to you. That's exactly right. And I think it's kind of good to know

because one of the unfortunate consequences of too much talk of post-traumatic growth is it puts a burden on people who have had terrible things happened to them where you know it's like there's an audience of us saying well okay now you're gonna grow you're gonna be better get on that project and you know some people are just saying I look I just want to recover I want to get back to normal leave me alone. I think in some way if when it happens is wonderful, but expecting to happen is seems like an unreasonable burden. Yeah, I get that expecting it to happen can seem like an unreasonable burden,

but I'm trying to channel all the people listening who've had what they might consider character building experiences that are, you know, the key signposts in their life's history. And now this is this Paul guy coming on to tell me, will I didn't grow and learn as a consequence of this stuff? Well, they'll push back on you, but I think you'll also find a lot of people who say, I was assaulted a year ago. You know, I was paralyzed. My son died. And I got to tell you, I'm clawing my way back here. And it's not just that I don't, I wish it never happened, which is, which even post-traumatic growth people say that people wish it never happened. That's fine. But they say, no, I'm not actually kinder, better, more spiritually fit. I'm just, you know,

making my way back. And I think there's a lot of those people too. But again, it is possible to go through unchosen suffering and come out the other side, kinder, better, more spiritually fit. You're not ruling that out. I am not ruling that out, but I'm also not ruling out that nothing at all could happen to you. And then you time goes by and you're all like that.

And then if just to add to it, since we're throwing everything in the mix, people talk about post ecstatic growth, which is something really good happens to you. You'll get married, some professional compliment, and then you also come out of it better. You come out of some positive development better. Yes, that's right. Okay, there's a lot in your differential here. You're allowing for a whole spectrum of results from unchosen suffering as opposed to the sort of popular notion that may be somewhat damaging,

if not also somewhat incorrect, that something bad's gonna happen to you. And you'll be better on the other side of this. Don't worry about it. That's exactly right. I'm allowing for it. We're complicated critters, all sorts of things could happen. But if somebody was to tell me, here's an interesting psychological

process that we almost always do, I'd say, no, evidence doesn't support that. Be nice if it were so. Be nice at bad things. We're actually good things, but bad things are often bad things. Okay, so let's go to chosen suffering. Let's get to the good. Yeah, happy. Right. Can you talk about some of the benefits that you've come across in your study here that can come to us from the right kind of chosen suffering? Yeah, and I think they fall into two categories. So you think about pleasure. Often chosen suffering could be pardon parcel of experiences that we really get a kick out of. It's a lot of fun to eat spicy foods and to compete in endurance competitions and go to sad movies and scary movies, go to haunted houses, get really scared.

And that's fun. That's a fun night out. A lot of the pleasures we get into involve suffering. And we could even talk about something which I think connects our interests pretty well, which is the idea that certain sorts of suffering can provide a sort of escape from self and there's an overlap here with meditation practices. And then the whole other category is suffering as a part of a meaningful life, where the sort of things that give us meaning, I say, wow, that was important. That was significant. Inevitably require suffering, suffering not of a sort of out pain, but in source of anxiety

and difficulty and struggle and worry. And that's of a very different kind of benefit. But still, I think a really important benefit. Because he said a lot there in that brief answer, and I think it's worth unpacking three components that I heard. I heard pleasure. I heard transcending of the self and a kind of liberating from anxiety. So let's start with pleasure.

Why is it that going to a haunted house or watching a scary movie or eating spicy food or as you referenced before, BDSM, this kind of controlled suffering or benign masochism. Why does that give us pleasure? So there's different answers to that. The simplest answer, I think, which applies a lot of cases is we enjoy playing with contrast. People have described the brain as a different engine. And there's a lot of work from neuroscience and psychology suggesting that if I asked you how you're doing, your only proper response is compared to what. And this has been done. If you are playing a game and you lose a dollar, if you expected to win that sad, if you expected to lose $10, you're happy. In some experiments,

they give you mild pain. If you were expecting something pleasurable, it hurts. If you were expecting something much worse, it actually feels good. And so there's a blurring of pleasure in pain. And we play with this. You take a movie like John Wick, classic revenge film. There's a part at the beginning, I'm not spoiling much, it's in the trailer where the Russian mobsters killed this guy's dog. It's very sad. But, and you feel sad watching it, but then there's the payoff where John way kills everybody. And so it's the contrast that we play with and that we enjoy. And you can't have the positive without the negative.

Yeah, that kind of gets me, you're talking about the gory movie. And there have been various sort of, I think it may be safe to call it moral panic around violent video games and violent movies. And I was just talking to my wife about this over dinner the last night that I don't think there's any evidence that this kind of the benign massacism

of watching things that are horrifying on the screen, not just scary, but like violent and gory. It doesn't seem to lead to people in the real world doing a lot of violent and gory things. I mean, there has been a million studies, let's say, looking at this and they find little or no effects. Sometimes they find a short-term effect, which makes sense. You just play Grand Theft Auto or shoot them up game, and then you're a bit hyped up when you leave it.

But the idea that these violent video games make you more violent has no evidence for it. And there's a big piece of evidence against it, which is over the last 20 years. The games have gotten more and more and more violent. And the streets have become safer and safer and safer. If you took a line of how gory and violent the video games are and juxtaposed it online of the crime rate of violent crime, it would be like an X. One goes up, one goes down. Now I'm not saying

video games make us nicer. That's a bit too much. But the idea that video games makes us worse really is one of the least supported findings you could find in psychology. Is there some evidence that doing this kind of suffering, putting yourself through the horror of a video game has some sort of benefit? It's like a rehearsal in some way for, I don't know, evolutionarily. Is there something to be said for this work? I think with video games, I don't think, evolutionarily, is there something to be said for this work? I think with video games, I don't think there's any evidence either way. I don't think there's evidence.

It's bad for you. I don't think there's evidence. It's good for you. But there is an evolutionary account, which I think is actually pretty plausible for why we might like negative, aversive games and movies and books and stories. Why would we like to have them with plenty of violence and suffering, which is, we're just naturally drawn to explore the negative.

It's even study as a daydreaming. You know, you daydream, you're micr go wherever it can go. And people daydream of bad stuff, they tend to think about, oh my God, well, it'll happen if I lose my job or somebody I love dies, my house burns down. And what we find in fiction is imaginative recreations of sort of worst case scenarios. Like, it seems like every movie is either these days, either some sort of zombie movie

where the world has collapsed and chaos or it's an Avenger movie where good is fighting evil. And these are sort of natural appetites we have. And we tend not to explore them. In a safe, prosperous country, we don't go to war. We just watch other people go to war, play war on video games. And evolutionary account is it's actually really good to think about and practice and worry about bad things. So this negativity bias that's been wired into us through revolution may serve many purposes, but one of them you're arguing or positing here could be that indulging the negativity bias by watching a zombie film allows some part of your brain to rehearse how you would

behave in a zombie apocalypse. That's right. And you know, there's one way of putting it, which sounds really dumb, which is, well, there's not going to putting it, which sounds really dumb, which is, well, there's not going to be a zombie apocalypse. But the cool thing about zombie movies, and this is, I think your point, is that they're not about really zombies. They're about, you know, the collapse of society.

The real dangers in zombie movies are never to zombies, so it's the people. Right. Right. Yes, in the walking dead, the zombies are pretty dangerous, but the most dangerous people are the other living people. Yeah, the show sort of forgot about the zombies. There's zombies just background noise to the cruelties of people, and that's what we're what we're drawn to. And you know, you brought up a more general negativity bias, and I think that explains a lot about our psychology and

what captures our interests. You know, if there's two people in the room and one's a really nice generous person, well, it's really nice in the room and one's a really nice, generous person. Well, it's really nice me to focus and notice him or her. But if one of them is a murder or psychopath, it's really important for me to focus on that person. The negative is much stronger than the positive. And this is for reasons of survival. Yeah, it's reasons for survival and prospering and reproduction. The way it's usually put is imagine the best thing that could happen to you today for the rest of the day and then imagine the worst.

And the worst is a lot worse for you than the best is good. I mean, the worst is for instance, you die and everybody you love dies and that's pretty catastrophic. The best is, I don't know, you win a lottery or something. That's really nice, but not as good as the bad is bad. And in fact, there's some evidence coming out from NYU that people who do a lot of positive fantasizing thinking a lot about what it'd be like

when I get a girlfriend, what would it be like when I get that job by one, actually do worse in the world. And the argument is they get so much satisfaction from positive fantasizing that it partially satisfies their appetite. So they don't actually go out and do the things as much as people who don't fantasize about them. That sounds intuitively correct. However, too much negative fantasizing sounds like a horrible way to live. And I say that from the experiencing it from the inside. Yeah.

So there's an optimal amount of anxiety and rumination and worry. And it's more than makes us happy. You know, I think there's an adapt of logic to worrying a lot about your kids, about your life, about your health, because you worry a lot and you prepare. And maybe 99 out of 100 times, your preparation doesn't make a difference, and you shouldn't

have worried so much, but that one time out of 100 makes it worthwhile. But you're absolutely right. For everything, there are extremes, and you worry too much, you find yourself with an anxiety disorder, and you are not as able to function. But you know, this guy Nessie, who's an evolutionary psychiatrist, pointed out we always talk about people, thanks to the disorders with too much anxiety, we never talk about people with too little anxiety.

And he says, these are people who don't make it into the psychiatrist's office. You find them in morgues, morgues and prisons. Hmm. You know, because they just take too many chances. Hmm. That's really interesting. Well, then I may live long and free, but I'll be worrying a lot while I'm at it. Jeans will thank you for your service.

You did mention, though, that this kind of benign masochism can liberate us from anxiety. What is the mechanism there? So that's a really interesting issue, which I'm sort of struggling with. And this came up in the context of BDSM. Why would somebody willingly be hurt or humiliated or punished by another person? And again, of course, there's always control.

There's a safe word, just as all voluntary. But this psychologist, Roy Balmeister, suggests that one of the things that this sort of experience gives you is a sort of escape from the self. In that, you know, the self is an easy thing. And it's often just like you get sick of another person. I think you get sick of what's going on in your own head or at least I can. The constant voice, the self-doubt, obsession about the past, worries about the future. And one thing pain does for you is it obliterates all that. It captures your attention, it captures your focus. And one thing, and I'll ask you this, which is, I'm not sure whether it's in some way the same as meditation,

which is often described as obliterating the self, or the opposite of meditation, in which case you're just stuck with yourself. And one reason why, despite having read your book and gotten into it for a while, I kind of struggle with meditation is because I can't quell the voice of myself, and so I kind of prefer things like listening to podcasts or endurance exercise, which kind of gets me out of my own head. Am I doing it wrong? Well, so it's possible that one source of the misunderstanding lies in the word quell because there's, and this is, I'm speaking from, from deep experience in indulging my desire to quell the voice in my head.

But implied in that word is a kind of aggression or a version. And the voice in your head is a little bit like a bad guy that gets stronger than more you fire your ray gun at it. So that kind of aggression that you bring to the voice in your head, whether it's overt or just subtle aversion is going to make everything worse. Meditation is a very tricky.

The stance that it requires, it's like a video game where you can't move forward if you want to move forward. You have to kind of get into, and you'll only get into this position episodically, by the way. But for nanoseconds at a time, you might get into a kind of equipoise, a kind of equanimity where you're like, okay, with whatever comes up. That is the kind of attitude we're training, which is very hard to get into, but you can do it. You just

have to kind of suffer a little bit, but that's benign, Massacism. In my view, at its apex, you know, like the being willing to sit and stew in all of the whole catastrophe, where eventually you get to see it all, the way you might see a horror movie. It's like, it's happened, it's light and color on a screen. It's not actually you. You're not taking it so personally. So I don't want

to go so far as to say you're doing it wrong, but maybe there's a slight attitude and no shift that would open the thing up for you. No, that's nicely put. That's nicely put. In some way then, the goal is the same. I mean, getting suddenly slapped or hit or snapping a rubber band on yourself, whatever it does, for that second, you're not focusing on yourself. You're just focusing on experience itself. I talk about my book, the first time I ever spired in Brazilian jiu-jitsu with somebody much younger than me and much stronger than me and much better than me. It was, you know, this incredible experience. And I realized afterwards, while this was happening,

I was thinking about nothing but, you know, not having my arms pulled away from my body. And I wasn't thinking about how's my book going and, you know, out of my relationships and so on. So let me, let me say a little bit about meditation in this context. And I apologize to any actual meditation teachers out there who are listening for any sins I might be about to commit because I don't want to claim to understand

it the way, you know, a lot of trained meditation teachers do. But there unquestionably is value to doing really sort of extreme activities that take you out of your head, you know, I'm regularly exercised in a way that it's so hard that I, you know, all my existential worries go away for a little bit. They always come rushing back in, of course. So I am in no way diminishing or devaluing that. What I think the difference is with meditation is you're actually opening the door to the whole mess So that you can become familiar with it in a way that you are no longer owned by it You develop a sort of a positive

Dispassion a a sort of a warm passion, a sort of a warm dispassion of us as the great meditation teacher, Ram Das said, you become a connoisseur of your neuroses. And that familiarity, and I think to Beton's talk about meditation as a kind of familiarization with the mind, allows you to not be so owned by it. So you do have to go through the work of just being inundated with like the bad news of what your life is actually about. You might think your life is about achieving tenure at Yale and being a great dad. And yeah, it is.

But in many ways, your life is about what's for lunch and why did that jerk get first author on this study that was just published in the annals of whatever. And being okay with that is immensely valuable in a way that I think provides a biting benefits that the episodic escape from the discursive mind that is provided through a jujitsu match does not. I think that's really well said, really interesting. And I grieve every word of it. I think that using pain in order to escape from the self, which is, I think, as a psychologist, I'm largely just interested in why people do these things. I think that that's part of the answer. But I

entirely accept the idea that it provides no lasting benefit, doesn't make you a better person, doesn't make you see the world more as it is, doesn't make you a connoisseur of your own neuroses. It just feels good and it's just enjoyable at the time. And for the most part, I think the use of suffering and pain to enhance or generate pleasure, Its benefits is it gives you pleasure. It doesn't make you a better person. It doesn't give you a more true representation of reality. In that way, I think the comparison with meditation is a little bit unfair because meditation

wouldn't end properly as so much more promise for other things. Well, this part that I'm talking about of suffering is mostly fun. But I don't know that you're being fair to yourself and to your argument here, because I think that having that release valve, those moments where you transcend the self and you're not stuck in your stories, I mean, I haven't run the data, but I can't imagine that doesn't have a positive sort of creative effect over time. It may be different from the one provided by meditation, but certainly complimentary. It might, it would be interesting to study as a people who practice BDSM, for instance. And this used to be thought as a form of pathology or mental illness.

But if it was, you'd expect these people to be worse than the rest of us, more depressed, more anxious, and none of that's true, they tend to be pretty psychologically healthy. And it's an interesting idea whether these practices could some way make them better than average. I find that a really interesting idea. I'm not sure it's true, but it's worth pursuing. Isn't there some evidence though that having healthy pursuits what Alex Su-jung Kim Park might call,

he's a writer, he wrote a book called Rest. He might call this sort of active rest. I don't know if BDSM would fit into it, but maybe, but vigorous exercise. I have a friend of a friend who is really, really a huge kind of sort of roller coasters. Obviously exercise has many, many physiological and psychological benefits, but even something like roller coasters where you're making a lot of friends, you're part

of a community, you're having those thrilling moments, you're traveling the world to go on these big roller coasters, I can imagine that these have, this is all to say that I am very much not a meditation fundamentalist. I think there are many ways to improve your life and I don't hold meditation in some, you know, I don't look down at all the other mechanisms. Yeah, I think there probably is a relationship between engaging in these sorts of pursuits and being a happy, fulfilled, good person. It could go both ways. I think if you're, if you're okay, if you're life and you're not in a bad place, it's a lot easier to do these things.

I think if you're okay if you're life and you're not in a bad place, it's a lot easier to do these things. You know, correlation and causation are always hard to pull apart here. People who do rigorous exercise are often happier, but maybe that's just because if you're depressed, it's really hard to do rigorous exercise. So much easier to lie in the couch and watch Netflix. But you know, I kind of agree with you and this gets into this kind of slides us into a little bit more of the the meaning issue, which is one of the things about difficult pursuits, exercise, I don't know, be a connoisseur of roller coasters for that matter, is it requires discipline, control, mastery. And those are good things to have. And it might be nurturing them

in some domains, makes them more available in other domains. I sort of think, although, you know, I'm willing to change my mind if evidence comes against it, that having kids engage in sports or artistic activities or musical activities, above and beyond the specific pleasures they get from it and the skills they get from it,

it gets them into the habit and ability to have discipline, to seek out difficult activities, to understand the value of work and struggle and sacrifice, and that kind of holds them in good stead later on in life. Yeah, I believe that too, but that's I think, my belief is a bit more because I've heard it said so many times that it just seems right. Yeah, it's true. It's true.

And I got to be cautious. Until I see a double blind study of all the bells and whistles and everything, you got to be conscious of these sort of homespun wisdom. But it seems to make sense, which is it does seem as if you could get the right sort of appetite for difficulty. This often comes under things like grit and conscientiousness, which are demonstratively good things to have. And if you could, through various focusing on one thing, get this appetite and extended to others, and you're right, we should be skeptical. But if that would work, it'd be very powerful. Much more by conversation with Paul Bloom right after this.

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So what would you recommend to people in terms of seeking out and systematizing benign masochism in a life? Yeah, I guess one thing I do is I'd recommend a read a couple of other books. I'd recommend a read a flow by Mahali Chikcentmiai, who tragically died just a week ago. And he talks about flow experiences, which are experiences of difficulty and struggle, not too hard, but not too easy, and the value they give to life. And he talks about seeking them out. So the advice I would give, sort of channeling him, is try to find activities of the sort that once you get started, an hour could go by and you just lost track of time.

That's how you know you're in flow. You forgot to eat. You forgot to, you know, call your friend back. You forgot to pick up your kids to school. You're just kind of in this flow experience. And then I'd ask them to read a book that you recommended, which is Victor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning. One of the things Frankl says is that a very powerful factor in how resilient we are and

how much we thrive is whether we have a large scale meaningful pursuit in our life. Do we have something to live for? And I'll add one more practical thing, which comes from research. As you said, research done at University of Toronto, which is, suppose you want to be happy. You say, well, I don't care about, I don't care about meaning, I don't care about morality, I don't care about truth. I just want to be happy. Well, the advice that seems to be real advice is don't try to be happy. Trying to be happy is reliably correlated with not being happy, with being depressed, with being anxious.

And this could be for a few reasons. It could be because when you focus on something, it's often hard to do it. It's like, I don't know, probably trying to be a good kisser, it gets in a way of being a good kisser. But another thing is often people don't try in the right way. They connect happiness with possessions or status or money. And happiness is related to all of those,

but not as much as we think it is. So maybe a better way to be is to just predipersoo a meaningful good life. And then sort of happiness might come to you as a byproduct. How has writing this book about the pleasures of suffering impacted you? Well, in a couple of ways, first thing, you know, writing, as you know, is its own form of suffering, its own form of discipline. It is to the way it's, I'm in the I'm three and a half years into a five year project of writing a book and nothing in my life makes me suffer more than this. That probably speaks to how privileged I am, but nothing

makes me suffer more. I mean, it's the simplest thing. I just wake up each morning and try to write for an hour. And then I fail, I often fail. I find myself, email, it's so much email. And you wouldn't know this, believe it's stuff to have on Twitter. It's incredible. There's tons of it. And I say, once I finish with the internet,

I'll continue on. So struggling with a long term project that has significance to me, and that is important to me, is, is sort of living out what I talk about in the book. Also, you know, sometimes you just talk to people and they say, so what are you up to, you know, writing a book and all tell me to be David or polite. And they say, tell me about what the book is about. And I tell them and say, hey, let me tell you something. Let me tell you a story. People say and I've learned a lot about people's masochistic pleasures, some stories that we cannot talk about in a family-friendly podcast

but I've also learned about deeper goals people have had. People say, you know, I'm training for marathon. I'm trying to build this, create this artwork. I'm trying to engage in such a spiritual practice. And it's not fun. It's not pleasurable, but it's a value. As I wrote the book, made me appreciate the value of difficulty in suffering and pain in people's lives.

Yeah, that very much is true for me. This is my second, you know, four or five year sprint on a book And I think it fits perfectly into benign massacres I mean it is an source of enormous Suffering and struggle and often I have to step away from the computer and lie down on the floor Are you comfortable saying the topic of your new book love? Oh, so I'm going I'm trying to I'm doing something ambitious so I'm really trying I'm trying to, I'm doing something ambitious.

So I'm really trying to bite off something large. And it's also a memoir, so it's very embarrassing. And so there's that. But it definitely, it is, I feel like benign mascasm because there is a lot of suffering, but I'm learning so much, I'm changing and improving as a person. And I have this goal that I try to constantly remind myself and reorient myself toward, which is this book could help other people.

Yeah. If you ask people what's a meaningful activity, what, you know, because it's such a strange word, it has meaning, what in the world does that mean? People will give you a list of criteria, and it fits exactly what you're talking about. Through your meaningful activity, it has to be difficult. It has to happen over an extended period of time.

You're talking about many years and it has to have significance. You have to believe that it will matter. That it will make a difference. And often it has to have a narrative, sort of a story behind it and writing a book as you're describing it has all of those things. And if it's meaningful, it's going to be hard. You write in the book that we're not natural hedonists. If I had to sort of summarize the sort of theoretical claim I make in a book that I want

people to take seriously, it may not convince them, but to take seriously. It's that it's the theory of motivational pluralism. And this is awful term, but what the term means is that if somebody gives you a one-word answer to what do people really want, they're wrong. It's not pleasure. It's also not meaning. It's not truth. It's not love.

It's not beauty. It's all the other things. We want many things. And you know, the fact you're writing a book suggests, you know, you want meaning. We want many things. And, you know, you de facto writing a book suggests, you know, you want meaning, you want purpose, you want to make a difference. But the fact that that if it's a really hot day, you probably enjoy a real cool drink means you want pleasure too. And so we want many things. And we struggle to find a proper balance between them. Here's where I'm going with that. You said it's an awful term, but I love motivational pluralism.

Maybe it's not the most molyphilous thing I've ever heard, but I just, I think it captures something that, that I've heard my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein talk about motivation as a spectrum before, which I have found very liberating because there are times when I'm writing my book, and I realize that I'm looking for a pause. And then I get really embarrassed about the fact that I'm like writing my own Amazon reviews in my mind and imagining the TED talk and blah, blah, blah. And then I'm like, well, I'm only doing this for solipsistic, selfish reasons.

And I can spin into a whole, you know, toilet vortex around that. But in fact, Joseph's point is, if you look carefully at why you do anything, it's gonna be a range from high-minded, like I wanna help other people, or I wanna learn, I wanna grow to, you know, the more a callous and crass reasons. And so for me, motivational pluralism captures that.

I don't know if you think I'm misunderstanding it though. No, I think that's a deep point. One of the things we want is applause. We want to be appreciated. We want to be respected. Admired, loved, found attractive, and so on. And, you know, we're mammals. We're primates.

The idea that we can get beyond that is incredibly unrealistic. And also, maybe not even that if I met somebody who says I literally don't care what other people think of me, I find that a little bit worrying. Because sometimes other people to write other people could give you feedback as to how you're doing. If everybody around me says, look, you're being a donkey, I should really pay attention to that. And applause is often a kind of healthy motivation. So yeah, and you read it about it being a continuum, you read it about pluralism, which is that that's all you're doing with a book. That sounds like self-defeating and not very good. Helping people, which you mentioned refers is another good motivation. But we're just

stuck with the whole stew of them. And that, to me, just brings me back to the value of meditation, which is, you know, as Tick Nhat Han, the great meditation does end master. He once said that if you look long enough at your mind, you're going to see Hitler. And I actually think that's healing and valuable because on a number of levels, one is that seeing of it, that's the kryptonite for Hitler. Like, for your murderous rage, it is the seeing of it can allow you to not be owned by it. It is also a very reliable route to compassion. Because you see, I am a by nature, very very judgmental person but I can feel my judgmental

is declining slightly. I'm still super judgmental but I in my good moments when I've had enough sleep I can look at somebody losing it and say huh yeah that's in my mind too and I find that a much easier way to go through life rather than the seemingly comfortable, relaxed back into my chair, confident in my judgments role that I have occupied for many, many decades. It's easier, and I also think it's more moral. I think one of the easiest things traps to fall into when it comes to morality, when it comes to right and wrong, is assuming that your views and the views of your tribe are plainly and obviously the good ones.

And if people disagree with you, they're monsters. They're either idiots or monsters. And the world does contain idiots and it does contain monsters. But I think for the most part, the people who have these very different views are people just like you and me, just situated differently with different goals, different motivations, different backgrounds, different information sources. And once you can understand that and realize, this isn't so alien, you're in a better position to understand people you're better at in a position to engage in productive conversation. I mean, this gets to the thesis thesis of now I'm now being super selfish and talking about my own stuff rather than your book, but this does get to the my inco-it notions

about what the thesis of this book I'm writing is, which is and I'm going to use some sort of terms here that might be triggering for people, but I view a warm relationship to your own Misha Goss, your own catastrophe, your own ugliness as self-love, which is a very loaded termed self-love. It could sound auto-erotic, it could sound super cheesy, whatever, but I'm trying to, in my work here, trying to co-op that term and talk about it on a really much more down to earth level of, yeah, just being okay with yourself, that is self-love.

And that self-love has geopolitical consequences because when you can be okay with your own ugliness, you recognize it in others and are less judgmental. And that, I believe, is an antidote to the kind of tribalism and bigotry and bias that is dogging us on a planetary basis. Does that make sense for you? Yeah, it does. I mean, my book before here was a critique of empathy and argument, emotional empathy, could lead us astray. But what we're talking about here is cognitive

empathy. And Robert Wright has sort of over and over again made the argument, exactly at argument, that understanding other people, understanding and not treating them as aliens or monsters or idiots, is the key to often to geopolitical wisdom and peace where it puts you on a common ground. And I really like the idea, it doesn't sound that cheesy. Maybe self-love is a phrase we could retire, but it doesn't sound that cheesy. To think of that, you know, if you have to be comfortable with the bad parts of yourself, because other people had those bad parts too.

And if you view these things as disgusting and unthinkable, you can't relate to other people. You know, if I'm unforgiving of my own selfishness, I'll be unforgiving of yours. But if I appreciate my own and see where it comes from, and I see yourself, I was like, well, you're just like me, this human. And we can talk and work around it. I think it's an interesting insight. Can you describe the difference between emotional empathy and why you wrote a whole book against it and

a cognitive empathy? So cognitive empathy is what we're talking about now, which is understanding what's going on in other people's heads. And I think cognitive empathy is a tremendous force for good, but what it is is a form of intelligence, understanding other people. And like any form of intelligence, it can also be a tremendous force for evil. So if I want to help you, if I want to make a deal with you, if I want to work together, understanding what goes on your head is great. But if I want to mess you up, torment you, con you, seduce you, also understanding what goes on your head is great. And some psychopaths have very high cognitive empathy is how they can be such terrible people.

My book was interested in emotional empathy, feeling what other people feel. So you're anxious, I get anxious, you're happy, I get happy. And I think this is going to be great. It could be great source of joy, it could be great source of personal connection. But the problem is from a moral point of view, if we let empathy guide us, it's too narrow. You naturally feel empathy for people who look like you, who are the same skin color, the same ethnicity, similar situations. Empathy doesn't naturally turn to strangers. Empathy is also, and this connects to the meditation work, exhausting.

So there's work by the neuroscientist,a Singer, and Buddhist monk Matthew Ricard, where they find they argue in all sorts of ways that emotional empathy leads to burnout into exhaustion as opposed to compassion or love, which doesn't have that effect. So the subtitle of my book against empathy is the case for rational compassion. And it's a nice connection with our interests, because mindfulness, meditation, to argue to be one way to sort of quell empathy. The way I've been taught and this may not align with your view, so I'd be curious to hear any corrections you have, because I haven't read against empathy.

Emotional empathy is feeling what other people feel. Compassion is adding on the desire to help. So there's this enobling, empowering aspect that doesn't exhaust you. I think that's exactly right, except I wouldn't say adding on it, but I might say instead of. So, imagine, you know, we're friends and you are extremely anxious about something. Emotional empathy would be for me to get anxious to, for me to feel your anxiety. And you could see right away why that might not be a good thing. You might want me to be calm and supportive and said, I'm freaking out too. Compassion would be, for me not to feel your anxiety. But if you say, I understand

your anxious, I love you, I care for you, let's see what we can do, let's try to get you in a better place. And what required and singer argue is that meditation could be one thing helping you along the route to sort of not immediately catch everybody's emotions, to deal with people who are in pain and misery and all sorts of unchosen suffering. And yet still be sort of cheerful and positive through this and use that positivity to help them. But isn't a little bit of emotional empathy as long as it doesn't get too carried, as long as you're not too caught up in it, isn't it helpful? So like, for example, my son is anxious.

He comes by, and honestly, both of his parents are anxious and all of our forebears. And when I'm handling my son's anxiety appropriately, which is not always the case, my desire to help as fueled in part by understanding his experience from the inside. Like, I know what it's like for him when he's anxious. So isn't that emotional empathy and isn't a little bit of that useful as I move toward compassion? I think there's a subtle distinction here, which isn't worth keeping in mind, which is your son's freaking out and comes to you. And my point would be, you're not at your best helping him if you freak out yourself, even a little bit.

The freaking out is not a good thing. But, and this is your point, I think, you have to understand him. And to understand what it's like to be in, you would have had to feel anxiety yourself in the past. If I go to a therapist because I'm intently lonely, I don't think I want to go to somebody who's never been lonely, who's never felt what it's like because that would get in a way of cognitive empathy. So cognitive empathy itself is ultimately grounded or can be ultimate ground in personal

experience. Much more by conversation with Paul Bloom right after this. No, we're getting increasingly subtle and hopefully this is useful, but I'm just thinking, but there's something that's been said of the Dalai Lama where he can be confronted with somebody talking about something really sad. And he can feel that sadness and move to a wish to help.

And then that encounter will end and he's right back at happy. And I just wonder whether there isn't some value in being able to touch into the sadness on a real visceral level. Again, but very quickly moving to the enobling, empowering aspects of wanting to help, but there is some feeling in there. You know, it's a good point. I've heard this before as a new objection to my views,

sometimes from therapists, some therapists say, you're dead on right. If somebody's deeply depressed, I don't feel or sad, and I don't feel anxiety, I just know what it's like, and I try to make them better. Others have said similar to what you're saying, which is, it's funny, they say, I want to sort of taste it a little bit. I want to sort of just feel a little bit thrown through my system. As maybe as a motivator, as a way to really remind me at a deep level what this is like, and then I get rid of it.

So I've never met a single person who says, yeah, I really want to feel what they're feeling, because I think such a person wouldn't survive a single day of working with people. But the idea of a taste of it is an interesting idea, and I wouldn't be quick to say it's wrong. But to go all the way back up to your main thesis for against empathy, again, the prior book, prior to the sweet spot, is that if we're guided only by this, the passions that can be aroused by feeling other people's feelings, well, that's a, that is a faulty tool because we tend to empathize most with people who look like us. That's right, and there's, you know, there's a million laboratory studies, but

to real life examples are very potent. If you have an attractive white girl, a kid gets trapped in a well or something or lost in a foreign country, the Western world comes to an end as we focus on that. And we think this is the most important thing in the world. The Western world comes to an end as we focus on that. And we think this is the most important thing in the world. You have a thousand people who are our dark skinned and speak a foreign language, and they all die. The Western world shrugs and doesn't even notice because we're too often guided by our

gut feelings and our gut feelings favor our own. So I think we see real moral development happening when we say, let's not go for a gut, but be compassionate and then use our rationality to decide what's the best way to act. There's these laboratory studies which as you see, how much we used to pay to save the life of a single child, you have a picture and a name versus how much would you pay to say the lives of 10 children, no pictures, no names, the one beats to 10. And nobody could look at that and say, oh, that's perfectly good. That's the way our minds should work.

It suggests that a natural way for our minds to work, but we can transcend it. Just on a related note, a former colleagues of mine from ABC News reporter named Steve Oson-Sami and a producer named Jasmine Brown did a report for Nightline, my former home, that looked at the fact that when black people go missing, the media basically doesn't pay attention to it, but when white women go missing, it becomes a huge story. And that just seems like a great example of your thesis of emotional empathy, misfiring. I think that that's right. And I don't think journalists are to blame. I think they're trying to appeal to an audience who knows what they want to see. But of course, every news network.

If you look at the time they spend talking with different stories, the stories will focus on the distress of people like us, more so if they're attractive, more so if we could feel like a connection with them, and a lot less so if they're black, or if they're speaking different language or from a foreign country. And I think this is just a fundamental part of how our emotions work. But I also think we can transcend them. Let me ask before I let you go. Let me ask a few more questions about the sweet spot and this notion of chosen suffering or benign massacism. Can we take this too far? Yes. For instance, one way to take it too far is to get so much involved in vicarious suffering that we consume it for pleasure. And we don't actually try to make it go away. We don't try to make it get better. If we find just some stories of suffering fascinating,

and we delve into them and they scratch some itch between us, but we are so much into that that we have, we've lost the appreciation that this is something we should try to stop. That particularly for the unchosen suffering of others is the bad thing we should try to stop. That would be a case of it going awry. Well, you're right about in the book that one of the reasons why paying can be pleasurable is that it can lead to social satisfaction or in increase in social status.

And that I would imagine could lead one to hurt oneself. Yes, exactly. Social signaling is sort of a zero sum in that if you're capturing everybody's attention, for me to do it, I have to one up you, and then you have to one up me if you want to get, and then you get any cycles, just like people get bigger and bigger houses, people might get bigger and bigger, pain, and more and more damage to the body. And that would be a case where there's definitely downsides. Do you think there was any upside to the global unplanned suffering of the pandemic?

Yeah, there's certainly downsides. So many people died. So much, everything from boredom to trauma, so many life projects derailed, and everybody has their stories, and it hit us a lot more, some people a lot more than others. But it goes in some way back to what you said before about post-traumatic growth and suffering, which is there's also a thousand stories, or maybe a million stories of people whose life's improved in different ways.

And maybe just because they didn't want to go to school that year. And voila, I was personally in a situation where I was in a long distance relationship with my partner. And then if only there was some way I could teach at Yale while being in another country and well, a miracle happened. And then I can, you know, so. But more to the point of the question you're asking, I wouldn't be surprised if the deprivation and the struggle in some people unleashed hidden

reserves that they didn't know they had, maybe established social connections, you know, Rebecca Solnet has a book called Apparitice Built in Hell which is about natural disasters and natural disasters often bring people together. Now, COVID was a funny sort of disaster because of isolation. It wasn't like the London Blitz, where we're all huddled together. It's more like we're just, you know, ordering and Uber Eats and staying by ourselves. But still, there are some communities that did come together due to COVID. So yeah, I think there's all sorts of ways in which that sort of suffering, even though one shows and did bring benefits. Right. So this goes back to

what you were sort of dissection of unshows and suffering before. Yes. So there are some people for whom it will lead to pro-traumatic growth. There are many people for whom it will just suck, but they'll get over it. And there are some people for whom it will suck and actually will create but they'll get over it and there are some people for whom it will suck and actually will create unrecoverable wounds like death. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Is there something I should have asked? Is there an area to which I should have guided us that I failed to do? Not a one. I think this was a great conversation. I think we hit. We hit all of the points and a few more. I didn't expect us to end up talking about. So it was great. That was great for me too. Can I push you before I actually let you go to plug this book,

anything else you've ever written, your website, your social media presence, just plug everything. I know it's a little embarrassing, but please do it. Oh my God. I'll plug everything out. My Twitter is Paul Bloom at Yale. My website is PaulBloom.net, where I have a series of articles, including some New York Articles I've written on different topics. And my book is The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering and Research for Meaning. But there are prior books. Oh, there are prior books.

There's against empathy. There's how pleasure works. Just babies. They cards baby. There's my book from a Howtrol Lunar in the Meanings of Words. If you're an university press book and if you're a parent and you want to see how your kids learn to talk, that's the book to get. If you buy them, buy all of them, I'll give you a shout out on social media. Paul, thank you very much for doing this, really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, this was great. Thank you to Paul. This show is made by Samuel John's Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartell, and Jen Poehlt with audio engineering from the good folks at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for an episode about how to get out of your head with Willa Blythe Baker. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad- with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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