The Rich Roll Podcast - Susan Cain On The Great Ache That Binds Us

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Are you one of those people that finds solace and comfort in rainy days or melancholy music? It’s not quite sadness. It's more like longing. A beautiful ache that makes you feel more connected to the human experience. What is that specifically? And why does it compel us so? Former corporate lawyer turned author Susan Cain wondered the same—a query that launched a 7-year journey to better understand the complex and nuanced nature of all things melancholic. The result of Susan’s adventure is Bittersweet, her #1 New York Times bestselling book that ponders this quiet state of being and why embracing it paves a true path to creativity, connection, and transcendence. Bluntly put, quiet states of being are Susan Cain’s jam. Today we go delightfully deep on Susan’s transition from attorney to writer and how she came to write about introversion. We discuss the irony of being a public introvert, the power of honoring your inner introvert, and how to support introverted kids and co-workers. We also go deep on bittersweetness—and the how and whys behind cultivating it as a means of giving our lives more resonance and meaning and appreciation. If you protect your quiet like I do, this one's for you. Watch: YouTube. Read: Show notes. Both introversion and bittersweetness are states that society doesn’t do a great job of encouraging, but Susan really encouraged my acceptance and embrace of these ideas as an introvert myself (and someone who scored pretty high on the bittersweetness scale) as powerful when nourished. My hope is that you will find this conversation equally nourishing. Peace + Plants, Rich

bittersweetness is a view of the world and a way of being in the world it's a way to connection it's a way to transcendence you're very attuned to the gap between the world as it is and the world as we would wish it to be but somehow what comes with that knowledge, there comes a kind of deep joy at the beauty of the world. So it's like a real blend of all these deep instincts. You can take those pains and sit with them somehow and then make meaning out of them. The Rich Roll Podcast. Are you one of those people that finds solace, comfort in things like rainy days or melancholy music?

It's not a feeling of sadness, really, if you know what I'm talking about. It's more like this feeling of sadness, really, if you know what I'm talking about. It's more like this feeling of longing, like this ache, this beautiful ache, an ache that actually makes you feel more connected to the human experience. So what is that exactly? Well, today's guest,

a former corporate lawyer turned author, wondered the same. She went on like a seven-year journey to actually better understand it, the result of which is Bittersweet, her number one New York Times bestselling book that ponders this quiet state of being and why embracing it paves a true path to creativity, to connection, and even transcendence. You could say that Quiet States of Being are Susan Cain's specialty. Her first book, Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking,

spent eight years on the New York Times bestseller list and was named the number one best book of the year by Fast Company Magazine, which also named Susan one of its most creative people in business. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

And her TED Talks on the power of introverts and the hidden power of sad songs and rainy days have been viewed over 40 million times. So today we go deep on both bittersweetness and introversion and it's coming right up, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe

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I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that,

I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you

to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you.

I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Susan Cain. So I got to admit, the prospect of interviewing this literary lion intimidated me just a little bit. Susan, of course, was brilliant, but I think I was a little

bit nervous and anxious on this one, so I hope I did okay. In any event, we covered a lot of ground. We talked about her transition from attorney to writer, how she came to write about introversion in the first place and the irony of being a public introvert, how to support introverted kids and coworkers. And then we discussed this idea of bittersweetness, the hows and the whys behind cultivating it

as a means of giving our lives more resonance and more meaning and appreciation. Both these states, interestingly, introversion and bittersweetness, are states, I think we can agree, that culture does not do a great job of encouraging, but Susan really encouraged my acceptance and embrace of these ideas as an introvert myself and somebody who also scored pretty high

on the bittersweetness scale, as states of being to be nourished and states that are really powerful when properly embraced and leveraged. And my hope is that you will find this conversation equally nourishing. So please enjoy me in conversation with Susan Cain. I was thinking about how I had this moment about halfway into my seven-year legal thing where my grandfather died and he had been a rabbi

and he had been practicing up until the very end. He died at 94. Right. And I had this moment of like, oh my gosh, I would never wanna be doing this when I'm 94. Like I don't even really wanna be doing this right now. So something must be wrong because he was still so like engaged

in everything he was doing all the way through. So I just kept having those kinds of moments. Right, but on some level, you needed an intervening event or a catalyst, right? Or somebody like Ken giving you permission with that email, like you need to write, like you needed a little bit of wind in your sails to kind of boost you out of that mentality

of this is my world. And yet my world could be something greater. I think it's also that when you're in that world, it's so all consuming and it's so 24 seven. It's so like hermetically sealed that you can't really imagine what else you could do. You know what I mean? So it was really very sudden, like the minute I left,

it was like my whole life turned upside down instantly. And then it only took you seven years to write the book. Yeah, something like that. Which is kind of like the amount of time you're meant to be on the partnership track to give birth to this work of beauty that we're gonna get into today. I was thinking about you the other day

because I got invited to attend this conference down in San Diego. And I was looking forward to it. Like, oh, I get to actually just relax and be an attendee as opposed to getting on stage, which is very, to this day, anxiety producing in me. And then at the last minute, it was being put on by Sanjay Gupta at CNN.

And he texts me and he's like, oh, by the way, I think it'd be great if you did like a fireside chat with Lance Armstrong, like on Thursday or whatever. And I immediately went from like thinking this was a little bit of a mini vacation to suddenly like, oh my God, how am I gonna do this? Like tormenting myself and being tortured over the whole thing.

Because no matter how many times I've graced a stage, it still feels very unnatural to me and is still very anxiety producing. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. You probably know I used to have this huge public speaking phobia. So for me, it used to be like, you know, a completely destabilizing event.

So I'm totally past that now, like that's overcome, but I still completely relate to what you just said. Like if I'm in the audience and going to the conference, like la la, but waking up in the morning when I have to be the one on stage, it's just like, that's not a chill morning. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, the occasion of this conversation is your latest book, Bittersweet, but I do wanna spend a little bit of time on the introversion subject matter. Yeah. Because I relate to it so deeply as somebody who has come into an awareness of being

an introvert or on the introversion side of that spectrum, but somebody who can emulate the extrovert for short bursts or periods of time, but always has to retreat to charge the battery back up. Like it comes at a cost. Yeah, we should definitely talk about that. Oh yeah, no, I get it completely. It know, it's so interwoven with the public speaking thing too, which is fascinating. It is so interwoven. There are introverts who are totally comfortable

with public speaking. It's like some small subset of them feel that way. But for most people, they more describe what you just did. Yeah, but even extroverts probably fear it on some level. Is that the case? Oh, lots of extroverts fear it. Yeah, I mean, it's like the number one fear.

So there's tons of extroverts who are terrified of speaking. Yeah, and you know, what's interesting about your work, you know, when we talk about quiet and introversion, which is a subset of the population, albeit a larger one than I think we previously realized, bittersweet speaks to something that's universal in all of us, not just to that subset,

but on some level to everybody. But I think what unites these books or one thing that unites them is that they both are this call to elevate something that society undervalues or doesn't quite understand and often to our detriment squashes out of us. And so that's kind of this universality theme that permeates your books. What is that sensibility? How did you come into that? I'm interested in how you chose this subject matter and why this has become your calling. Yeah, absolutely. We can talk about that. It's exactly what you just said, like hidden superpowers. And it's also about a different way of being in the world from the one that is celebrated, you know,

in the media and celebrity culture and all of it. In our work culture, I would say both of the books are about a different way of being in the world. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, start with introversion. Like I think the sense of the introvert is that he or she is always out of step with expectations or there's a feeling of less than

or a pressure, a social pressure to be other than who you are. Yeah, I don't know where this comes from in me, but I would say when I wrote Quiet and when I wrote Bittersweet, I thought that I was writing two really different books. But now when I look at them, they both have to do with the way in which culture has such a specific and really rather narrow expectation of the way that we're supposed to be in the world. And so both books are talking about a different way of being.

And one that is quite powerful or ways that are quite powerful in their own right, but that don't get celebrated. And kids from a very young age, like in the case of introversion are taught, you should be out there, you should be dominant, you should be loud, you should take charge, this whole constellation of qualities, which are wonderful. But there's another way of being that describes a third to a half of the population and that brings with it delights and powers of its own. And it just felt to me like, you know, a colossal waste of talent and energy and happiness

to be telling up to half the population that who you are isn't okay and you should be turning yourself into a pretzel to be some other way. Right, and so how do you define that? Like what is your definition of introversion? And I suppose the follow-up question to that is like, how does that differentiate from someone who is shy or somebody who is insecure or has some kind of social anxiety? Yeah. So there's a kind of popular definition, which I think works really well of like, where do you get your energy from? And a really easy way to think of it is to imagine that

you're at a party and you've been there for about two hours and it's with company you're truly enjoying and you're having a good time. But still, the extrovert at the party, their battery is charging up and now they want more. Whereas an introvert's battery is probably draining no matter how good a time they're having. So there comes that moment where you just wish you could beam yourself home and be someplace else. And so it really is this question of like, how much stimulation do you need in order to feel in a state of peace and equilibrium? You know, and for introverts, they get very quickly to a place of too much. And for an extrovert,

you get very quickly to a place of too little. You know, like if things are too quiet, not enough is happening, you feel like, you know, I better call a friend, I better do something. Right. And all of that is quite different from shyness, which is more about the fear of social judgment,

you know, and like a shy person has an interaction with someone who might have a neutral expression on their face and they'll tend to read disapproval into the neutrality and then be very upset about the disapproval. So it's a quite different state. Like you could be an introvert and not be shy or vice versa. But my work, I would say focuses on both,

both ways of being, because both ways of being show up very similarly in terms of behavior. And so they get judged in similar ways. Right, right. Yeah. And shyness being something that is mutable, but perhaps introversion or extroversion

is more fundamental or constitution. Like, is there a mutability to it? Yeah, I don't know if I'd say that one is more mutable than the other. I would say in both cases, there are temperaments that people are born with that predispose you in one direction or another, and then layered over the temperament,

you have all kinds of life experiences and skills that you gain, and it's all a big mishmash. But there are babies who are born into this world. And from the day they're born, you can test their nervous systems and see that they're more reactive to all different kinds of stimulation. Like they'll salivate more if you give them sugar water and put it in their mouths.

So the babies who salivate more when they're two years old and you put them into a play group of kids they've never met before, those are the babies who are gonna tense up and take longer to integrate into the group because they basically have a nervous system that is just reacting more to new inputs. And it makes you want to like slow things down and pause and check it all out before you're ready. When I think about that, the word that comes to mind is sensitivity, right? Which is applicable

to bittersweetness too. Like I took your quiz, I scored a 7.3. So I guess I'm prone to some level of bittersweetness, but I've always thought of myself as maybe just a little bit more sensitive than certain other people. And sensitivity could be a word that you could apply to introversion as well. Like they're just more sensitized to their environment. Is that a completely different way of thinking about this or how does that match up? No, it's more like these are all really overlapping categories. They don't lay totally on top of each other, but they overlap.

So with bittersweetness, which by the way, I define as a kind of a state of mind where you're very attuned to the way in which joy and sorrow in this world are forever paired. You know, you don't get one without the other in this life and the way in which everyone and everything we love will not be here forever. But that's somehow what comes with that knowledge. There comes a kind of deep joy at the beauty of the world. So it's like a real blend of all these deep instincts. And what we found, we have a bittersweet quiz. I say we, because I developed it with Scott Barry Kaufman.

I know you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm seeing him on Friday night. Oh, that's right. I know, I know. He actually was inviting me to come, but I'll be back home by then. So Scott Barry Kaufman and I and David Yadin,

who's at Johns Hopkins, we developed this quiz to measure how bittersweet you are. And what we found is that the people who score high on the quiz, like you, also score high on this trait of high sensitivity that you're talking about kind of instinctively. And that trait is basically like the kind of person who just reacts much more intensely to everything. You know, like if you see the beauty of these canyons out here, like you're going to really love it. And if there were suddenly a loud and terrible noise, it would probably bother you that much more. And so many introverts are highly sensitive, but not all of

them. So we actually didn't find that there's any correlation between bittersweetness and introversion. That's fascinating. The correlation is with sensitivity. That's really interesting. Yeah. Because you would think that they would toggle together. Well, it's like about 80% of highly sensitive people are introverts, but you could be highly sensitive and be extroverted also. Right.

And then you can be introverted and not be sensitive. So that's why I say these are like overlapping categories. I'm interested in how we arrived at this moment in our culture, and you've written about this, where I wouldn't say we pathologize introversion, but we certainly don't socially select for it, right? Introverts are sort of thought of as the people who are gonna have a harder time in the workplace achieving.

They tend to have more difficulty getting their ideas across because of the constructs that we've created around education and professional careers. And you've written extensively about like how we've gotten to this point and how we might rethink these cultural mores or priorities to better understand not just this dynamic between introversion and extroversion,

but also like how to leverage the beautiful talents of the introverts so that they can thrive because just like extroverts, they can become leaders and they're often the people with the most interesting, creative, forward-thinking ideas. Yeah, and so there's this real mismatch. I mean, when you look at who have been many of the most creative people over time, I mean, like so there's this real mismatch. I mean, when you look at who have been many of the most creative people over time,

I mean, like psychologists have studied this and you usually find people who are quite introverted or at least to some degree introverted because solitude is such a key ingredient of creativity, which is not something that ever gets talked about, but it's true. Yeah, and for me, I think I was just aware of this mismatch

from a really early age this mismatch from a really early age because I come from a family of introverts. Like, I don't think we have a single extrovert in my family of origin. And it was just really plain to me that the different things that my family members were doing in the world, things that I admired were so related to their kind of quiet and cerebral way of being. You know, like I had a father who, he was a doctor and a medical school professor and he was amazing at what he did. And he was the one you'd go to

if you couldn't figure out the diagnosis, he might be able to figure it out. And he was also somebody who would go to work these long hours and then he would come home after work and pour over medical journals and go to the medical conferences and sit in the front row and tape everything and listen to it over and over again until he'd figured it out. It was things like this that I kept seeing in real life. And then many of the artists I admired and writers I admired. So just like people out in the

world were so clearly contributing, not in spite of, but because of their quieter way of being. And yet, as you're saying, in our schools and in our workplaces, it's not thought of that way. Right. And so what is the solution for that? I know you've done a lot of work around like reorienting the workplace and trying to find ways where we can foster that type of energy and bring it to the surface in a way where it is respected better. I mean, I do think as with everything that raising awareness is the hugest step of all.

And it's actually been amazing to see how over the last 10 years, how much more awareness there is and how much of a shift in orientation there is. So there are lots of workplaces that are like thinking about this in really conscious terms and they have working groups formed around it.

And they're thinking through different ways of hiring and promotion and that kind of thing. And you also see schools doing things like rethinking the way kids are given feedback. Because so many kids are told, you know, like Sophie is doing great academically, but she must learn to speak up more in class. And getting that feedback compared to Sophie is a deep thinker. And when she contributes, everybody turns around to listen because she has so many interesting insights to add.

Right. That feels completely different to Sophie. And I've gotten a lot of letters from the Sophies of the world telling me how painful it is to them when they get the first type of feedback. Right. They feel like their teachers don't respect them at all.

So I am seeing those kinds of changes. We are seeing those kinds of changes and that's really gratifying, even though I think we have a long way to go. I just know for myself, kinds of changes. And that's really gratifying, even though I think we have a long way to go. I just know for myself, when I think about open plan, open floor plan workplaces or, you know, co-working place, like that just, that sounds terrible to me. Like I want a womb. I want to shut the door. I don't want any windows. I don't want anybody to ever knock on that door or for the phone to ring. Like my great ambition is to be left alone.

And when I can inhabit that place, I then can do the work that I feel compelled to do, my best work. But anything that involves collisions or like inner is like, just sounds like a nightmare to me. And when I see that trend of like these open floor plans, that doesn't seem conducive to the introvert

being able to express themselves optimally. Oh my God, yes. And in fact, I discovered this because, well, like you, I used to be a corporate lawyer. So I had come from this world. I assume your firm was like this, where everyone had their own little office. It was almost like a dormitory with everybody in their office.

So I kind of thought that's what work looked like. And then I started researching Quiet. So I decided I was going to like plop down in Silicon Valley for a while because I figured there would be many introverts there. And I was expecting this kind of introvert nirvana. And I got there and all these people who I was interviewing, they're all coming up to me and kind of whispering, this open

office plan that I'm in is a disaster. I can't concentrate. Like everything that you just said. Everything's overwhelming. Everything's overwhelming. And they were like, I can't tell my boss. This is why they're whispering. They're like, I can't tell my boss because if my boss heard me saying this, they would think I'm not a team player. They think I don't like my colleagues. And it's not that. It's just everything you just said about the best way that they would focus and be in a state of equilibrium would be in private environments. So they started asking me, is there research that I could show my boss to just let them rethink this a little bit? And I started looking. And this was already, this was like a

long time ago. But even by then, there was a lot of research. There was a mountain of research showing all the problems with these open office plans, specifically for introverts, but really for everyone. You know, focus goes down, people get more sick, all this stuff. So fast forward, I would say now people are starting to understand how problematic that kind of floor plan is. And especially now in the wake of the pandemic, there is a kind of rethinking going on.

Right, right. Where we end up remains to be seen because it's also much more cost-efficient to have everybody crammed into one big space. Sure, of course. The pandemic must have provided you with a lot of data on this. Like on one level,

it's sort of nirvana for the introvert who now can be ensconced in their own home and can sort of control their environments a little bit better, but then over time, maybe not so good. Like what have you learned about the pandemic in terms of the introversion, extroversion thing in the workplace, et cetera? It's a little bit of a mixed bag

because as you're suggesting, It's a little bit of a mixed bag because, you know, as you're suggesting, there's a way in which, especially during kind of peak lockdown, there's a way in which it was much easier for your typical introvert than for your typical extrovert. But all the uncertainty that was involved and the disruption isn't easy for anyone. And introverts in general are less comfortable with uncertainty than extroverts are. So I would say it took a toll in different kinds of ways. But what I really saw is that, especially at that moment, it was really a fantastic time, regardless of who you were, to take stock, or regardless of your temperament,

to take stock of whether your previous life had been working for you or not. Because I knew many extroverts who were telling me, you know what, even for me, I was going to 24 seven and now I realized that I wanna pull this back. And then there were introverts who were saying, this is fantastic. And I love not having to go to the office all the time

and I have to rework my life to preserve some of this. Mm-hmm. to rework my life to preserve some of this. Yeah, I think we're gonna be learning about this for years to come. Like we're still kind of in it and we don't necessarily have the 10,000 foot view on the long-term impact of this. But it's been hard for everybody.

It's been very hard on you and your family. I know that. It must have been excruciating for you while writing this book on bittersweetness to kind of endure loss in your own family. Yeah, that was an interesting thing because people assume that I wrote bittersweet like in response to the disruptions and the losses of the pandemic.

But, you know, because as you say, I lost my brother first and then my father to COVID. But I was actually working on this book for years before that. That is my way. I work on things for a really long time. So I don't know. What's interesting to me about that is I see the world as bittersweet all the time, regardless of what's going on.

So when it's a pandemic, it's not surprising to me. And the epigraph of the book comes from the Leonard Cohen quote of, there's a crack in everything and that's where the light gets in. So because of seeing the world that way, it means when we're in difficult times, I'm also more apt to be looking for what the light side is just as when we're in good times, I'm like, come on, you guys, don't you realize everything's not as perfect as you think? There's also all this loss and fragility

going on at every moment. It's a kind of worldview where you're seeing it all constantly. Well, it's a non-binary, non-dualistic approach, right? It's a very holistic approach to how emotions operate. And you can't have one without the other. And this is a soup. And the more that we can appreciate that one doesn have one without the other. And this is a soup. And the more that we can

appreciate that one doesn't happen without the other, the more kind of space there is for healing and kind of understanding the beauty and the power of leaning into these emotions rather than avoiding them because we're constantly being signaled to just be happy or pursue happiness at all times, at all costs. Right, right. Yeah, and in fact, I gave a talk about bittersweetness at TED the summer before the pandemic hit. So it was the summer of 2019.

And it was really interesting because I felt like there were half the people, like when I came off stage and I knew a whole bunch of people in the audience and half of them were like, Oh my gosh, this is totally me. And I totally understand what you're talking about. And then some of them were like, Oh, I didn't know that you were depressive.

And I was like, no, that's actually not what I'm saying at all. And that's part of what the problem I think with, part of the problem that our culture has is that we don't have a way of distinguishing between clinical depression, which I would never recommend to anybody versus this way of being that takes it all in,

the good and the bad, and is just aware of it all. Right, it's very telling that somebody would just leap to that and associate those two things as being the same and pathologizing it, right? Oh my, I'm sorry, something's wrong with you, as opposed to this is life. And of course we aspire to live happy lives,

but that happiness is informed by the inevitable obstacles and painful moments that descend upon all of us. And the manner in which we're able to kind of embrace those moments, learn from them, lean into them, I think enriches the happier moments because that's truly how you appreciate life rather than running away from those other things and repressing them and trying to dodge them. Yeah, and there's this whole, like if you look at all our wisdom traditions and our literary and artistic heritages across the world, across the centuries,

like they have been teaching all this time that this is a way in, that appreciating this side of existence, the bittersweet side of existence is a way to creativity. It's a way to connection. It's a way to transcendence. And the way that I got into this whole inquiry in the first place is because all my life

I had had this really intense reaction to sad music. But by intense, I don't mean intensely sad. I mean like I'd hear this music and feel completely uplifted. So there's this one moment I was in law school and some friends were picking me up in my law school dorm on the way to class. And I was blasting Leonard Cohen or something as I am wont to do. And my

friends came by and they thought it was hilarious. And they were like, why are you listening to this funeral music? And at the time I just laughed and went to class and that was the end of the story. But I couldn't stop thinking about it because it was like, well, what is it in our culture that makes it so odd to listen to this music, but even more, what is it that the music is telling us? There's something in it. I mean, we know that sad music is much more likely to produce like goosebumps and chills and listeners.

People listen to the happy songs on their playlist 175 times, but they listen to the sad songs 800 times. And there's something, there's somewhere that that music is pulling us of like that the musician is telling you that thing that you felt, that pain that you've sometimes felt, I, the musician have been there too.

And everybody listening to this has been there too. And we are all connected in this same strange state of being human. And that's where the feelings of uplift and love come from. Right, and connection, of course. Like you feel like you're seen and you're being heard. There is somebody else there through a musical note can identify very specifically an emotion

that you're experiencing and suddenly you don't feel alone anymore. Yeah, exactly. And that's a joyful experience, even if it's one that also is kind of about sorrow and pain and grief. Right, because I think the ultimate human desire is for connection and that's what it's doing.

And so like you look at our culture now and there's so much divisiveness and so on. And I don't think that's what it's doing. And so like you look at our culture now and there's so much divisiveness and so on. And I don't think that's unrelated to the way in which we're supposed to present so cheerfully and so successfully all the time. That means we're not really able to connect with each other. Right, right. Cause we're fronting and we're wearing that mask.

And we're trying to appear or present in a certain way to be approved of or to be received in a manner that, you know, we would desire. And that ultimately just alienates us from one another. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I tend to look at these things, I've said this many times before, like somebody who's been sober for a long time, like through the lens of recovery. And the more that I was reading your book, the more I couldn't help but think about how this operates in the 12-step context,

because you're part of this community that has a kind of a shared narrative about the pain that they've endured and the struggles that they've, you know, sort of overcome to be in this place. But then, you know, somebody has the courage to get up in front of a group of people and share their pain and their grief and their sorrow, but do it with a level of levity

and also a level of specificity. And I found the more specific it is, the more universal it is. Like when somebody, I may not relate to the facts of that person's experience, but I can relate to the emotional experience that they've had. And you can't help but feel incredibly bonded

to this person and to the group through the courage and the pain and the grief and the levity that makes it all this, you know, soupy mess of emotions that just make you feel more human. Yeah. You know, as you were describing that, what came into my mind is Darwin, actually. Because Darwin was actually, he was a really kind of gentle and melancholic type of person.

So he's known for survival of the fittest, but he was actually this guy who like, he couldn't stand the sight of blood. His father wanted him to be a doctor and he took one look at what surgery looked like and fled to the jungles of the Galapagos to look at beetles. And he noticed from very early on, I mean, he was very aware of how cruel and violent animals and humans could be with each other.

But he also noticed at the same time that there's this impulse that mammals and humans have that when they see another being in distress, that they feel the distress themselves. It just gets mirrored and it's happening at a really quick and pre-conscious level. And he thought that that was the strongest impulse of all in humans. So people talk about how he's known for survival of the fittest, but you could equally talk about survival of the kindest. And now we're seeing the fruits of that like 150 years later in the research. Like there's a guy named Dacher Keltner at, who does all this amazing research. And he's found, for example, that we all have a vagus nerve,

which is the most important, biggest bundle of nerves in our bodies, regulates breathing and digestion. And your vagus nerve becomes activated when you see, like when you were in your AA group and seeing somebody talk about their troubles, if you felt that sense of like your heart opening up or, you know, your throat closing or whatever it is, that's partly your vagus nerve is becoming activated almost against your will. You know, it just happens. And yeah. And so to cut that off from each other,

you know, the ability to relate to each other that way is cutting off one of our most basic ways of bonding. Right, so there is this implicit like evolutionary advantage, right, to indulging in this kind of emotional landscape. Yeah, and I wouldn't call, I mean, even the word indulging in this kind of emotional landscape. Yeah, and I wouldn't call, I mean, even the word indulging, like I wouldn't think of it-

Allowing maybe. Allowing, yeah. Allowing. To allowing, exactly. I mean, it actually comes from our need as mammals to be able to take care of our young, you know, like you have to take care of a baby who's crying and that's how they let you know that they need something. Because we're primed to be able to do that, that kind of radiates outward to our ability

to react to each other in general in that way. And we don't always get it right, but that is one deep aspect of being human. And the neurochemistry tracks to the vagus nerve. Yeah, exactly. Which makes me think this is like deeply primal, dating all the way back. Exactly, exactly.

And the vagus nerve is like one of the most ancient parts of the human body. Right. So it's really fascinating. So this idea of bittersweetness, I think most people think of it as an experience, but you talk about it as like a state of being. So distinguish those two things and how you arrived at that point of view.

Yeah, so I mean, it is an experience in the sense of, like the moment where you're walking your child down the aisle or something. That is a quintessential bittersweet experience. But there's also a view of the world and a way of being in the world that's quite bittersweet. You could call it melancholic, except that word in our culture is associated with clinical depression. And that's not really what it means or it's not the way I'm using it. So the bittersweet state of being is much more about like this sense of, it's a sense of

that awareness of joy and sorrow and of fragility. Um, Aristotle 2000 years ago asked the question of like, he has this question of what, why is it that so many of our great poets, philosophers, and politicians all have a melancholic temperament. Like, what is that? So it's something about being attuned to the gap between the world as it is and the world as we would wish it to be. You know, there's like,

it's like the emotional DNA of humans is like we come into this world with a sense that there is a more perfect and beautiful world that's out there somewhere to which we belong, but we somehow find ourselves here instead. Right, so it's the yearning and the longing, like the idea that things could be better. It's not a despairing per se,

but it's a sense that like we're in a certain place, it could be better. And the melancholic impulse is built out of like how to get from one to the other. Yeah, and it's like, it's the heart of our creative impulse. You know, it's like a feeling of like, how do you get closer to that perfect and beautiful world

for which you are yearning? You know, so the word longing, like it literally means to grow longer and to reach for. So there is a sense in which we're all reaching to get to this other place. And that's what propels us forward. And like historically, we've always known this. It's really only recently that we've forgotten it.

So like with the Odyssey, historically, we've always known this. It's really only recently that we've forgotten it. So like with the Odyssey, Homer, that whole adventure, it starts with Homer who's on a beach weeping for his homeland because he's so homesick. And because he's so homesick, he goes out into the water and has this adventure. It's the same thing with all our religions, you know, like we're longing for the Garden of Eden,

we're longing for Mecca, we're longing for Zion. And all the religions that like the teaching is that it's through the longing that you get closer to the divine itself. So it's an incredibly generative state. Right, and it's also, it's about temporality as well, right? This idea of fragility and nothing lasts forever and we're only here for a short period of time.

And that ticking clock, you know, kind of a la Memento Mori is sort of a driver behind this state as well. Absolutely, absolutely. I actually tried practicing Memento mori while I was writing the book. So like memento mori, it basically means remembering death, you know, as a way of like understanding how precious life is. And that idea comes to us from many different traditions. So I tried it and I actually found it to be so incredibly helpful. And the place I really noticed it is like my kids at the time were pretty little and we had this bedtime ritual that we were doing.

And it was an amazing time of day. And it was like reliably the time that they would open up about whatever was on their minds. It was just great. And I also was bringing my cell phone into the room while I did that, while we would do bedtime. But I started doing this memento mori and I would say to myself, they may not be here tomorrow. You may not be here tomorrow. You have no idea.

And just that thought would completely extinguish any desire I had to look at the cell phone. It was like, it was gone. And I stopped bringing it into the room completely. And it didn't feel sad. It didn't feel depressing. It was just a reminder. Right.

That for me, you know, connects to gratitude. Like if I can be present, that's what I'm trying to cultivate. It's not necessarily a bittersweetness other than like, oh my goodness, if this is the last time that I'm able to do this, there's a dusting of sadness on that, I suppose. It's complicated.

It's complicated. Like having to tease all this stuff out. No wonder it took you so long to write this book. Just trying to wrap my head around like what it is and what it isn't, how you cultivate it, how to channel it appropriately. Well, do you know the feeling I'm talking about

when you listen, I don't know what kind of music you love. I mean, we all like many different kinds. I mean, I love Leonard Cohen and I know he's your spirit animal. He's my spirit animal, that's true. Yeah, no, I mean, it all like many different kinds. I mean, I love Leonard Cohen and I know he's your spirit animal. So, you know, go ahead. That's true. Yeah, no, I mean, it's just like,

I started out with that question of why sad music? Like, what's so great about it? And that seemed like a kind of narrow question. I didn't really realize it was gonna become a whole book. It was more that that was a gateway question into this whole state. Right, but if you look at the musicians, the great poets, the writers, all of the painters,

the ones that seem to resonate the most are the ones who have the facility, the capacity to kind of take these seemingly conflicting emotional states or the polarities of them and weave them in some way that makes sense to us as humans, but perhaps transcends our ability to like articulate. And I think when you see it, it's sort of like, when you hear it, you know it, when you see it, you know it, you're not sure why, like, why is it that the minor key or these certain songs and the way that they're constructed

cultivate that in ourselves? I don't know if there's neurochemistry on that or any science on that, but it really is like, I know what that is. I don't know why I know what that is. It makes me feel this certain way that is perhaps seemingly off my optimal state. And yet there's a comfort, like you talk about rainy days and things like that, like you kind of want to languish in it. Yeah, there's a comfort and there's a comfort, like you talk about rainy days and things like that. Like you kind of wanna languish in it. Yeah, there's a comfort and there's a transcendence in it. Like with Leonard Cohen, the very first artistic act that he took was when he was nine years old and his father died.

And he took one of his father's bow ties and he wrote a poem and he buried the bow tie and the poem in the garden, in the backyard garden of their family house. And that was his first artistic act. And it was like, he was kind of repeating that act again and again throughout his career. There's a kind of like taking something painful and then turning it into something else.

And I think that's like the real, in terms of how to live, that's the real insight that this tradition gives us because it's kind of saying to us, these moments are gonna come, these pains are gonna come and you have two choices of what to do with them. You can suppress it in

some way and inevitably you're going to take it out on yourself in the form of depression or addiction or whatever it is, or you're going to take it out on someone else, abuse, passive aggression, or you can take those pains and sit with them somehow and then make meaning out of them and transform them. And that's something that we do so naturally. You know, like after 9-11, you suddenly see all these people signing up to be firefighters, you know, like the spike of applications, it goes way up.

After the pandemic, lots of medical school and nursing school applications. So people are like running, you think they might be running away from those things. Towards the thing that is creating the pain. Exactly, exactly. But it's a way of making sense out of it and of making meaning of it

and turning it into something better. And I think that's one of our fundamental impulses when we're at our best. Right, like take your pain and transmute it, turn it into a creative offering. Yeah, yeah. And that's an active service to the self and others. I mean, in a very broad way.

Quit your law firm job and spend seven years writing a book. It can be anything, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and that's really powerful. And I've thought, you know, like that made me reflect on my own life and realize that without being consciously aware of it, like I've done that.

So there is something instinctual in us that's drawn to that practice. And before, when you were still, like before you were in recovery, do you think you were taking the other path or? Oh, I mean, before I, when I was indulging in my addiction, no, I was running away from everything and repressing all of those challenging emotions

and medicating myself essentially. Because those emotions were too painful or I wasn't mature enough to really excavate them. And I was at the behest of a powerful substance that hijacked me. And I think most recovering addicts will be able to relate to that. And I think there's something interesting about the recovery community.

And what you kind of learn is that there's something aspirational there, even in the addict. Like they're looking for a higher experience of self and consciousness and they're doing it in a very self-destructive and unhealthy way. But at the very core of it is like, there should be something better or I'm in pain and I'm reaching for something else. Yeah. You know, and then when you get sober and you can continue to reach in a healthier direction, people in recovery, like I know so many people who are just, they're just amazing human beings

because they've learned to take that pain and turn it into some form of creative offering that is healing for not only themselves, but for a lot of other people. Yeah, that makes complete sense to me. I wrote most of Quiet in this cafe called Doma in Greenwich Village, which no longer exists tragically, because it was my place.

It was such a great place. It was like, it just had this amazing creative energy and people would come from all over and work on their stuff there and get to know each other. And one or two nights a week, it would happen that this group of people would come in and I always noticed them because they always had like this special light about them.

There was a kind of charisma in them. And then I found out that they were all coming from an AA meeting. They were going for their coffee after the meeting. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, they had been meeting like right down the street. There was something about this group that you could feel their reaching for transcendence

or reaching for the more perfect and beautiful world. You could just feel it in their very being. And I think they were probably at a moment in their lives where they were making the transition from doing that in an unhealthy way to doing it in a meaning making way. Right. Yeah, one of the more powerful aspects of that

is like making peace with that pain and kind of transcending the shame that's associated with that. And when you can kind of own it because you've unpacked it and looked at it and shared it and worked through it, that becomes a really powerful tool for continual growth, but it requires like taking the blinders off

and dealing with it. And really the subtext of bittersweet is for all of us to do that and appreciate, all the colors of life and to really challenge ourselves to embrace these difficult emotions rather than run away from them. And the larger question that I'd love to hear from you on is like, how did we get to a culture that so forcibly,

pushes us in the direction of repressing so much? I mean, start with the Calvinists and like walk us through like how we got to here and how we can kind of grow and mature as a society to have a healthier relationship with the nuance and complexity of the human psyche. Yeah, okay. I'll start with like a glimpse of where we are right now and then I'm gonna go back in time.

So where we are right now, our problem is that we look at ourselves and each other in terms of are we winners or are we losers you know it's like this great binary and it's a kind of harsh binary and you know the word loser literally has gone up astronomically in usage over the past decades but going back in time so we started out as um with calvinism as the dominant religion and Calvinism, the idea was that everybody was bound for either heaven or hell, and you really had no choice

of which direction you were going in. But what you could do was kind of demonstrate to yourself and others that you were heaven bound. And the way that you demonstrated that was by being a really hard worker. So everything was about labor and hard work. But then like in the 19th century, that started to transform

as we became more of a business culture. It became more about like how success, not so much how hard a worker are you, but how successful are you at business or how much do you fail in business? And then the question starts getting asked, well, when you succeed or fail, what is the reason? And with these echoes of Calvinism, and Barbara Ehrenreich talks about this in her book really brilliantly, with these echoes of

Calvinism, we answer the question by saying, you succeeded or failed because of something inside you. It's like you're heaven bound, you're hell bound. You're either a born success or a born failure. And the more you start looking at things that way and really believing that, the more you need to develop the emotional affect, you know, the emotional self-presentation of somebody who's a success. So you don't wanna talk about anything

that suggests an acquaintance with longing or loss or fragility or memento mori, like anything, you're not gonna talk about anything like that. You're gonna be presenting in a really tearful way. And over the course of the 19th century, that became really explicit so that people stopped wanting

even to talk about bad weather. Like that was seen as not cool, not appropriate to notice that there were clouds in the sky, literally. And that's kind of increased over time. So then you get to the Great Depression in 1929, and you have all these people who are losing all their money because of external forces, and some of them are committing suicide, and they're described as losers in the journalism. They're described as losers. And that's the heritage that we're still living with now.

There's, I think, a deep fear that people have of being a loser and a deep need to be a winner instead of seeing the actual truth of the situation is, which is that in all lives, there are successes and failures and wins and losses. And that's just how it is. Right, it's so interesting that it emanated out of this heaven, hell binary.

Yeah. Winners, losers, heaven, hell, rich, poor, these binaries that put us in buckets and allow us to judge each other. Yeah, and to judge ourselves. Yeah, ourselves probably more detrimentally, right? Yeah, I mean, the fear, when people start feeling like they're getting closer to the loser side

of that divide, I think the fear and the shame in that is overwhelming. But has that not even expanded? Because now as we have moved even more towards this self-help obsessed culture, it's a happy, sad thing, or a depressed, happy thing. And we're afraid of people who are demonstrating challenging emotions and we're sort of repelled by them.

Like we move away from the person who's grieving or the person who is depressed because we don't have a comfort level or a vocabulary for how to communicate with them. And there's this sense that it's contagious, right? Like we can't be associated with that. That's gotta go over there. And even our relationship with death to bring memento mori up, like it's in a hidden corner and we don't

talk about it and we pretend it's not going to happen to us. And we've sort of stripped it from our kind of daily experience of life, despite its inevitability. And there is something pathological about that. Oh yeah. And we allow people to grieve for a certain amount of time, but then after that, there's something- Get over it, yeah. Yeah, it's time. It's socially unacceptable.

And that's because it's making me uncomfortable that you're still grieving. Like, I don't really wanna be around that. You know, I think it's that. And I also think there's something, there's a way in which we judge it. You know, there's something distasteful about it. There's weakness.

Yeah, like think of the admiration that we have for people who, they're like moving forward in a supposedly healthy way. Like even in the most recent version of the DSM manual in psychology, they've now limited the amount of time for grieving, I'm forgetting now the exact amount, but it's like a very short amount of time. And then after that, you're considered to have a diagnosis

if you're still in a state of grief for a loved one. Right, that's so weird. Yeah, and like in Bittersweet, I tell the story of, do you know Susan David? I do, yeah. Yeah, so she's a dear friend of mine. She's a great psychologist and her work came out of her experience when she was 14 and she lost her father to cancer. Okay. And Susan is a really cheerful person by temperament. That's like who she is.

So because of that, she felt all this cultural pressure. And because she's so cheerful, she put on a big show. For the whole year after her father died, she like went to school, acted as if nothing was wrong. Everyone would say, are you okay? She was like, sure, I'm fine.

But in the meantime, she's off in the bathroom vomiting up her lunch every day. So that's how it was coming out for her. And she would have kept going on that way until in her English class, she had a teacher who had also lost a parent at a young age. And the teacher hands out blank notebooks to the class

and she looks Susan straight in the eyes. And she says, I want you to write down what you're truly feeling. And no one else is going to read it except me. And I'm hardly going to comment at all, but just write the truth, write the truth of your experiences. And Susan said that moment for her, it was like a revolution in a notebook. So it was like the only time she had been invited to actually tell the truth. And that was her healing. And like, that's what we don't do.

Right, and that's what leads to this whole life of exploring emotional resilience and how to develop it, right? And certainly by repressing or running away from these difficult experiences and emotions is to undercut our ability to develop that level of resilience to weather the difficult times that we all inevitably face.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, and that the more, I mean, there's really interesting data on it, that the more we have a sense of the fragility of existence, the more of a sense of gratitude we have, the less angry we feel, the more we invest in meaningful relationships. Right.

What I was fascinated by in the book was you dipping your toe into the life extension world. Yeah. You know, the sort of we're gonna live forever crowd. Yeah. And I know some of those people and I'm familiar with that kind of scene. So walk me through that because there is some,

there's so many profound philosophical questions that come up. So many. Psychological profiles that you could render about the people who are obsessed with this that I think are not getting an appropriate amount of attention or discussion. Yeah, I agree with you.

And in fact, when I went to one of these conferences, I was just assuming that there was gonna be all kinds of philosophical discussion about whether this was a good idea or not, or like what the downsides were. No, it's totally Pollyanna on that. Oh my God, no, no, no. It's much, yeah.

I mean, it's much more like, thank goodness, everybody here is beyond all those questions. We don't have to talk about that. We know it's a good idea. That's really the vibe. Yeah. Yeah, I've had a couple people on the podcast who are from that world and I can't help but think,

like philosophically, like what is your relationship to life if you could live for 300 years? couple people on the podcast who are from that world. And I can't help but think like, philosophically, like what is your relationship to life if you could live for 300 years? Like, how does that change the choices that you make, the risks that you're willing to incur, and, you know, the kind of relationships that you're going to have with people? But that doesn't really seem to be of interest to the people that are. I mean, they talk about it, but they talk about it in a way that resolves it very neatly. Like they talk about terror management theory,

which is basically, okay, that's the idea that when we are, there are all these studies that show that when we're reminded of our mortality, that in the immediate aftermath of being reminded of it, we become much more like focused on our in-groups and hostile to out-groups. So there's like studies where they'll remind people of their mortality and then ask them how much hot sauce they wanna put on the food

that they're gonna give to people in the opposing political party. And people will put on too much hot sauce because they get into this sort of anti-outgroup mode. So, okay. So they take that and they say, well, this means that when we solve the problem of mortality, we're also going to be solving all our other problems of conflict and war and everything else. Cause it's like, if we could solve this, we'll solve everything else. And that's where I feel like,

I met there's ways in which I'm actually really sympathetic to the Life Extension Project, but I do feel like it's kind of missing the larger point that our problems are not only about the fact of mortality. The problems are much deeper than that. They have to do with just all the longings of existence that would be here whether or not we lived forever.

Depending upon, yeah, like they're still there. We're not gonna sidestep that. And I think, of course, there's something aspirational about tackling this problem and it's fascinating to learn about it. And there have been these amazing breakthroughs in science, et cetera. But I can't help but think whether or not it's being driven by just a deep seated fear of death that's so desperate that we must solve this problem because I don't want to have to face that myself. Well, I think they would actually, in some ways, agree with that. I mean, part of the reason that I went to see them and to study them was because I was interested

just in this culture that we live in, you know, that wants everything to be like winning and sunshine all the time. And I thought this would be a really interesting example of that. But what I actually found is all the scientists would get up on stage and present their thing. They would begin their scientific presentation, usually by telling a really heart-rending story

of a person that they had lost in their lives, you know, of how harrowing and how terrible the bereavement had been. And so they were like quite explicitly saying, they were like, this is so terrible. You know, we just, as a society should not be tolerating this, this deep pain. We should be doing something about it. So there was a way in which I was like really moved because I felt like they, they were doing their own version of taking a pain and trying to transform it into something else. And their something else is immortality itself. Yeah. And what they would say, I think to your point is,

well, the idea that we have that there's a way in which death or mortality gives us meaning to life, that that's like a nice story that we tell ourselves because we have no choice. But if we really did have a choice, then we might not be telling that story anymore. Right, right, right.

And I'm not so sure about that. Time will tell. But it's funny that you say 300 years And I'm not so sure about that. Time will tell. But it's funny that you say 300 years, cause I feel like, you know, 300 years, that kind of sounds sort of plausible to me. Cause if you think about it, we used to only, we would have life expectancies of 35 or 40, you know, now it's 70 or 80 or whatever it is.

And we're totally comfortable with having doubled it. So. But that's different from the achieving life, you know, now it's 70 or 80 or whatever it is. And we're totally comfortable with having doubled it. So- But that's different from the achieving life, what is it called? Life expectancy, velocity or escape velocity. Yeah, what is that? Longevity philosophy? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Something like that. Where just basically every year you live, like the science extends the ability to extend the life. Right, right. Proportionately more or whatever. So that by definition, that means you could potentially live forever. Right, theoretically.

Yeah. We'll see, I don't know. But on that subject, that's not a distant cousin from this idea of transcendence. And so I'm interested in how this dovetails into a discussion around spirituality and religion, these traditions of religion that relate to bittersweetness that kind of percolate across all these different variations

of practice, I guess, because that's super interesting, right? There is something elegiac about all of this. Oh yeah, absolutely. And I had no idea when I started off in this path that I was gonna end up writing and thinking so much about religion. But I started realizing this whole subject

is like intricately bound up with that because almost every religion that I see, like especially the mystical sides of our religions, they're all talking about this state of longing that all beings have for, you know, union with the divine essentially. And the idea that the state of longing is actually healthy in that way, you know, like Rumi, the 12th century Sufi poet, he says, be thirsty. The longing you express. Well, he has this one poem where he's talking

about a man who's praying to God, to Allah, and he doesn't get an answer back. And so he becomes kind of bitter and disappointed and he stops praying. And then he falls into a sleep and he's not sleeping well. And Khidir, who's the guide of souls, comes along to him and says, why did you stop praying? And the man says, because I never got an answer.

And the guide of souls says to him, the longing that you express, that is the return message. And the grief that you cry out from is exactly what draws you towards union. And so this is the message that we get again and again from these traditions. Like the grief is what draws you towards the ultimate love that you seek.

And the yearning, it's almost like a spiritual or a Boris though, because these things are a circle, they're a cycle, right? Like the yearning, the answer that you seek is in the yearning itself, right? Yeah, yeah. That's really beautiful. Yeah, and I don't think, well, I don't know.

I mean, maybe someone does, I wouldn't know, but I don't know that we ever like actually get there on this earth, but there's something about the act of- The striving. Of drawing closer that is intensely satisfying. Yeah, and how did that exploration land for you as somebody who kind of identifies as agnostic, but you had this grandfather who

was this beautiful rabbi. Where did this lead you? Well, it was really interesting for me because I grew, yeah, my grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi and like, I really adored him. Everybody did. And he was like such a huge figure in my life. And at the same time, I've always been deeply agnostic in my life. And at the same time, I've always been deeply agnostic and didn't really honestly think that much about religion once I became an adult. You know, I was kind of dismissive of it, if anything. But I don't know, I started to realize that I don't know. I started to realize that the thing that I feel when I listen to sad music and what someone else might feel, and I do to some extent when I'm in nature or something like that, the way I see it is that they're all manifestations of the same experience. And for some people, they have that experience through the language of the divine and religion. And for some people, they have that experience through the language of the divine and

religion. And for others, they have it through music or art or sports or whatever it is, but we're all kind of reaching for that same state. And in fact, there's this Hasidic parable that I came across that talks about, there's a rabbi and he has a man in his congregation who he notices is paying no attention at all and isn't really buying what the rabbi is saying. And then the rabbi hums for the man a yearning melody, a bittersweet melody. And the man listens and he says, now I understand what you've been trying to tell me all this time because I'm feeling this intense longing to be united with God. Right. And I read that and I was like, oh my God, I'm that old man. Yeah. That's you. That's Leonard Cohen for you. Right? And what is it about that minor key or that musical sensibility that elevates the soul and can't help but leave you wondering

whether there is something more beyond the senses. Yeah, I think it's because it's touching that sense that we all have of there being some other place that we're reaching for. You know, you see it in like the Wizard of Oz, right? It's like Dorothy's longing for somewhere over the rainbow. You look at all our children's stories, there's always the protagonist who enters the scene at the moment they become an orphan. That's when the whole adventure begins, like the moment they're thrust into the state of primal longing.

So I think that's just tapping into a DNA that we all share, although it manifests differently for each of us. Right, as you know, there's this idea that, you know, this shared proclivity towards their sweetness allows us to understand that we are one super organism, but perhaps it extends beyond the vagus nerve, right? And you who like, you're exploring Judaism and Sufism and these various religions and mystical traditions. And there are similarities that they're very different in many ways, but there are these similarities that unite them.

are these similarities that unite them? And from that, can one extrapolate some truth about the beyond or our relationship with something more ethereal and non-material? Yeah. And it's not like I don't know that exploring all this gives definitive answers to any of these lifelong questions, but for me, it gave, it offers a kind of roadmap of how to live, because what it does is it makes you notice how incredibly miraculous everything around us actually is, how sacred it really is. Whether you're an atheist or believer, I'm just using those words, like the wonder of it all. And you can enter into a relationship with that kind of wonder that really,

it's a complete enhancement, a really transformation of what life is like. It's a better way to live. It's a much better way to live. And it can be, the good news is you can cultivate it in whatever tradition suits you. Absolutely, absolutely. There are so many paths towards that.

Yeah, and we actually found, in that bittersweet quiz that we did, that people who score high in bittersweetness also score high in states of awe and wonder and spirituality. It's not surprising, of course. It's not surprising. Yeah. Right.

So what is the relationship between bittersweetness and awe and wonder? They're like two sides of a similar coin. Are they not? Yeah, they are because they basically they're both born of they basically, they're both born of a receptivity and a noticing of everything that is. So you're not only noticing one side of what is,

you're like looking for the truth of everything. And that's what gets you into that state. Yeah, when I think of awe and wonder, I think of being present. Like if you're present enough and you just see the leaf on the tree, that could inspire awe and wonder, I think of being present. Like if you're present enough and you just see the leaf on the tree, that could inspire awe and wonder, but it requires like a level of attention

that kind of alludes the way that we live our lives, right? Like you have to really, really be practiced in that or habitual in it. There's another parable that I came across that I found incredibly useful as a way to live. And this one also came from the Kabbalah. And it's the idea that all of creation was originally this intact divine vessel.

It was all intact. And then it broke, the vessel broke. And the world that we're living in now is the world after the breakage. And yet the shards of this vessel are scattered everywhere around us. And so what we can do, we're still living in the broken world, but we're living in a world where you can bend down and pick up these shards of light. And I love this as a way to live because it's like a way of making sense of the tragedies that are still and always part of this world, but yet being able to turn in the direction of joy and beauty because you're not denying the tragedies. You're not believing that

a utopia is going to come, but you're still able to bend down and pick up the shards of light that you personally notice. And we're all gonna notice different ones, but they're yours for the taking, yours to pick up. Yeah. That's really beautiful. But there's also packed into that a little bit of a lament of what once was or could have been had it not shattered.

That's true. But I don't know a way to live without that lament when you look at the tragedies in the world. Like you have to make space for the lament also. Sure. Otherwise you're just living with blinders, I think. Yeah, yeah. Is this attunement to bittersweetness trainable. Like you can take the bittersweet test

and see where you score on it. And certain people are obviously more attuned or receptive to this than others. But to the extent that appreciating bittersweetness or cultivating it or kind of synthesizing all the different colors of your experience into some kind of creative offering and making sense of it for yourself

seems to be something that anybody can do. And even if they score lower on that test, they could increase their score and perhaps like elevate the richness of their life experience in so doing. Yeah, so there are gonna be some people who are born into the world with that high sensitivity trait and they're probably gonna tend in this bittersweet direction from the beginning.

Then there's gonna be a lot of people who just by virtue of life experience come to more of a bittersweet awareness over time. Right. Once they- Things happen in their life. Things happen. Jar them out of their lack of empathy

or whatever it is, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And for people who aren't there yet, but would wanna be, I think it's just a matter of turning your awareness in your direction, I'm sorry, turning your awareness in your direction. I'm sorry, turning your awareness in certain directions. That's scary though. Well, it's scary if you think that by doing that, you'll never come out again. And that's what I hear from a lot of people. They're like, I'm afraid if I go there, I won't be able to come out.

out. And yet there's no reason that that should be so because these two states are always paired, right? It's joy and sorrow. So there's no reason you have to stay in one state. It's more just a sense of being able to tell the truth about everything that's happening or everything you observe. Yeah. So why do you think it's scary? I mean, I just think you're asking people to confront painful past emotions or to look objectively at stuff that they've kind of worked hard to build walls around, right? So that prospect of deconstructing those walls and really grappling with some past trauma or something that occurred or whatever that you've kind of really tried hard to like move away from requires a certain level of courage. And I think it is frightening for a lot of people.

Like I know a lot of people who have built walls around certain pains in their life. And by dent of that are able to kind of safely navigate through their life, but they wanna stay in that lane. And if you say, listen, you're missing a huge growth opportunity or a certain level of enriching life experience by ignoring that, you should look at it.

And if you work through it, like your life is gonna open up in ways you can't possibly imagine. Intellectually, they may understand that. And I can kind of see that arc awaiting that person. But for a lot of people, it's like, that's fine. I hear you, but I'm not gonna do that. And you've had that.

I mean, your story about your mom in on a certain level, like illustrates this for me. Like I, what I read in that was, you know, a certain kind of affect in your mother. Like she had her own painful experiences growing up and that very much informed how she interrelated with you at times in very unhealthy ways. But could you have been able to get your mother

to kind of confront her past traumas so that you could have had a healthier relationship with her? That seems like a very steep mountain to climb. Yeah, no, I think people are at different points along where they are in their lives. And sometimes you're not ready at a certain moment and you are 10 years later. And I guess another thing,

yeah, but sorry, just to go back, that's an interesting question with my mom, because I've often thought, you know, would there have been a way to have her be open to that if I had thought about how to get there to do that? And yeah, I don't think I ever did. I mean, explain a little bit, like tell a little bit of that story. The story, yeah.

So I had a really intensely close relationship with my mother growing up. It was a kind of Garden of Eden type of childhood. She was incredibly loving, devoted, warm, amazing company. We really loved each other's company. Yeah, it was really quite wondrous. But my mother had passed traumas of her own. And this made it so that when I became an adolescent,

she had a really terrible time, especially because I was the youngest child. She had a really terrible time, especially because I was the youngest child. She had a really terrible time with my growing up and becoming independent and having different ideas and different life experiences. And her reaction to that was incredibly difficult, to say the least. And I had a lot of trouble with it too. Like I felt like I didn't use these words in those days, but it was a kind of like casting out of the Garden of Eden. Like suddenly the mother that I had known all my life had transformed into a hostile person who,

where there was kind of a choice. I could either still be with her and still be a child and be loved, or I could grow up and develop and be myself and be cast out. And I don't think I ever really questioned the choice. So I went and moved in a separate direction. But the casting out part was like incredibly, incredibly painful. And my way of dealing with it, because I'm a writer and I'd loved writing since I was four years old, I wrote everything down into these diaries that I kept and went off to college. And at the end of freshman year, for some reason, I had to stay on campus for a few extra days and my parents came to take my stuff home. And just as they were getting ready to leave,

and they're like leaving with all my suitcases, I take my diaries and I hand them to my mother. And I thought at the time, like I truly, on a conscious level, I thought I was just giving them to her for safekeeping. You know, I didn't have a place to store them at school. And I never thought that she would read them on a conscious level, but of course she did. And whatever I had written there, and I say whatever,

cause I've never read them again since, but whatever I had written there, kind of like put the final nail in the coffin of our relationship. And so we still, for the decades after, we were still seeing each other at holidays and doing all the regular family stuff. But the relationship really was never the same again.

And it was like, it was a loss for me that I couldn't, for years years I couldn't even talk about my mother without crying I couldn't mention her name but I will say there's been this amazing rapprochement now my mother has Alzheimer's and she's still she she only has a few conversational lanes that she can travel, but when she's on those lanes, she still feels like herself. And she has completely forgotten all the difficult years we had. She's forgotten them. And so all this time through my adulthood, I had always been asking myself,

that childhood that you remember as being so wonderful, like maybe it wasn't really true. You know, maybe that was just like a child's misperception, but now the mother of that childhood has come back. Like, and I realized like, we still, we still are that way. You know, the relationship we have now is the same relationship we had when I was a kid. Right. So that's been a kind of amazing return. Such an interesting story.

And it's certainly, there's bittersweetness in it, of course. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so much. But the idea that you were faced with this choice of either reverting into a childlike state or just becoming the person that your mother actually wanted you to be that you were faced with this choice of either reverting into a childlike state or just becoming the person

that your mother actually wanted you to be, put you in an impossible situation without her being consciously aware of the kind of psychic toll that that would place on you. And then the bitter sweetness of never really fully reconciling that later, right? I mean, I read it as somebody who, because of her past traumas and pain

that she hadn't adequately worked through, there's this transference, like she wants you to be safe, she wants you to be upwardly mobile and all of these things. And she lovingly drives you on this kind of ambitious journey to achieving all these amazing things. But as you achieve them, of course, separation occurs. And that's a threat to this bond that she has that is so meaningful for her,

that is in part driven by the pain of her past, right? That creates this unhealthy soup where she's transferring so much of her identity onto you. And you're, as a young person, having to shoulder that burden. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, it's funny. I'm actually gonna amend something I said before,

because I think I said a minute ago that I had never really considered doing anything other than growing into a separate person, but actually I'm not sure that's quite right. Because I do remember many times saying to myself, like I loved her so much, all I wanted was for her to be happy. So I felt like, well, maybe I should do some of these things

that she's asking so that she can still be happy, which is a very difficult thing. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And did you have a sense of her self-awareness around any of this or just no? I don't think so. Yeah, I don't really know. I don't think there was so much of it, but what I will say happened over the years

and especially during the time I wrote this book, as I told you, it used to be that I couldn't talk about her at all without crying. And I wrote her story. I wrote the story in the book. And I was really worried about what was gonna happen when I would go out and do interviews about the book.

I thought I won't be able to speak about this without breaking down. And despite everything I'm saying about the book, I thought I won't be able to speak about this without breaking down. And despite everything I'm saying in the book about being comfortable with all our emotions, I didn't really wanna do that. Right, that's interesting. So I didn't know what would happen. But I remember talking to somebody about this dilemma

and he said to me, talk to me when you're done writing the book because you might actually resolve some of these issues. And at the time he said that, I thought, oh my gosh, that's never going to happen. But in fact, that's exactly what happened. There's just a sense of peace that I now have with everything that happened. And I don't know, just so much love for her and understanding of it all and like wishing that it had been different,

but I don't know, it's just a complete reconciliation. Well, that's the beauty and the gift of reckoning with your bitter sweetness, right? Like you can have some kinship with Leonard Cohen, who I'm sure similarly was having conflicting emotions and was in some sort of pain and he was trying to work through it. So what does he do?

He writes a song about it, right? You write a book about it. And in the process of writing this book, you find a way to heal and make peace with yourself and your loved ones and come out the other side like a more complete human. And that goes to the very thesis of the book, which is channeling your pain and, you know, turning it into a creative offering. So it's like a, you know, a meta exam, like it's all very meta in that

regard, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's true. And I do wanna be careful to say, like for anybody listening, again, that we use that word creative in a really general way. So it's not like you have to go and write a book or write a song or, you know, like be a Grammy award winner or something. It's not, it has nothing to do with that. It's more just about going through a kind of transformation

of like taking the pain and transforming it into something of meaning. Yeah, well, just confronting it and walking with it and finding a way to come to the other side through whatever modality suits you. Yeah, it's funny. I've been trying to write this story for so many years. Like I said this in the book,

I first started writing about it when I was in college. And my creative writing teacher said, you're way too close to the story. You should like put it in a drawer and not take it out again for 30 years. So it's been a long time. And now it's 30 years later. You're too close to it.

But you're still so close to it, you know, but you're distant enough from it that you could write about it with some level of objectivity. But the fact that it creates so much emotion in you, it's still very present with you. Yeah, it's still very present, but like with a lot less turmoil than there used to be.

Like I experience very little turmoil now talking about it because I really do feel such a sense of resolution between us and between like my relationship to my mother in my heart is very different from what it had been. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. On this idea of binaries, heaven, hell, of binaries, heaven, hell, rich, poor, and the like, there is this undercurrent in our society around the pursuit of happiness, right? It's in the declaration of independence, like the pursuit of happiness.

And now we're in a happiness obsessed culture. I think we're getting to a point where we're maturely grappling with what happiness means and trying to create a healthier relationship with how to build that into our lives. But in reading your book, I couldn't help but think what would happen if that phrase in the Declaration of Independence said something like, may you pursue longing or something like that. May you grapple with your own bitter sweetness. Like if we had created a cultural priority

around a more nuanced relationship with the conflicting emotions about what it means to be human, how would that percolate into our culture and change our relationship with the darker side of things that make the brighter things so much brighter? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I've thought about that with the Declaration of Independence

because I actually, I mean, I enjoy being happy as much as the next person. So it's not, so I don't think happiness is the problem, but maybe it's just how we define happy, maybe meaning- Happiness at the cost of everything else. So I don't think happiness is the problem, but maybe it's just how we define happy. Maybe meaning- Happiness at the cost of everything else. Yeah, and I think we end up interpreting happiness as a kind of like hedonic type of happiness

as opposed to happiness where you feel a deep sense of meaning in your life. And I also think part of the problem is that we have such a separation of church and state, which is great in most ways, but it means that all these questions that religion naturally grapples with,

like this existential longing that we all have, we tend to relegate that to what you experience, you know, at church on Sundays, as opposed to just thinking of that as part of everyday life. Yeah, but as we become more agnostic as a culture, are we not adequately in constructs where we are actively confronted with grappling with these

philosophical questions. Wait, say the question again? Meaning like you're saying that the purview of that kind of inquiry would be in the church or whatever spiritual tradition, but as we've become kind of more, we've become a culture that seems at least from my perspective, like less interested in those types of outlets. And so where does that leave us in terms of, how we're dealing with those bigger spiritual and philosophical questions?

Yeah, that's the problem. Cause we've always relegated it just to that. So it was already bad enough when- But if we're not going there anymore. But now we don't even go there. So now it's kind of nowhere. Because, you know, Dancing with the Stars is on and- Yeah, exactly.

So I think we need to find ways of introducing this into part of everyday discourse. And you could see how much we long for it because you look at Leonard Cohen, like there's a reason that his song, Hallelujah, was making people cry for years on end. It's like the most covered song, I think, in history or something like that.

People are relating to that. As soon as they hear it, they open up to it. So we need to be finding different ways of introducing this into everyday life. And I think part of that would actually be just proactively engaging with beauty more in everyday life, like at work, at school, like actively encouraging people to bring in

things that they find beautiful or meaningful and be sharing those. You don't even have to talk about bittersweetness so much. It's like through engaging with beauty, all of that comes out. How do you feel about Jeff Buckley's rendition of Hallelujah? Is that sacrilege? It's not sacrilege at all.

I like it. It's not one of my favorites, but I do really like it. But no, I'm all for covers. He captures the bittersweetness in his music beautifully. He sure does. He really does. I like the Rufus Wainwright one. Oh yes, very good.

Yeah. That's right, I'd forgotten about that one. I think a good story to tell would be the story of Beethoven that you share around that performance, because that so kind of captures this idea of, you know, channeling that emotional experience into something shared. Yeah. That breeds that community piece, right? that breeds that community piece, right? Yeah, so Beethoven, you know, one of his, maybe his most famous work is Ode to Joy,

which everybody loves so much. Maybe we could even play it somehow into the episode. Or drop it in. Yeah, drop it in. And Ode to Joy actually started out as a poem by Frederick Schiller. And Beethoven loved this poem because it expressed all these ideals of love and brotherhood that were really important to him. So he labored for years.

I want to say it was 30 years, maybe getting that wrong, but forever, to set this poem to music. During the time that he's working on it, he starts to lose his hearing and he has all these other personal troubles. And by the time of the debut performance, after all these years of creating Ode to Joy, he's now totally deaf. And yet he's like desperate for this music to be performed the way he hears it in his head. And so he stands on stage with the orchestra, with his back turned to the audience, and he's facing the orchestra and he's like throwing his body around, trying to direct them to play the music the way he sees it in his mind. He's standing next to the conductor. And because he can't hear any of it, he doesn't see the, because he can't hear any of it,

he doesn't even realize when the music is actually over, when they're done playing. But when it's finished, there's a 20 year old soprano and she turns him around to face the audience who are so overwhelmed. They're like standing up in their seats with tears streaming down their faces

and raising their hands in tribute to this man who's given them this experience of longing, which you listen to that music and it's an ode to joy. It's literally about joy. And yet you can't help but hear the longing and the sorrow that's like echoing in its notes. It's just the most incredible. That's what makes the music so incredible. in its notes. It's just the most incredible. That's what makes the music so incredible.

And in fact, there is an economist at MIT whose name I'm forgetting right now, but he did this fascinating study where he looked at Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt at their music. And he read all the different letters they had written over their lifetimes. And he coded the letters for emotions. And he found that during the periods

when their letters had a lot of emotions expressed, like sorrow and longing and grief and like that, that was when they were composing their most profound best works of art. Wow. Yeah, yeah. There's just this incredible confluence there. And I feel like we know it instinctively.

Yeah. But we're not sure what to do with it. And it's hard to- And we don't wanna go deaf. It's hard to like canonize it. Like, oh, this note and this note, it's more than that, right? Like it's the performance of the music as well. You have the story of the violinist, right?

Like when you are carrying a certain emotional resonance, it gets translated into those notes in a certain way that we immediately recognize, but you can't quite define. And in telling that story about Beethoven, it's very cinematic. Like I imagine, like he's just, you know, like doing his thing with such, you know, dramatic physicality, but because he can't hear,

he's completely detached with how it's being received. And perhaps even thinking like, is this even working at all? Or am I able to kind of get out of these musicians, the performance that I hear in my mind, only to find out that it is united and really just uplifted and connected this huge group of people.

And I think it's really profound example of the power of sharing those types of emotions and figuring out a way to create a container for it that people can consume that really is this antidote to what is dividing us. And it's like, I don't have to tell you, like it does feel so divided out there. And I often despair of our ability

to kind of mend that division. And it used to be when a tragic event befell the country or the world, we would feel like one, we would feel like that super organism. And now it feels like when that happens, everybody retreats to their corner and figures out how to blame the other side for it. And like, how do we move forward as a functional, healthy society with this sort of

rift and dynamic that doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon? Yeah, I know. And I mean, I don't have answers any more than anybody has the answer, but I do think that one thing that we could and should be doing is creating spaces for people to truly be telling their stories. But to have the stories not be attached to policy prescriptions or politics or anything like that, just tell each other the stories,

like just get to know each other on that elemental level. Obviously like our social media platforms right now are designed to do the exact opposite of that. But sometimes like if we could have a social media platform that would give people space to just share it all. Maybe it needs to be done anonymously. Like the moth or something like that. Yeah, something like that.

Yeah, it is. Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, not everybody wants to tell their story with a name attached the way you do with the moth. done anonymously. Or something like that. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, it is. Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say, not everybody wants to tell their story with a name attached the way you do with a moth. But you know how that- Maybe there's a way to anonymize it.

Yeah, yeah, or have that option. Yeah, I think there's something about storytelling, like honest, open, vulnerable storytelling that is akin to this notion of bittersweetness and perhaps it emanates from the vagus nerve as well. Like when we hear somebody share a story and we have the sense that that story is true to that person and honest and authentically rendered,

that also breeds connection, right? Like whether it's bittersweet or not, like just the storytelling as a vehicle for connection and also learning, like it doesn't have to be prescriptive, but it's more effective than a prescription when whatever that notion is, is kind of wed into the narrative. Like we as human beings are able to kind of synthesize that

and then ultimately kind of holdize that and then ultimately kind of hold onto it and perhaps even practice it in our lives in a way that is very different than if somebody said, here's the five things that you need to do today. We remember the story, we forget the listicle. And I think there's something really profound about that as well that perhaps can be traced back evolutionarily, back to the campfires of yore and the like. Absolutely, I mean, I actually think podcasts play a huge role in that. I think part of the reason that podcasts

have become the amazing medium that they are is that they're touching into that campfire impulse that we have. You know, there's something about the voice in your ear as you're listening, where you feel like you're like bonded with all the other listeners sitting around a campfire. It's connection.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So there you go. There's your next book. What are you working on now? Are you on another seven year jaunt to the next one? Well, I mean, I probably will be

at some point. I have two different book ideas that I'm playing with, but I actually want to start a podcast also. So I'm probably going to be doing that in the next year. And that's going to be my next big project. That's exciting. Can you say more about that or is that under wraps right now? It's under wraps right now, but I'll definitely let you know when it's ready. It probably won't be until 2023. So what is it that you want people to get out of Bittersweet the most? Like if they're to take away one core idea? I mean, I guess I'd say the idea of that whatever pain you can't get rid of

to make that your creative offering. And then another large idea I would say, and this applies to quiet as well as to bittersweet, is the idea of there being ways of being in this world that are not talked about, that are actually kind of hidden superpowers. Because I hear now from so many people, like the letters that I'm getting from people who have read Bittersweet are so similar to the letters

I've gotten all these years from quiet readers. Like it's all these people saying, you know, I felt this all my life and either I never had words for it or I never felt like it was okay to talk about because it's not seen as the right way to be. And yet there is a sense of it being a superpower once you understand it as such.

Yeah. I think it would be helpful to also share some words for perhaps the extroverts out there that have introverts in their lives. Like maybe they have a kid who's introverted and they're struggling to understand why this person wants to be in their room and doesn't wanna go to the party.

Or I think from a parenting perspective, I have an introverted child. A child is very introverted and it's been an education and a learning experience to like, even though I have introverted proclivities, I still have some extra, you know, it's sort of like, I don't wanna judge my child because this is my child's choice,

or this is what, you know, this person needs to, you know, recharge the battery in terms of like how we parent and how we think about supporting the introverts in our life. Oh yeah, I mean, there's so much to say there, but I mean, the first thing as you're saying is to just really understand like where your child or spouse or whomever it is, is coming from

and what do they need to be happy. With children, I think the fear often is that if they're not kind of out there socializing enough, that they're not gonna like get enough of the bounties that life has to offer. So one thing to know is that the research shows that if your child has one or two close friends, that's what they need.

Like if your kid has no friends at all, that's when you should be concerned. But if they have just a few friends and if they're happy with that, then that's fine. And to, I mean, for all introverts, there's the question of if a person wants to like stay home from a party or something, is that because of a true preference of how they want to spend their time? Or is it out of a sense of fear or discomfort? Sure. Right.

And like with a child, if you think it's fear or discomfort, then that's when you can be a really helpful parent in helping them to develop strategies and work through that. But if it's just preference of how they wanna spend their time, then you wanna make sure they don't become too isolated, but you also wanna honor their preference. Yeah, that becomes very nuanced and difficult

because is it a preference or is it just you're afraid of trying something new? Like you need to get pushed a little bit out into the world and learn new things and try things and fail and all of that to Susan David's point of emotional resilience. Like you can't procure that in a vacuum. Yeah. And the answer to that, like if you sense that it's fear or discomfort that's standing in the way And the answer to that, like if you sense that it's fear or discomfort that's standing in the way, the answer to that for parenting, but also for our own selves is to expose your child or yourself to the thing that you fear, but to do it in very small steps so

that it's manageable and that your, so your child has small wins as they go. So like a lot of introverted kids, just for example, are a little iffy about swimming when they're first introduced. And the answer is not to like throw them in the water. It's more to say, okay, let's go to the pool on a day when it's super quiet. We'll go like late on a Tuesday evening and you're gonna dip your toe in the water and that's it.

And then we're gonna celebrate and we're gonna go home. And then you go back the next day and you do a little more and in the water and that's it. And then we're gonna celebrate and we're gonna go home. And then you go back the next day and you do a little more and a little more and a little more and little by little, they come to love it. And then you can't tell the difference between them and the kid who just jumped in from the beginning. But it's like a lot of times introverted kids

need a longer runway that they travel down before they take off and fly. And they need to know that you're with them on the runway and admiring them and respecting them as they travel that runway. Right. Yeah, that's really good advice. I like that.

The final thing I wanted to ask you about is this idea of getting, being so good in your particular role professionally as an introvert, but inevitably getting promoted into a role that requires extroversion, which is the story of your life, right? Like to write this book about introversion, to be an introvert, and then to become the public facing,

you know, persona behind this idea and this movement have foisted you onto the public stage where now it's kind of your job to like be extroverted in public, right? And having to kind of learn a new set of skills. And I think it's common probably in, you know, less extreme examples of people who excel at their job and then suddenly they get promoted into a role

that requires a completely different skillset that is at odds with who they wanna be or what they're good at. Yeah, okay. So, I mean, the first thing I would say is that when that happens, that's really the moment when you know whether you love and care about your work or not, because it's one thing to have to go outside

your comfort zone in the service of work that you love. And it's another thing to have to do it for a job that you don't actually care about that much. So like, I'm really like, I care so much about what I'm doing and I love writing so much and these ideas that it's like worth it to me to go through the parts that are more of a stretch. So in some ways, introverts can see

that as an advantage, that they're less likely to get stuck in the wrong job because it's just going to be too painful at the end of the day when they get promoted. But also, so the psychologist Brian Little talks about this a lot, the idea that in this service of work or people we care about, we can and do and should sometimes step out of character, but you have to do it in a way that honors your own self and you have to give yourself lots of restorative niches to come back. So like I do that all the time. Like when I go out on trips and I'm giving talks or interviews or whatever, I spend so much time afterwards ordering room service and just like chilling in the hotel. I feel you on that. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you can't wait to get back to the hotel room

and be alone. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I really like honor that time and I guard it really carefully. And then I also, you know, I feel like I'm lucky

because I also get to spend a lot of time doing my work is just like sitting at a cafe writing. Right. So I do think it's worth asking oneself, like if you get to a point where your work is having you constantly doing things that are outside your comfort zone, it might be the wrong place for you.

But if you can get it to a manageable place and it's in the service of something you care about, then it's okay. Yeah, if you being like this public facing person on the subject of bittersweetness or introversion meant that you couldn't write anymore because now you're running a large organization that's trying to foster these ideas,

that probably would not be something you would want. That would be too high of a cost. Way too high of a cost. Even if it would make you super successful and push these initiatives through and change the world, it's not within your constitution to do so. Yeah. And having that self-awareness to recognize that.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, not your, I feel like it's not my constitution. It's not my calling. It's not what I feel like I should be doing. Yeah, but no, I am super careful about that when I go and do these public facing things. Yeah, and is it non-anxiety producing for you now because you're so practiced at it? So it's not like extremely anxiety producing anymore

the way it used to be for me. Really not at all. I feel like I've overcome that. But I would still say that, you know, a morning in which I am looking at a day full of publicity versus a morning where I'm looking at a day full of writing with my laptop. Those are completely different mornings.

Two different experiences. Yeah, of course. Two different experiences. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe everybody feels that way. But I feel like it's probably more intense. The difference between those two

is probably more intense for me. Right. Like, I think I read actually that you, am I right about this? That you spend your mornings doing exercise and writing and contemplative things. The first part of the day. Yeah, and then you do podcast interviews

and things like that later. And when I read that, I thought that's really interesting. I don't think that would work for me because if I knew that I had the public facing side happening later in the day, I don't know that I would be able to enjoy as much the writing and contemplative stuff. It spoils the other stuff earlier in the day.

Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. But it sounds like you don't experience that. No, it definitely, like public speaking creates a lot of anxiety for me. But like doing podcasts less so. And it's something I, you know, I could do it in the morning too,

but I just, I need that time for, that's a recharge the battery time, right? Like if I don't recharge the battery, then when I come in to do this other stuff, like I'm just not at my best. So I have to protect that time for self-care. And that doesn't mean that I always do it perfectly or that I don't make exceptions

because life intervenes and all of that. But I try really hard to like, that's how I preserve, you know, who I am, I think. And the whole thing. And it's a privilege, not everybody can have that. Right, absolutely. And I recognize that. But it's pretty fundamental to kind of how I do things.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I have my, you'll appreciate this, like my home office is a shipping container that we kitted out into like an office. So it's just like a writing office with bookshelves and things like that. And that's where I kind of can work at home. So it's customized on the inside and, you know, has an air conditioner and all that kind of stuff, but it's literally a shipping container. Right. And when, and, and when we were kind of figuring out how to tweak it and customize it the kind of contractor that we hired to like, help us with this, he's like, well, you're going to want a big window and you should do, and it should be like this, let all the sunlight in. I was like, no, I don't want any window.

Like I want it to be like, I literally want the sunlight in. I was like, no, I don't want any window. Like I want it to be like, I literally want to have the experience of being in the womb, like to feel like on some level, on a primal level, like that's what makes me feel safe and protected. Yeah, no, I totally understand. And then he still put a little window in and then I hung a shade over it and so I can black it out.

Anyway. I hope that office designers are listening to that. Cause they're all like, you're crazy. You're gonna want this. I'm like, I'm telling you, I'm not gonna want it. Anyway, any last thoughts for the introverts out there grappling with bittersweetness? Or we wrap it up.

Yeah, I think we can wrap it up. Really just to understand I don't know just that my view of life I don't know if I've said this already so edit this out if I have but

lay down the truth right now my life philosophy is that there are different kinds of superpowers that exist in this world and usually we're each only granted

one or two of them you know like we know this from all the movies, right? There's like lightsabers and then there's like Spider-Man and Incredible Hulks and all these different ways of being powerful in the world. And so for people who are born with more of a bittersweet way of being

or an introverted way of being and a sensitive way of being, these are superpowers that where you're like in the stage of the movie, you're like Luke Skywalker before he knows that he has the force basically, because your culture isn't teaching you about the superpower that you naturally possess,

but it's there, it's just yours to discover. I think there's something really powerful too about that quiet person who is really grounded. There's a center of gravity and kind of an anchor to that person who knows who he or she is and is really comfortable in that quiet space that is perhaps exponentially more powerful than the boisterous person who's really loud

and perhaps charismatic, but unable to kind of have the resonance that, that quiet, powerful person can embody. I think that's right. And like, I often tell people, cause people are always, quieter people are always concerned about how do you show up in a meeting and still have presence,

especially when everybody's talking, being very dominant. But there's a way where if you're speaking from a sense of conviction, people know it. Like they feel it right away and that's what carries the power. So the answer is not to try to become a louder, more dominant person.

The answer is more to get in the habit of understanding what you truly believe and speak what you truly believe. And then people feel that. That's where the power comes from. There you go. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you.

It's really great. No, I appreciate it. The work that you do and the wisdom that you share Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. It's really great. No, I appreciate it. The work that you do and the wisdom that you share with the world is really powerful. And it's obviously changing millions and millions of people's lives. And I think these are really important topics and subjects

that previously perhaps we were too afraid to talk about and you've made it a thing. And I just wanted to publicly thank you for that. And can't wait to see what you do next. Well, thank you so much. And such a treat to get to meet you in person. And I just love the work you do. So thank you.

Thank you. The pleasure and the honor is mine. So come and talk to me again sometime. I would love it. Cool. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way,

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See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.