Next Big Idea Transcripts: Susan Cain

The transcript to my podcast conversation with Susan Cain about her new book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, follows ... You can listen to our conversation below, on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify .

Rufus Griscom: Susan Cain, welcome back to The Next Big Idea podcast.

Susan Cain: Rufus Griscom, it's so great to be here with you.

Rufus Griscom: Well, first of all Susan, how are you? How's your book tour going?

Susan Cain: Oh gosh. Well, I'm doing really well. We are recording this in that strange moment of days before my book is going to come out. And it's been a really long time since I've been in this mode because Quiet came out quite a while ago.

Rufus Griscom: Right, yes, yes.

Susan Cain: And so I'm recognizing all the different experiences of it all. The first week that I was out there talking about it publicly, I had to go through my obligatory week of suffering where it feels like really nervous about it, and I wasn't quite sure how to talk about the book. And I actually had a little glass of rum with me, right on hand for every interview, but I will say now I'm speaking to you only with coffee and no rum, so that's the progression.

Rufus Griscom: That's one of the benefits or maybe liabilities of having the 10:30 a.m. slot.

Susan Cain: Oh no, no, no, I was doing it for the 10:30 slot even at the beginning.

Rufus Griscom: All right, yeah. Well, Susan, I so enjoyed your book. I've been deep in the bittersweet for a couple weeks now and arguably, I've been deep in the bittersweet for 54 years now. And if you could believe it Susan, I've done almost a hundred interviews for this podcast in the last couple years. And many of the books that I've read in the process have changed me, changed the way I live my life, but none of them have caused me to cry as many times as your book Bittersweet did. None have been more full of love and compassion for all of humanity. So thank you for turning me into a puddle.

Susan Cain: Oh my gosh. Well, thank you for saying all that. This is making me wonder, you must have taken the Bittersweet quiz that I have at the beginning of the book, and I'm curious how you scored on that.

Rufus Griscom: I was pretty off the charts. Certainly questions like do you feel goosebumps multiple times a day and are you struck by the beauty of small things? I was 10 out of 10 in that department and actually, I picked up from a friend the habit of lifting my right arm and sharing with friends, "Look, goosebumps." To just to share that visceral experience of beauty because it is just such a powerful thing, and it's a physical thing.

Susan Cain: Sorry to interrupt you, but it's so funny that you do that because I find myself multiple times a day writing in emails, goosebumps, goosebumps, I'm having goosebumps right now at what you just said. It's like not only do you feel them, but there is this need to communicate how moved you've been by something.

Rufus Griscom: Yes exactly, exactly right. And that's one of the great things about physical presence, right?

Susan Cain: That is true.

Rufus Griscom: Actually. See the goosebumps. maybe we should start with the broad thesis of the book and why you wrote it.

Susan Cain: Yeah, so this book was basically a five year or maybe more than five years, you know me, a five year quest to grasp the power of a bittersweet and even a melancholic way of being. And what I learned is that the bittersweet tradition spans centuries. It spans continents and that it teaches us that we are creatures who are born to transform pain into beauty.

Also that our feelings of bittersweetness, they are some of the greatest gateways that we have to states of creativity and connection and love. And we live in this culture that doesn't really like to talk about these kinds of emotions of sorrow and longing and poignancy, they're seen as vaguely distasteful and that is, it's a real shame because it's cutting us off from some of the best parts of ourselves.

Rufus Griscom: Yeah, I love your phrase. Longing is a sacred and generative force. It's really almost a human superpower which you point out is it odds with our culture of normative sunshine.

Susan Cain: Yes, yeah. We do live in that kind of culture. And when you hear the word longing, if you ask me, "Quick, quick, what word do you associate with the word longing?" I would say mired. You think mired and longing. You keep wallowing in it, but if you look at the anemology of the word longing, it literally means grow longer, to reach for something.

And one of the things I did with this book is really explore what our artistic and wisdom traditions have been telling us about these states of mind for the last centuries and the message of all these traditions is that the state of longing is actually what propels us to astonishing acts of creativity and of love. And there have been many words for longing. So in ancient Greece, the word was potos which meant the longing for that which is unattainably beautiful and perfect, and true.

If you look at Homer, the Odyssey, we think of that as just that's a simple tale of epic adventure, but it starts with Odysseus literally weeping on a beach for his native homeland. He's gripped with longing and with home sickness, and the understanding is that Potos is the catalyst that gets him on the epic adventure in the first place. If you look at so many of our tales, that they're all telling us the same thing.

Rufus Griscom: So extraordinary, and I think so many people feel this sense of exhaustion from the effort of remaining upbeat and positive all the time. And the idea that that's not only a burden and a form of to some degree social fraudulence, that we all engage in, but it's also cutting us off from an experience of the beautiful and experience of empathy. To me, this book feels the most natural and perfect sequel to quiet that I can imagine. To me, it has a lot of parallels, do you feel that way?

Susan Cain: Well, it's so funny because I think it ended up having a lot of parallels, but I had no idea of that when I started it. I felt like I was often in this completely new direction. I thought it had in common that it was also a work of non-nonfiction and written with my sensibility, same author. But yeah, it was only as I was going along that I realized that it was also talking about a state of being that is undervalued in our culture, and that it's the unearthing of a hidden superpower that we hadn't realized was there. So I think that's what the book is, but I didn't set out with that framework.

Rufus Griscom: Quiet in my mind which had such an enormous impact gave people permission on some level to inhabit without apology a non-mainstream personality type. And now, Bittersweet is giving us permission to have this non-normative worldview though most people who know me have rejected any claims I've ever made to having an introverted side. I think most would see me as bittersweet.

So therefore, I'm now included in those being emancipated this time around, but what's amazing to me is that in both cases, you've done this partly through, I think both books are part memoir and not memoir because I think you wanted to particularly tell your story, but more memoir because you saw that stripping yourself down and sharing deeply personal experiences was a necessary part of the process of getting the reader to develop the trust and courage to do the same thing themselves.

Susan Cain: Yeah, I think it's partly that, and it's also something you and I have talked about before. I had had on my website the observation that one of my favorite moments in life is when an author or artist expresses something that you've always felt, but never quite articulated before. To me, that's just one of the great wonders things that happens when you're alive when you have those moments, and I think it's why I became writer in the first place because it was so inspiring.

So I always feel like because of that when you're writing a book, you have to do that. You have call it telling the truth of what it's like to be alive because that's why people are reading, they're counting on you to open up in that way. I don't mean in a confessional way so much, but in a really telling the truth kind of way.

Rufus Griscom: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Absolutely. Yeah, it's so powerful. And again, I went through quite a few boxes of Kleenex, but good tears and pleasurable tears. Well Susan, let's start with music if we can because I think music is to some degree where this started for you, where you found yourself connecting in a pleasurable way to sadness and longing and it's also where you discovered that this was not necessarily considered to be normal by everybody, at least for a law student.

Susan Cain: Yes, yeah. So just like anybody else, I don't like the state of sadness. I don't like being sad. No one likes being sad, just to be clear about that. But as you say, this book started for me with a question ... Well, with an experience that I kept having. So before I became a writer, I was a lawyer for almost 10 years, very improbably.

So in my first year of law school, some friends were coming to pick me up to go to class, they were coming to my dorm and as I characteristically do, I was listening to some minor key music. It was probably Leonard Cohen and it was blasting for my speakers. And one of my friends asked me, "Why are you listening to funeral tunes?" And at the time, I just laughed and we went off to class and that was the end of the story, except that I couldn't stop thinking about that comment.

About the fact of why it is that listening to this kind of music is seen as something to joke about or even vaguely embarrassing. You wouldn't normally be blasting it out, I guess, but also, what it is about that music that I love so much, I was trying to figure this out. Why would something so ostensibly sad actually be happy making?

Rufus Griscom: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Cain: And for me as I dug down, I realized that it's the willingness and the ability of musician to turn pain into beauty is such an awesome action. And also there's a sense of communion that the music is expressing sorrow in a way that we've all experienced. So there's a communion that you have and listening to it, and started researching it and finding that people listen to the happy songs on their playlist 175 times, but they listen to the sad songs 800 times.

Rufus Griscom: I love that sad. Yeah, it's amazing.

Susan Cain: I know, it's crazy. And they tell researchers that the music makes them feel a sense of wonder and awe transcendence. Researchers call it the sublime emotions. So at first, all I really wanted to do was answer this question about what philosophers call the paradox of tragedy. Why would we engage with art forms that should make us sad? But what I started to realize is that these art forms are part of these centuries of wisdom traditions, and artistic traditions that all contain this message to us that these states of longing, that we feel for a more perfect and beautiful world than the one that we have.

That is the fundamental state of the human soul. And for some people it's expressed religiously and explicit religious terms and for some people it's metaphorical, but that is fundamentally who we are. And it's also the wellspring of our best natures. It may not always be happy, but it's our creative wellspring, and it's one of our deepest wellsprings of connection with each other.

Rufus Griscom: And the power of that connection is so beautifully demonstrated in the story that you open the book with, The Cellist from Sarajevo. Can you share that story?

Susan Cain: Yeah, sure. So I think it was in 1992, there was the famous siege of Sarajevo in which there were literally ... It was a civil war and there were snipers on the hills of this beautiful city. Historically, this had been a city in which three different peoples, it was Muslims and Croats and Eastern Orthodox had been living together in more or less harmony for quite some time. But then suddenly it broke out into civil war and the people of the city literally couldn't leave their homes without risking their lives because there were snipers up on the hills and there were bombings and so on.

And one day, there was a bombing of a bakery in the middle of the city and a man named Vedran Smailovi? had been near that bombing and he took care of the wounded, helped to take care of the wounded. And then he came back the next day to the scene of the bombing and he was the lead cellist of the Sarajevo Orchestra. And he came back and he was dressed up in his concert tales, in a tuxedo and so on.

And he plopped a chair down right in the middle of all this wreckage and carnage and rubble. And he took out his cello and he played the Albinoni in G minor which most people listening, they may not know what it is, but if they hear it, they'll recognize it, and it's just the most hauntingly, beautiful music you can imagine. And people said to him, "How could you do this? How could you sit out and expose yourself to all this risk? You're going to be shot any moment."

And he said, "You ask me if I'm crazy to be doing this, you should ask them, are they crazy to be bombing the city?" But he plays this haunting music every day for 22 days out in the open.

Rufus Griscom: Wow.

Susan Cain: One day for each of the 22 people who had been killed by the bombing. And there's something about that music and it's yearning, haunting, minor key nature that expresses better than anything else could. The fact that this is on the surface, a city of combatants or victims of combatants, but it's really a city of people aching for love. And that's what he's saying with that music. And by the way, we are now seeing all kinds of echoes of that in Ukraine with musicians. I'm guessing many of them are consciously aware of following Smailovi?'s example because it became so iconic.

Rufus Griscom: That's right. I texted you, you may have already seen it. This incredible article about this violinist in Kyiv, a conservatory student named Ilia Ponomarenko who partnered with a violinist in Los Angeles to create what they called a Violin Flash Mob. They created a video that opens with Ilia performing a Ukrainian folk song in a basement shelter in Kyiv. And then he's gradually joined by more and more violinists around the world.

It's just so powerful, and it's amazing to me that that's a Ukrainian folk song. What I hear listening is we are all mortal. We're all going to die, but before then, we have this time together and it's beautiful and let's connect. It's just this incredibly visceral human cry.

Susan Cain: Exactly, exactly, that's what that music is saying. There's something about this human impulse as I say to transform pain into beauty and music happens to be one of the best media that we have for doing that. But that's what we're hearing in those moments, and that's what the artists are doing whether they're thinking of it consciously that way or not.

Rufus Griscom: That song on YouTube has raised $24,000 for a UN relief fund for refugees. So it seems to be working. I made a donation this morning after listening to it just ... But so there's something about certain kinds of music. I think music and minor keys that evokes this sense of communion, connection sadness. We're all together in the same human plight, and apparently Susan, you're not the only one who likes this music, right?

As you pointed out, people play these sad songs more than happy songs. In all cultures, we have these beloved musical genres, Spanish flamenco, Portuguese fado, Irish lament, right? The American blues. And you also pointed out that the lullabies we sing to our kids are in minor keys and that was a Ukrainian folk song. So it's interesting that this is in all areas of music we have this kind of connection.

Susan Cain: Yeah, it's such an interesting thing. The poet Federico García Lorca actually ... He was Spanish and he traveled around Spain collecting the country's lullabies and concluded at the end that we ... I don't have the exact quote at my fingertips, but basically that the nation uses its saddest melodies to lull our children to sleep, and why do we do that? It's a very interesting question.

I have theories about what it is. I do think it's because all of us enter the world with this sense that the beautiful world that we belong in is now out of reach. You come into this world with a sense of spiritual banishment, but also spiritual longing for home and that's what the music is telling us, and that's why we're singing it to our babies.

Rufus Griscom: Yeah, yeah, no, it's a calling us home and I think in summer camp where I listened to taps, day is done, the sun. Every night that would be played on a trumpet and it was beautiful and mournful and, but somehow calling me to sleep which was home, which was this place of stillness.

Susan Cain: That's such a great example. I had that exact experience, but I had never thought of that before.

Rufus Griscom: Yeah.

Susan Cain: And I do want to say by the way just for people listening, I love dance music too. I'm sure you do also. So we're not saying this is the only kind of music, it's more just talking about what this strand of artistic and expression and of emotional life means because we don't usually shine enough of a spotlight on it.

Rufus Griscom: The next podcast we'll hit the dance tunes and the hip hop. So you mentioned García Lorca who I think was Leonard Cohen's favorite poet. Of course, I learned this from your book.

Susan Cain: Oh, you really read it, that was one line.

Rufus Griscom: And I guess Cohen said that he had learned from García Lorca that he was quote this "aching creature in the midst of an aching cosmos and the ache was okay. Not only was it okay, but it was the way you embraced the sun and the moon." It was just such a powerful sequence of sentences.

Susan Cain: Yeah, isn't that just the best quote ever?

Rufus Griscom: Yeah.

Susan Cain: And Leonard Cohen said that in response to García Lorca's observation about this longing that you and I are trying to talk about and García Lorca called it "the mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains." I have to say I felt better when I read that quote because part of the reason it took me so long to write this book is it was an exercise in trying to put into words something that is by its nature ineffable.

Rufus Griscom: Right, exactly. Yup, yup. And you dedicate the book to Leonard Cohen who was almost like a friend you growing up, it sounds like, right? Just through his music, its played a real role in your life. I think we have a clip from Susan.

Speaker 4: (Singing).

Rufus Griscom: What does evoke for you?

Susan Cain: Oh my gosh. Well, so I had Loved him and his music for so many years as you say. I had never really thought about why it was or what exactly he was saying. But then when he died and also when I started writing this book and found myself speaking of him so much and dedicating it to him, I went deeper into his biography. The epigraph to this book, one of the epigraphs is his and it goes, "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

That idea comes from the Kabbalah is the mystical side of Judaism that he had been influenced by quite heavily. And the idea there is that there's a metaphor that all of creation had originally been a single and intact divine vessel, but then the vessel shattered. So what we're in now is the world of brokenness, but equally a world of beauty. And so we're living with these divine shards from this vessel scattered all around us in the mud.

And one of the things that we can do in our lives is pick up the shards where we find them and the shards that you notice are going to be completely different from the ones that I notice and pick up, but we can all see them. And I realized, "Oh my gosh, that philosophy, I found it so deeply comforting and inspiring."

And I thought, "Oh my gosh, that's what he's been saying all these years in his music." And I think it is really useful for all of us to think of who are the artists or entrepreneurs or whatever, who are the figures in our lives who we love with a crazy outsized love, and then to take this next question of asking what do those people represent to me? Why do I love this person the way I do. There's usually an extra truth, I think, buried in the answer to that question.

Rufus Griscom: Yeah, I just love that notion of the shards of beauty being scattered all around us in the mud because it also dignifies our just little daily recognitions of beauty and daily connections with each other, opposed to living in this way that, "Oh, everything has to be building to this climactic sudden moment of meaning that it's this daily process of observance and connection and love."

Susan Cain: Yeah, absolutely. And I don't know, as you say as I'm looking out my window and there's a tree, you could say it's just a tree, but it's also a freaking miracle that there's a tree out there. You know what I mean? And when you look at life and through that lens, you see it quite differently

Rufus Griscom: Absolutely, but we're particularly after living in New York city for a decade or two, but the tree really looks like a miracle. So again, we're aching creatures in the midst of an aching cosmos, what are we aching for?

Susan Cain: Yeah, we're aching for communion with each other. I believe we're aching for a world in which the lions actually do lay down with the lambs where that's not just something we say that it's actually true. A world that is truly kind and without cruelty, a world in which life doesn't have to eat life in order to survive a world beyond anything that we experience, but I think we're aching for all of it.

Rufus Griscom: I love this observation that the Portuguese have this concept of Saudade. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly.

Susan Cain: Saudade, yes.

Rufus Griscom: Saudade. A "sweetly piercing nostalgia often expressed musically for something deeply cherished long gone that may never have existed in the first place."

Susan Cain: Yeah, exactly.

Rufus Griscom: That I thought was extraordinary.

Susan Cain: It is so extraordinary. And the amazing thing, I don't know if you've ever been to Lisbon which.

Rufus Griscom: Never I'd like to go. No.

Susan Cain: Oh my gosh, you've got to go. I love that city so much.

Rufus Griscom: Oh, wow.

Susan Cain: So they're so into their concept of Saudade, they name their pastry shop Saudade. It's like everywhere, everywhere you see that concept in the city. And this comes from the fact that this is a city on an ocean and historically, the men would go out to see, and there was a sense of will they come back or won't they come back. So Fado was partly an expression of the longing of those who had been left behind, longing for their seafarers to come home.

But then of course it exists on a more metaphysical plane as well, but yeah, you can hear it in all of the music. And then you see that in Brazil too, Brazilians have the concept of Saudade, same thing, you hear it in Brazilian music. All of these different cultures are all really expressing the same thing, and it's a sense of longing for the unattainable. You mentioned romantic love, I think that's a really useful thing for us to know about ourselves when we enter our love relationships, romantic relationships because what happens is especially during the early moments of romances, you feel for a moment in time that you've actually gotten to that place that all humans long for, and then reality sets in, and you have whatever incompatibilities you have that happen in all couples.

And if you're not aware of these dynamics, you can think that means there's something wrong with this relationship, and you should go to the next one where Eden will be over there. Okay. This was a false garden of Eden, I'm going to go to the real one now. Instead of understanding that this is the condition and over the course of a given relationship, we keep having those moments where Eden approaches, but to understand that the feeling of it falling away and then coming closer again and then falling away and then coming closer again, that's a normal state for humans.

Rufus Griscom: Yeah, no, in my experience, I think it may last three to six months. That experience of, but yes, absolutely. It's so critical to see the totality of it, this is the human condition on some level. I love this observation in the book. You cite a study of 50,000 Norwegians who expose themselves to creativity whether as a creator or consumer just going to museums and so on, that showed that exposure to art whether it's creation of art or just exposure to art results in greater health, life satisfaction, lower rates of anxiety and depression.

And I mentioned this because this can start to sound like, "Oh, this is a very sentimental expression of a desire for a certain kind of emotional experience." But in fact, I think there's a fair amount of evidence that there's real utility to inhabiting this artistic sensibility. It helps us be more appreciative, have more transcendent experiences, but also just fundamentally be more grounded and happier.

Susan Cain: Yeah, there's something about you hear the word beauty and you're like, "Okay, well, that's nice. We think of it as a dormant or decoration as opposed to something that is fundamental." And I thought that study was really, really interesting because it validates an experience that many of us have had during the pandemic, I'd fallen into a habit of waking up in the morning and doom scrolling as I guess, many people do, and I decided I needed to do something about it.

And I asked people to tell me their favorite art accounts that they followed on Twitter, and I started following those people and more and more and more of them. And before I knew it, my whole feed was full of art. Yeah, yeah, and then I started this daily practice of sharing my favorite art on my social channels, and I would often take the time to pair it with a favorite poem or quote or idea. And it would sometimes take me an hour to do this before I would start writing every morning, but it was such an amazing daily practice. And so when I came across that study, I thought, "Oh, okay. That's why this makes sense to do."

Rufus Griscom: Yeah, I love that. And that's a really practical tip for all of us that I've always been struck that ... I've always thought, "Well, it's clever that these hedge fund managers are able to make money when the market's going down, and when it's going up by selling short or whatever." And I've always thought artists do this with experience. That you can actually generate joy and beauty from painful experiences and loss.

And that is a hack that to be very pragmatic about it that we all need. And I think this is part of the core message of your book that I took away anyway which is that really, this is fundamentally an artistic sensibility that is not just for the artists unless you want to say that we're all artists, that to be human is to be an artist is to be an appreciator of beauty of that which is within reach, but also that which is not within reach, that that is where a huge amount of the satisfaction of the human experience lies and that really, everybody can benefit from embracing this sensibility.

Susan Cain: Absolutely. I actually say in the book whatever pain you can't get rid of, make that your creative offering. There's been this debate in recent years over is creativity associated with depression? Isn't it? And I think that's actually really the wrong debate to be having because the idea is not that creativity is pain, it's that creativity is a power that we can use when we're confronted with pain to turn it into something else.

And there are actually really interesting studies about this. There was one that I wrote about where the researchers took this group of people and they split them into two groups, unbeknownst to them. And one group was asked to give a speech, but unbeknownst to them, the audience was primed to respond to the speech with a lot of disapproval and board expressions on their faces and lackluster applause at the end. And the other group got an audience that responded with lots of cheers and approbation.

And just as you would expect, the people who gave the speeches to the disapproving audiences felt pretty down afterwards, and the other group felt pretty happy. The researchers asked these people who had just given the speeches to make a collage which they had a panel of artists rate for creativity. And they found that the group who had given the speeches to the disapproving audiences created better collages. And that that was especially true for those who had come in with a hormonal profile that showed that they had a tendency to emotional vulnerability.

Rufus Griscom: Wow. That's so cool. And it overlaps in beautiful ways with Dan Pink's research around regret, doesn't it? That there's utility to these feelings.

Susan Cain: Yeah, absolutely. And that you have a choice when you have these feelings of are you going to disavow them and then you end up taking them out later on yourself or on somebody else or is there some way to transform them? And I don't mean to say that in a way to put further pressure in somebody who's going through a painful experience. Not only do you have this pain, but now you should turn it into the next ninth symphony. I don't mean it like that. And the act of transformation doesn't have to be public or grand or anything. It could be baking a cake, it could be whatever it is.

Rufus Griscom: Well, this is a line from your book. Sad moods tend to sharpen our attention, they make us more focused and detail-oriented. They improve our memories, correct our cognitive biases. There's real utility to these sad moods. One of the most extraordinary studies to me in the book was of 1,400 letters written by Mozart, Liszt and Beethoven throughout their lives. Just tracking the words and the letters to see when they were using ... Talking about happiness or grief to track the frame of mind that the artists were in and the conclusion was that the quantity and quality of the music they composed was directly correlated with mood and basically sadder, less happy mood resulted in better creative output.

Susan Cain: I know, it's astonishing, right? And I think that study was done by an economist. It was an interesting use of an economist's tools.

Rufus Griscom: Absolutely. So as I mentioned earlier Susan, I took the bittersweet survey. I scored off the charts, I was not surprised by that. But when I was asked the question, do you tend to see happiness and sadness and things all at once? I first put 10 out of 10 because yeah, I love that kind of aching relationship to beauty, but then I reduced my score on that one because what I realized was that there are times let's say when I'm playing with my kids, or even with good friends spending time where I'll sometimes pull back and experience nostalgia for the present moment if that makes sense.

Susan Cain: Sure.

Rufus Griscom: The sense that this is so beautiful and special and it won't last forever. And so now in this moment, I'm looking at this current moment from through an inch of glass and that's beautiful in the sense that it's an active appreciation, but it also distances me from presence in that moment. Is that something that you've experienced?

Susan Cain: Well, that's interesting. I feel like what you're talking about is the difference between being fully present in the moment versus using a cognitive tool to make you appreciate that moment more. And that, yeah, there's a place for those tools, but you don't always want to be using them, but I would say that there are moments where that joint awareness just happens to us spontaneously. So we are fully present, but it still happens. And you know that's happening because anytime you tear up at something that you find incredibly beautiful, I think that's a moment where you're fully present and it's happening.

Rufus Griscom: Yes. I do think that's right. And you address this in the book, I guess there's this question of how much we should long for. Is there such a thing as too much longing? There could almost be a melodramatic impulse which I feel in myself, but sometimes my response to myself and my internal dialogue is, "Rufus, maybe let's just want less, and I'm not talking about things here. I'm talking about experiences and connection and all those things."

Susan Cain: Well, it's interesting you say that because one question I really haven't answered yet is, "Okay, I believe we need to be making especially in mainstream psychology, there needs to be a distinction between melancholy and depression which you won't find right now." Right now, if you type melancholy into PubMed, let's say you're going to get back a whole bunch of articles about clinical depression.

So this whole artistic and series of wisdom traditions that we have that talk about all this stuff about longing and melancholy. You don't really find it reflected in mainstream psychology. So on the one hand, we do need to make that distinction. What I really don't have the answer to though is whether it is a distinction of kind or a distinction of degree. I'm not sure.

It may be that it's a distinction of degree that a certain amount of these kinds of emotions and states of being do give us access to higher states of creativity, connection, awe, wonder all of that, but that when you have too much of it, you get pulled into the emotional black hole of depression that's possible or maybe that they're totally different. I don't know.

Rufus Griscom: Interesting. Yeah. Well, there's probably some Goldilocks zone. I've always been torn between the ironic view and the literal or the artistic temperament and the more practical business temperament. I've always had a foot in both of those worlds. And I've often had two groups of friends, right?

Susan Cain: Yeah, yeah.

Rufus Griscom: Some of whom were just entirely inhabiting an artistic sensibility all the time, and others of whom were always in this literal world of gears and cogs and fascinated with the machinery of the world. And I've always felt like, "Well, I'm really interested in both." And I'm not sure I can handle only having one of those points of view.

Susan Cain: That's really interesting. And it's funny, you were talking about Dan Pink's book about regret. And one of the questions I ask myself all the time is, "Do I regret, should I regret all those years that I spent as a corporate lawyer before doing the thing I really wanted to do?" And in the end, I us can't get myself to regret it. And part of the reason for that is that I think if I had followed my artistic side from the beginning, I don't know, I feel like I could have spun out into a world of reality in a certain way, and spending all those years in the world of quantification and practicality.

Rufus Griscom: Yes, yup, yup.

Susan Cain: I feel like it was good for me even if it wasn't where I truly belonged.

Rufus Griscom:

Well Susan, to me the most moving parts of your book were the parts about your own personal journey. And I know that some of it is still raw. And I was absolutely ... If we were to have a tissue index on my lacrimal response to your book, it really was off the charts with the story specifically of you and your mother. If you don't mind, I might read a passage from that section.

Susan Cain: Sure, sure.

Rufus Griscom: You wrote, "She was still my mother and I wanted desperately more than I've ever wanted anything before since to fill the chasm inside her, to take away her hurt. I couldn't think of my mother's tears which I often caused without crying myself." As the youngest child, I mattered so much to her. I mattered too much. I mattered like the son. To grow up was to condemn her to darkness.

It was just so affecting, and you were presented with a choice to be loved unconditionally or become your own person, and it was not a real choice because you had to become your own person.

Susan Cain: Yeah, so my mother and I went through like a very, very extreme version of I guess what often happens when children grow up and separate from their parents. For us, it was just very extreme, and I think I might leave it to listeners who are curious to read about that because I think I probably wrote about it better than I might be able to express it all right now other than to say that I share that story in part because I don't know, I guess for a lot of reasons. Well, in a book about ... Oh gosh Rufus, I'm really bad at talking about this.

Rufus Griscom: No worries, no worries. It is beautifully expressed in the book and listeners will hopefully have the chance to read it. And I love the detail Susan that you say when I got back to campus, you signed up for a creative writing class and you wrote a story about this and the professor was a season novelist said gruffly, "Put it in a drawer and don't take it out again for 30 years, you're too close to the material." And you said the professor was right, but that was over 30 years ago.

Susan Cain: Yeah, that's right.

Rufus Griscom: So it took you 30 years to process the experience and be able to write about it and writing about these painful human experiences is very empowering. And that's something that you talk about as a tool that we can all write about are the most painful experiences and get a lot of relief from that process.

Susan Cain: Yeah, absolutely. So this is something I had just been doing naturally. My whole life, I had been keeping diaries and diaries play a very central role in the story that I wrote about my mother in me, but it was many, many years later that I came across the work of the UT Professor James Pennebaker who's done this like astonishing series of studies showing the benefits of the simple act of just writing down your troubles and he's done all these studies where he'll compare one group of people who are asked to write what they had for breakfast that morning.

And then the other group is asked to write about the things that are bothering them. And I want to stress, they're not asked to write it in any specially beautiful or poetic or grammatical way. They just have to splat it down on the piece of paper and then throw it away afterwards. That's it. And he found that the simple act of doing that improves your health. It improves your sense of wellbeing. It improves your capabilities at work.

There was one study where he had this group of 50 something laid off engineers who were very despondent and hadn't been able to find new work. And half of them were asked to write down their troubles and the ones who did were much more likely to have found work several months later. And they had lower blood pressure and all kinds of other indicators.

Rufus Griscom: It's amazing.

Susan Cain: You can't believe it. Yeah. So that's a really simple daily practice that we all could be doing. It would take three minutes every morning.

Rufus Griscom: Absolutely. Yeah, I've been trying Susan for 30 some years and I get in modes where I'll do five days in a row and then I forget about it for a couple months, but it is such a great practice and it's much cheaper than therapy which is also a great thing.

Susan Cain: Yeah, and a lot less time consuming too.

Speaker 4: (Singing).

Rufus Griscom: Let's talk a little bit about our American sensibility, right? Because so much of this, what we're talking about exists in contrast or in attention with our prevailing culture because we live in this culture in which we're all expected to smile all the time and have an upbeat can do attitude, and you went deep into trying to understand where that came from. That was such an interesting section of the book, and do you want to share that?

Susan Cain: Yeah, I was really curious where it all was from. And so there is this strain in our culture through the 19th century, we became increasing a society-oriented around business and being successful at business. But at the same time throughout the 19th century, there was this ongoing series of economic booms followed by panics and busts. So people would grow quickly wealthy and then lose everything or they would fail to have ever earned anything in the first place.

And there became this question of like when somebody failed at business, was it the product of outside circumstances or was there something in the man? Some quality that marked this person as a loser. And I used the word loser advisedly because that word changed meaning over time. It started as just the expression of a person who has lost something, a very matter of fact, but of course now it's become, loser is the most contemptible thing, the thing you absolutely don't want to be.

And so even during the time of the depression, the economic depression in 1929, there were newspaper headlines that would say things like loser lost his fortune and commit suicide in the streets. And so increasingly the answer became if you had failed, it was because there was something wrong with you. And the more you think that, the more it becomes really important to take on the persona and the emotional affect of somebody who appears to be predestined to win, right?

If you're really cheerful and everything seems to be going your way, that marks you as a winner. Whereas if you're somebody who the way we're doing right now, if you're sitting around for an hour talking about loss in melancholia, maybe that means that there's something wrong with you.

Rufus Griscom: Yes.

Susan Cain: That marks you out as a secret loser.

Rufus Griscom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Cain: And so that's where this distaste that we all have comes from. Yeah.

Rufus Griscom: It's so interesting and this genre of self-help which is I think a deeply American genre, right? Arguably traces back to Benjamin Franklin, and maybe it goes earlier, I don't know, depending on how one looks at it, but a core part of the American sensibility is this pragmatism, right? And somehow in this self-help genre, you have these fascinating passages of the great psychologist William James writing about how around the turn of the century in his 1902 book Varieties of Religious Experience, that there was this almost a movement to banish sorrow.

He writes complaints of the weather are forbidden in many households and more and more people are recognizing it to be bad for him to speak about disagreeable sensations. The Boy Scouts trained its charges to "look for the bright side of life. Cheerfully do tasks that come your way." So this was really a conscious decision that was expressed in many, many, many books, advice books, and so on to just have a positive attitude and get things done and smile and ignore your true feelings.

And of course, we have seen studies that in some cases, this can be effective. There can be a utility to being intentional about changing one's mood in the service of trying to accomplish things. And so it strikes me, and I'm curious to hear what you think of this that if you think of culture as an algorithm, there are different cultures running different algorithms, that this American culture that's focused on a fraudulent positivity is effective at a very specific thing which is advancing business and pragmatically moving forward to get things done, but it tends to block or impede our ability to apprehend reality, appreciate beauty, be psychologically healthy and connect with people on a deeper level.

Susan Cain: I think that was the most amazing encapsulation of what I was trying to say that I've heard ... Yes, I think that's exactly it. And it's not that there's no utility in each way of being. I'm so fundamentally at my heart a seeker of balance. So in arguing for this, I'm really just trying to correct an imbalance. I'm not saying that there's no utility to trying to be actively positive and cheerful in certain circumstances, especially for the sake of people around you or for the sake of getting things done. There is utility in that for sure. It's just that we've done that to such a fault.

Rufus Griscom: Yes, we've over steered. And also maybe these could be modalities that we should learn as individuals to turn on and off to some degree. I found myself reading this section feeling very torn about whether I was ready to do away with this American positivity or not.

Susan Cain: Yeah, yeah.

Rufus Griscom: I've always loved the quote from E. B. White. I arise in the morning torn between in the desire to improve or save the world and a desire to enjoy or savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. But Susan, I feel like that's my life. It's like [crosstalk 00:58:19]

Susan Cain: I totally see that in you. You're like equal parts, cockeyed optimist, and bittersweet melancholic. It's hard to see which one is stronger in you.

Rufus Griscom: I'm definitely surfing between those two sensibilities. And I feel like the faux positivity is part of the story of Americanness that has had utility, but I certainly cannot live in that sensibility all the time.

Susan Cain: Yeah, no, it's a very, very tricky thing. What you're making me think of, not long ago, I gave a virtual talk to a group of executives at a company and the talk started as it often does, there's the little chat bot and an organizer asked, "How's everybody feeling this morning?" And all the answers were like pumped and thrilled and so happy to be here and all like that.

And I thought to myself, "What are the chances that this is a true representation of the emotional state of every member of this executive team right now?" The chances are probably near zero.

Rufus Griscom: Yeah. Yeah.

Susan Cain: And so is it the right thing or is it not the right thing? I do think that there is a way of spaces for people to give a more true expression of what they're really feeling far from it dragging other people down or interfering with the task. It can be a way of people coming together if it's handled correctly.

Rufus Griscom: You and I Susan read so many books in this space. And it's interesting to see what studies are most cited. And one of the most cited studies, cited in literally dozens and dozens of books was the study that Google did called Project Aristotle where they studied the effectiveness of different teams. And the most effective teams were those that shared personal challenges.

And there was a particularly memorable example of a leader who had a cancer diagnosis and was in the final years of his life and was candid about it. And so I think it's a 100% right that it's not ... So I'd like to rescind some of what I said previously which is it's not a zero sum game at all, there's no need to be contained and not emotionally connected.

Susan Cain: That Project Aristotle study was absolutely fascinating. And I would also say that we have another step to take with that because I was really struck as you were by the very moving story of the manager who revealed his terminal diagnosis. And at the same time, what I also thought about is the way that certain kinds of griefs are okay to talk about in the office. And one of those is illness, but then there's this whole other category that psychologists called disenfranchised griefs of all the different losses that we have in an everyday life that are socially unacceptable still to disclose.

Rufus Griscom: I've had to learn just to be able to say, honestly I'm just in a funk and I'm not totally sure or why.

Susan Cain: That's interesting. So when you say that, if you tell your coworkers, "I'm in a funk, I'm not sure why." Are you concerned about them? They're looking to you to steer the ship. So I could understand you feeling concerned about sharing that, that you wouldn't want to make them feel insecure of maybe our leader is distracted right now by emotions.

Rufus Griscom: For better or for worse Susan, I have fully abandoned any kind of veneer of perfection and invincibility our team. We're now our amazing team of nine people, the Next Big Idea Club, I am happy to say, it's my experience anyway that everybody's really forthcoming and sincere and we actually do share that kind of stuff. And it may be easier with a small team like we have, but it's been a beautiful part of my life, and I hope that's true for others too.

Susan Cain: Oh, I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. And I'm sure what happens over time is they've come to realize that you can talk about being in a funk and that's consistent still with running the company. Those are not mutually exclusive states and then the more they see that, the more they realize, "Okay, that can coexist in all of us."

Rufus Griscom: And this is something you point out in the book which is that there is some evidence that people believe that leaders should be less vulnerable. There's certainly a perception that it's not okay to be a vulnerable leader and hopefully that's beginning to change.

Susan Cain: Yeah, I do think it is. Yeah, there's talk about like many researchers look at different kinds of power that leaders have and some leaders who might express themselves with more of the traditional modes of expressing anger easily and projecting invincibility that they're seen as having positional power, the kind of power to fire people and hire people. And then there's a different style of leadership that has more to do with "personal power" where the team feels supportive of the leader, the leader has their back and they have the leader's back. They're just different styles of leadership.

Rufus Griscom: One question that really interested me reading the book is this question is this question that came up earlier really of like, "Is there a Goldilocks zone of the optimal amount of longing?" Right? And it strikes me that some longing that we all experience today may be a result of poor design of how we live, and of course, one theme that's come up in so many of the books that have come out recent years is that we have this loneliness epidemic that so many people today feel isolated and alone.

And one of the things that I've been fascinated by is, and I'm interested in being involved into some degree in the second half of my life is are there ways we can design how we all live together that result in people being more connected and experiencing more love and less loneliness? And it feels to me there's a little bit of a design flaw in the world right now, and that maybe longing is exaggerated for some portion of the population because people are too isolated. If we live more communally, we might feel longing a little bit less often. Do you think there might be something to that?

Susan Cain: Well, I guess where I take that is that we need more truth telling with each other, we'd probably be healthier if we first started by just telling each other stuff and listening to each other more.

Rufus Griscom: Absolutely. And actually, I think maybe the case that you would make as well is that it is through more honesty and more bittersweet communication that we do connect more meaningfully and more powerfully. This is the process through which we come together.

Susan Cain: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And again, I'm not saying that we need to speak this way and in this style, in this dimension 24/7. It's just that right now, it's limited to musical concerts and sometimes church on Sundays. And I just think we need to open up this field of discourse and a lot of people would feel less alone. And I will tell you that already from early readers of this book just like with Quiet, the word that I keep hearing again and again is the word permission.

Rufus Griscom: Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Cain: Finally ,I have permission to express what I have always felt all this time, but could never say.

Rufus Griscom: What you just said reminds me of what I felt for years which is I grew up in a very religious household and I decided that I was not religious at a relatively young age, and I felt a little bit of a sense of loss there for a long, long time. And I felt that we need a secular church of some. A place where we can talk about things that matter and celebrate humanity and connection together. Maybe there's something to that a lot of people have lost some of these rituals that used to be places of this kind of connection.

Susan Cain: Yeah, it's funny you say. I'm actually writing about that right now. I think that first, we had a religious culture, but now all the statistics are showing us that people, that many people are falling away from traditional religion, but they're also moving away from traditional secular humanism, and it's unclear what's next. And I think we all have to figure out what's next.

Rufus Griscom: Well, hopefully we'll figure it out having read your beautiful book bittersweet because I think that will help with creating a wise and beautiful version of what's coming next. Susan, thank you so much for taking the time this morning. It's just wonderful to talk with you about this.

Susan Cain: Thank you so, so much Rufus. It is always a joy to talk to you, nothing bittersweet about it. And it was really great to be here.