Susan Cain || The Beauty of Bittersweet

dear friend Susan Kine. She's author of wonderful book Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, which was a really big game changer for a lot of introverts who felt as though their unique guests were not appreciated in a world that is catered towards extroverts. Her most recent book is called Bitter Sweet, How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. And really like this new

book as well. Her new book touches on lots of really important topics that aren't often discussed, such as the complex emotion of bitter sweet and idea that she refers to as existential longing, which I really like. I've known Susan for quite some years, and I remember when she was working on this book, we would have lots of text chats about existential longing and how it's strongly tied

to things like creativity and human connection and spirituality. It's really always a delight to talk to Susan, and today is no exception. I hope you enjoy our chat as much as we did, so without further ado, I'll bring you, Susan Caine. I am very proud of you. I am very proud of you, Susan, and I love how you bring such soul and emotional depth to your writing and thinking and thinking. I think we need that in the

world today. There's a lot of thinking that somehow the idea is that, well, if it's properly reasoned, we've stripped out all the emotional depth from it, and I don't think that's quite right. I agree, that's actually such an interesting idea, because I do think even from an intellectual point of view, we now understand that the emotions are just as important, if not more so, than our ability

to reason. And yet in a way that academic ideas get discussed, there is still a feeling of like, no, no, the cognitive thought process being above a heart and sooul, and maybe a suspicion that the heart and soul is not it is based on it's based on slimsy intuition and not on heart evidence. They'll say, yeah, but you show these things can be integrated, and sometimes you just have to show people a better way. Okay, So this new book, Bitter Sweetness is such a complex emotion, isn't it.

It's not just like, you know, like a palette of colors where you're only just combining two and then out pops something. I feel like your the Bittersweetness combines like thousands. Yeah, it's like all of them, not even thousands, but all of them, which which I guess would then say that we end up with brown, right, like a big muddy brown. But I don't think that is where we end up. Is that true, that if you combine all the colors,

brown is what comes out. I think. So I'm no visual artist, but I think I didn't know that, or maybe black. I don't know. Well, black seems somehow appropriate or bittersweetness, but in a way that I feel like you're arguing that the black that comes out is actually beautiful. Like you're not saying like it's not black, but you're saying it's beautiful. It's like a like when you look at it, you're like, Wow, there's so much here that can be fodder for so much of the goodness of humanity. Yeah,

I am saying that. I'm saying that bitter sweetness is one of the great gateways that we have to creativity, to connection, to love. And yeah, we're living in a culture that tells us not to talk about these things so much, and that is to our great detriment. You know, it's like not using one of the great powers that we have. And maybe we should define what bitter sweetness is for people who are listening and haven't read the book yet. Sure, well, I feel like that's no fun.

Let's do it. Let's be poetic about it. If you've ever wondered why you like sad music, if others have ever called you an old soul, if you find comfort or inspiration in a rainy day, if you react intensely to music, art, nature, and beauty, if you've ever wondered why creativity seems to be associated with sorrow, longing, and transcendence, then you know what the definition of bittersweetness is. I love it, I love it, I love it. I don't know. Are people I hope, I don't know. I tried something

new there. But do you want to define what? Do you want to define? Precisely? It's so funny we just reversed roles. Wait a minute, wait, what's it happen? You're like, You're like, Scott, shouldn't I give the scientific definition? And I was like, whoa, oh, Susan, let me be poetic, let me yeah. And I will say, speaking of the scientific definition, that some of those questions that SBK just read to you come from a quiz that that he and I'm a great psychologist, David Yaden and I worked

on together. It's in a very preliminary form and it's at the start of the Bittersweet book, and it helps you assess where you are or on this bittersweet spectrum, how likely you are to find yourself in states of bitter sweetness, which I would define as being the recognition that joy and sorrow and light and dark, bitter and sweet are forever paired kind of acute awareness of passing time. And then also with all of that a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world, which when we're

in the states of bittersweetness we feel very intensely. Yeah. And it's the music is such a great example of this. Some of my favorite cell sonatas are an E minor. For some reason, E minor just strikes the core of my soul. Strikes to the core of my soul. I love E minor and it's a sad ostensibly sad yet joyful key. It's hard to describe. Yeah, And did you always wonder about it? I mean, it's actually because of that experience that I started going down this path in

the first place. Like at first, I wasn't thinking no, not not, but minor key music in general for me, Like I didn't at first know I was going to be writing a book about a bittersweet construct. All I really wanted to do was was answer the question of why it was that minor key music elicited the reactions in me and many other people that it does, you know, And it's a reaction that philosophers can call the paradox

of tragedy. Why is it that something that is extensibly tragic or sorrowful, or is a minor key like dissonant and unresolved, Why is it that that those states would be elicit in us feelings of joy and uplift and communion and transcendence. That's what I was trying to figure out, Like I saw it happening in music. So at first I was just answering that narrow question that became a much bigger, a much bigger project of how all these states are connected? Who uses the phrase happy melancholy to

describe those states? I read, I saw that in quotes in your book, but who calls it that one? So that actually started. It was years ago. Gretchen Rubin, you know who has the Happiness Project book and blog and so on. She asked me in her blog to I can't remember exactly what the question was, but it was something like, what is your favorite form of happiness or something like that, And again, what was long before I'd

written this book? And I said, it's the state that I would call the happiness of melancholy, which I you know,

I've just for so long been intrigued by. And I might have actually called this book the Happiness of melancholy, except I was told by you know, agents and publishers and people who care about the success of the book, that that very word melancholy would drive people away, and so I couldn't use it well like I use it in the book, but I couldn't use it as as the title well melancholy all so go on, No, no, no, you go ahead, and then I want to talk about

melancholic and psychology. But what were you going to say, Oh, that's what I want to talk about. Well, that's precisely what I want to talk about, because that's what linked to depression, and just melancholy, not happy melancholic, but just straight out melancholy has been correlated with depression. Yeah, and this is the thing. I mean, if you look in mainstream psychology, there is not really any distinct call it

a correlation. Effectively, there's no distinction made between the state of melancholy that artists and writers have been talking about for thousands of years versus depression. It's not really talked about, even though I think that many of us, like you with your e minor reaction, we know what it is to experience melancholy in a productive and uplifting and in spiritual sense, and so I've found it very frustrating than in mainstream psychology, there's really no place to discuss this.

I mean, there are, I would say, the tender shoots of that discussion and rising up now, but generally it hasn't been there. Yeah, that's really unfortunate. That's really unfortunate. Imagine therapist who is familiar with your book and and these ideas and science of it, and uh and has A has a patient too is melancholic and they say, great, let's build on that and figure out some way of integrating that emotion into your life that gives your life

more depth and meaning. Maybe that's more, Maybe that's more of what a coach does. But why should why should there be any distinction? And again, what we I'm not saying, and I'm sure you're not saying that the psychologist should take a person who presents with clinical depression and say great, Like, that's not the point talking about that emotion, right, We're distinguishing the emotion for depression, and psychology needs to make that distinction. Yeah, just to be super clear about it,

one hundred percent, thank you, thank you. If I didn't want to get canceled, so I appreciate that canceled by psychology, that would be not a good canceling for me. Absolutely. So let's talk about some of the powers of a bittersweet, melancholic outlook. And I am very curious why our culture has been so blind to its value up to this point. Yeah, I mean, so the powers. I'll kind of say this all at once, but it really needs some unpacking for lack of a better worth. It's kind of appliche word.

But the powers really do have to do with creativity for reasons that we can talk about, not in the conventional sense in which people equate sometimes I think falsely equate depression and creativity. It's not what I mean. But the powers have to do with creativity and with connection and communion and love. I believe what is really happening. You can see if we think about the experience that we've all had when you look at something that you

find almost unbearably beautiful. You know, it could be a painting, work of art, could be nature, you know, it could be the child splashing in a rain puddle, whatever it is. And the feeling that you get sometimes where you cry at the sheer beauty of that thing. And all the way back in your five hundred, Gregory Great called these called this feeling of crying in the face of beauty compunctio, which is the holy tears, and he described it as

a kind of the kind of bittersweetness. And it's what you're crying at is the gap between the world that we long for, like that beauty represents the perfect and beautiful world which all humans that their soul feel they've been vanished from. It represents the gap between that world that we're still longing for and the Eden that we can't stop speaking of, and the world that we live in today. And that maybe what I've said so far accounts only for the tears part and not the holy

part of that phrase holy tears. But what makes it holy is, and you can use that word literally or metaphorically, what makes it holy is the glimpsing that better world for that moment. It makes us reach for it and do everything we can to bridge to narrow the gap between that world and the one that we're in. So it's the heart of our creative impulse. The word longing, literally it's etymology, means to grow longer, to reach for something. You're reaching for Eden, and that's why we create in

the first place. And it's also the fact that we are all in this state of exile from Eden. We're all in that state together. That gives us a kind of communion because we all know it, we all know what it means, and it's the deepest part of ourselves. Wow, that's it's quite a statement. I need to process everything you just said, because it's really quite profound, and there's so many layers to it, because it resonates a lot with the kind of creative mind we put forth in

our book Wired to Create. You know that the creative person is deeply sensitive to the world and and and its meanings and its potential meanings, and its ability and their ability to show the world what new ways and new interpretations and deeper complexities. And it does seem like when creativity is at its best, it's able to go deeper into a phenomenon or something that most of us just see the surface of. Does seem like that's the case?

Seem like that's the case. Yeah. In your Ted talk, you said a comment something along the lines of like, and that's why we exalt or give such special status to musicians and artists. And that statement actually hit me different.

There's a new phrase that what the kids are saying these days that hit me right or saying, I forget what the phrase, but people saying that my Twitter time when recently and I had a Google hit me okay, emotionally kind of hits you in a different way because I had I've long wondered, like why do we exalt artists and musicians? Why do we put them above on a pedestal above like doctors. And they used to bother me.

It used to be like, I feel like doctors should kind of they should be the ones we kind of put on the healthcare professionals, like should have the most

status and money in our society. But but yeah, there's something that if you can, if you can, it's a beautiful gift to the world if you if you have that capacity and drive to not even has that drive to create, you know, yeah, yeah, And it's that they're the reason we exalt them is that they're bringing us the taste of eat, and that's really what they're doing, and we want those tastes. I mean, we would like

to live there all the time. Talking about psychology for a second, meanstream psychology, I kind of knew in advance that I believe there was this distinction between melancholy and depression that the field of psychology wasn't talking about. What I didn't realize and came to see is that I think that because in psychology, I think because most psychologists are atheists or agnostics, and I'm an agnostic myself, but

because most psychologists are this. We don't properly talk about spirituality in psychology like we think of it as I'm saying, we as if I'm a psychologist. I'm sort of in the field as a writer. But you know, spirituality gets talked about is if it's like it's like a characteristic that's over here, and some people have and some people don't. You know, you look at the list of character strengths, and for some people spirituality is high on the list,

for others not at all. And I have come to believe that's a misunderstanding of what spirituality is, and that instead what is accurate and truth is that all humans have this longing for the better and more perfect world, and that one manifestation of that is to long for Mecca or Eden or Design or the beloved of the soul or whatever you call it. And for other people it takes completely different manifestation that we express in more

secular terms. But still the heart of the human soul is that longing and that sense of disconnection from the world as we wish it were, the world we feel we belong to. Yeah, I think many truths flow from that central premise. So I would like to I'd like to see what happens if we use that as an organizing principle in psychology. Do I just want to give

credit to Jeane Houston. I'm not sure if you say Houston or Houston, but she talks a lot about this idea, and so I just want to give credit where its due. She talked her books. Thank you. I appreciate you doing that. I remember early in the early days of the book idea and Concept, the whole thing was surrounding a concept that you called you referred to me as existential longing. Now, I loved it, but that's not the central folk guy like you don't even use that exact phrase in your

TED talk. You say, use the word longing, but I don't think I heard you say existential long What happened to that phrase because I loved it? Huh, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I'm going to turn this to you for a second. What do you think the phrase existential longing gives us that that de play longing does not? Well, if I add the word existential to any word, it gives me something. Yeah, what is the

thing that gives you? I? Now, I had to articulate and what that thing gives me besides a feeling, like existential psychotherapy gives me something above and beyond just psychotherapy. Right, with existential psychotherapy, it's all about understanding what does it mean to be an experientially alive human. What are the factors and things we can do that make us feel fully human? Addressing all of our needs, but our spiritual needs as well, and not neglecting those needs, but also

of course not neglecting the lower needs. What does it mean to feel like a whole person? Existential longing does seem like it adds something to me. Then longing I can long for that delicious pizza that I had back when I was twelve years old, I could want. You can long for lots of things that aren't existential. Right, It does seem like there's a boundary condition where when you long for things that we're existential to your whole being,

that's what you're longing for. So it really it's something to me. Yeah, well that's very persuasive, and maybe I should bring it back into the way I talk about it. I like that Susan's bringing existential back. What are you saying what I said credit to ask you not at all. I'm just reflecting a mirror back on you, because do you remember, like we had text messages three years ago about this. For years you used that phrase and I was like, I love it. Okay, so existential longing and

just bittersweetness, the complexities of it. Do you how do you see it? Differentiate it from the experience of all A w E. I have trouble saying that word out all all yeah and wonder. I knew what you meant. I do believe they are a very close cousins of their closure. Yeah. And in fact, we found in our quiz that people who are predisposed to these experiencing these states of bitter sweetness also tend to be predisposed to states of awe and wonder and so on, so they're

very closely connected. I would say that bitter sweetness has that element of sorrow in it. Understanding that everything is impermanent. You know that that which you are gazing upon, that is putting you into this state of awe and wonder, will not last, and that maybe that's part of the reason you're feeling that awe and wonder in the first place, is because it's infused with its impermanence. So it's a

recognition of those states. To go back to the existential idea, there's more of an existential question to bitter sweetness, whereas I think on wonder we could experience, as you know, just sort of like a passing phenomenon and not one that has the same profound implications. The all experience can certainly feel profound. You're often witnessing something very outside of yourself and you're kind of in reverence of it, whereas bittersweetness is not. It's not the same thing as reverence

or even you know, fear. It is something more deeply existential. I see what you're saying. Yeah, the reverence might trigger, but it's more about the longing to go home. At its base, it's like a longing for some fundamental home. And it might be triggered by beauty or by aw or whatever, but at its base it's it's there's a fundamental pain of separation to being human and a longing

for that reunion. And that's what bitter sweetness is. When we feel something bittersweet, do we always actually want to return to the thing, because it seems to me like we can have the bittersweet feeling, and yet also cognitively not want to return back. For instance, I when I when I visit like my high school. Where I visit like the high school's probably a bad example because there's not any longing there at all. But let me think of a better example. When I go to like when

I go back to England. That's actually have a proper example. When I go to England and I visit my Cambridge like where I had my grad school days. There were some of the most wonderful moments in my life, and I feel this kind of bittersweet feeling when I when I visit it again and kind of activate some of those same emotions and feelings, but I don't actually want to Some things our best when they're only experienced once

or twice. Sometimes when you try to go back a third time, you're like, no, it wasn't meant like it's not the same thing, you know, And so yeah, do you know what I'm saying, So I know exactly yeah no, And I don't mean I don't mean it in the literal sense, like I don't know you literally want to repeat the past over and over again. I'm talking about Okay, Like there's this one quote I have it in the book.

I read this, I just kind of could not believe that someone has actually managed to articulate the following feeling. Let's see if I can find it. It's in a novel by a guy named Mark Merlis, and he is describing the feeling we've all experienced this when you meet somebody like erotically irresistible. And he's saying that when you look at that person who finds it irresistible, maybe i'll just quote I'll quote him. And this is from a gay novel, so it's written by a man speaking about

another man. Just to put it all in context, he's saying, do you know how sometimes you see a man and you're not sure if you want to get in his pants or if you want to cry, Not because you can't have him. Maybe you can, but you see right away something in him beyond having. You can't screw your way into it anymore than you can get at the golden eggs by sluting the goose. So you want to cry,

not like a child, but like in exile. He was reminded of his homeland, and that's what Character as when he first beheld Character B is if you were getting a glimpse of that other place we were meant to be, the shore from which we were deported before we were born. So that's that's beautiful. But I really need to wrap my head around it more than yeah, okay, because well, what is it that you are longing for there? Specifically?

I can I can relate to the feeling of seeing someone so beautiful for me because I have my own quirky taste. Maybe other my friends will be like bro, really her, and I'm like, no, trust me her, you know, but someone's so beautiful to me I've had. I can relate to that feeling of feeling like yeah, like I don't know about crying, but like like, no matter what I do in the mortal world, it will not be

enough union with that person. Just like you know, they use the word screwing, but making love, no matter how much making love you know i'd be doing with that person, I still like nothing like it still there not be a full completeness because that person is such perfection in my eyes. Now, So there's kind of an understand I think I kind of get it, But what is what is the longing there? Do you can you articulate it? Yeah, it's like in that moment that the person represents something

beyond that which is attainable in this world. And I guess I'm saying that's that is a fundamental part of our being, that a full union is not attainable in this world, but the act of longing for it brings us ever closer, kind of like an acientop and it expresses itself through acts of creativity and through acts of love. Yeah. Yeah,

I do tend to be utopia utopia, you know. I tend to think along those lines, even in my own theory of whole love that I propose and in my book Transcend, it's what does it look like when all these things are integrated with a partner, And what does a whole love look like? And I don't know if it's obtainable. It's probably not attainable. But the idea is that there is some sort of ideal that we're deeply longing for. Is this kind of what you're saying, Yeah,

I mean yes, I would say so. I actually think it's useful in our real life love relationships to understand these dynamics and to accept that the person who we're with and the person who we love is not going to deliver us back to Eden, you know, and that what often happens in the course of the typical lovel relationship is that at the very beginning of it, when you're first uniting, you actually feel, for some moment in time or moments in time, that together you've achieved this

thing that the human soul longs for. And then, of course real life intervenes in the form of incompatibilities and so on that any two humans coming together are going to have. And then, you know, if we're not aware of these dynamics, you might turn to your partner and be like, wait, what the heck this wasn't eaten after all. Now I better go look for another person who might deliver me there. And of course that doesn't really get

you anywhere. So I actually think it's very helpful. It's healthy to understand the way we are programmed this way and to appreciate. You know, in the course of any relationship, you're going to keep having those moments where you feel like, oh my gosh, we're getting back to that amazing place, and to know it can keep generating that way. But it's not always going to be It's not all the time going to be that way. It's very good to have a realistic view as well of other people and

not put people on pedestals. That's that's that can lead to psychological disorders when you when you do splitting, you know, with people. So yeah, but but also holding at the same time, holding in mind this emotion of existential longing is still valuable. Yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah, I mean, And so like all my life, I've loved Leonard Cohen, I

talked about this time. I think I'm obsessed with my whole life, and I never really understood what it was about his music that spoke to me so much, you know. And then after he died, I heard, well, I started reading about him, and they heard interviews with his son and so on, and he like his music came out

of this idea. It was based on the mystical side of Judaism and the idea, well, the metaphor of the Kabala is that all of creation once was divine unity, and then it shattered, and so now we're we're living in a kind of broken world where the shards of

the divine are scattered all around us. It's strewn around us, and our job is to pick them up wherever we might happen to see one, and so all of all of his music that I was reacting to all those years was about this idea of beautiful brokenness, you know,

the fact that everything is simultaneously broken and beautiful. And also, like the way his son talks about his music, he says that like he had this perception that this was reality, but that he would create these songs whose purpose was to be a kind of transcendence delivery machine, like he said, the way the way cigarettes delivered nicotine to you. His songs were for the purpose of delivering transcendence through through the medium. And that's what creativity can be at its best.

I think that's what we're often doing when we perform are to act. I agree. I have often felt not completely at home with being a scientist because I like writing, and I like writing being a vehicle to inspire and to have people experience the feeling of transcendence. I actually want people to read my books and feel transcendence when they read my books. That's a different kind of longing

than a lot of scientists have. Pure pure scientists, right, I understand that being able to integrate those sides of me which I feel like I did in my book transcend I feel like it gave me an opportunity to really be you know, unabashed and saying hey, I like transcendence. Say it's the title of the book, and also saying, hey, let's look at the science and see what it says about how we can have merchants as that was a really nice way for me to finally find a way,

a sneaky way of integrating it all. You know, but I don't think I think. I think it was very on his face you were doing. And it seems to me that science and specifically psychology has more appetite for that, or more license for that than it used to. Do

you agree with that? Yeah, thanks to people like David Yaiden, and thanks to people like doctor Keltner and and people who are really studying the science of transcendence, Andy Neuberg putting it on a firm foundation, a firm neurological and behavioral foundation, where it's not treated as though it's indicator of mental illness. Because Freud certainly thought these shelf transcendent moments were infantile regressions to the womb. What even mean? I know, but that's what he that's what he saw

these things. As he would say, bittersweetness is well, he's that was his everything that it was like that wasn't like sex or violence was infantile regressions to yeah, no, and the oceanic experience was not sense. I know, I know. I love Dacher Keltner's work. I actually spent a whole

chapter talking about it. His work especially on the compassionate instinct and the way that human beings because we are primed to respond to the cries of infants, that what radiates from there is that we're also primed to respond to the cries of all beings in distress. And obviously we're not perfect at that, and we have lots of limitations.

But I love his studies about the vagus nerve, you know, the big gigantic bundle of nerves in our bodies which are responsible for our most basic functions of breathing and digestion, and that also react when we see another being in distress. To me. The fact that it's that basic and that ancient a bodily system that governs thisby to not just ability, but like a tendency to see sadness, to notice it, and to respond with love. That's pretty profound, you know.

And remember if it was Dacker someone else who said, we tend to think of these emotions as being Sunday School emotions, you know, that are like we're taught we're supposed to feel these things, but maybe they're not quite true. So to have this whole body of work that fills the case for it from the ground up is so valuable. Yeah, yeah, it's so valuable. And yeah, I'm excited about the new science of self concendence. Everything has to be the new science for it to like count, you know, in terms

of publicity materials. But I'm really excited about it. I'm really excited about it. You did, you did quite a bit of research in traveling while you're doing this book. One thing that I want to talk about was the conference you went to a conference of transhumanists, yes, who hoped to live forever. What did you learn about bittersweetness?

I'm talking to them, Well, that whole inquiry that was very interesting and it really challenged a lot of my assumptions and ways that I'm still grappling with, because you know, this is a collection of people who believe that we can and will ultimately live, you know, if not forever healthy lives, that we can extend our health span for

hundreds of hundreds of years at some point. And they ask really interesting questions like, you know, let's say that the standard of philosophical assumption is that it's an immortality that helps to give our life meaning 's say, you know, and that impermanence is what that the knowledge of impermanence gives us a greater sense of the preciousness of life.

And these things are true, I believe. At the same time, you know, I talk to some of these people at this conference and they would say things like, you know, those are all story is that we tell ourselves because we feel we have no choice but to die. And so if you truly have no choice, then of course you're going to want to give yourself as beautiful and

reassuring a story as you possibly can. But if you knew you didn't have to and your beloveds didn't have to die, you would no longer be telling yourself that quote story. And that is a very persuasive argument. At the same time that you have not only the philosophers, but on the other hand, people like Laura Carstenson at Stanford,

who studies aging and longevity and so on. She gave a famous Ted talk called older people are Happier, And she's done all this research showing that older people tend to in a greater sense of meaning, a greater sense of gratitude, less likely to have a necessary anger, like a whole list of traits that we might classify as wisdom. And well, that's been a stereotype for a long time of it, that age confers wisdom. But what Carstensen found is that it's not age per se that gives wisdom.

It's having an intense sense of life's fragility that gives it. And so she found that young people who for whatever life circumstance, have been primed to realize how fragile life is, that those young people had the same sense of wisdom that the older people did. Wow. Yeah, yeah, And I think that does get to a very profound truth that we all sense. You know. It's like the reason we love cherry blossom is the way we do like why

do we have festivals in their honor? It's not only that they're beautiful, it's that they don't live very long. They're a symbol of fragility. Wow, what kind of tree lives the longest? I know? I guess Redwood's live for hundreds of years, don't they? And we love them too, We love them in a different way. We're in all of them in a different but we love them differently. Yeah, but they don't live forever, you know, hundreds of years

as a blip. So, but I do think there's something about their strength and solidity that is very, very comforting and magisterial. I mean, so, I'm not saying fragility and bittersweetness is the only type of beauty in the power. I'm just saying it's like one type that we tend not to pay attention to. I'm reflecting on Abraham Maslow's

near end of death, at the very end of his life. Yes, he was walking on the beach and he wrote in his personal diary, because yes, I read a thousand pages of his personal diaries, and he wrote, it's the contrast between the eternal nature of the waves and the mortality of my being that creates the highest height of transcendence for me. Wow. Yeah, it was the contrast of the two. I don't know how I'm linking this to what you're saying, but it's completely linked. I get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he also said right that it was in the final months of his life, after he had had it was a heart attack, he already had a big heart attack. Yeah, that he experienced the greatest sense of transcendence, meaning is that right? He wrote that he realized it wasn't the peak experience that was the greatest beauty and transcendence in onlyfe It was what he called the plateau experience, which is being able to see them miraculous in the every day. Right.

He said that was more transcendent to him than the peaks that he had been chasing his whole life, in which so many people seek, you know, and which he had written about so much in his life. So a lot of people are not aware of the plateau experience now now, is that the best naming for it from a publicity point of view? No, no, no, no, it's the wrong name. So I think you should rename it. Yeah,

it's the existential longer experience. Yeah it is. And it's a kind of contrast experience too, But yeah, contending with a transhumanist or immortalist or whatever word one uses, contending with that argument it's very very interesting. Like one of the people who I met with, a guy named Keith Comitta or who I really respect, such a good guy who's doing all this work to extend our health scans. He did a thought experiment with me where he said, Okay,

would you want to die tomorrow? No? I wouldn't. Okay, would you want to die next week? No? Would you want to die ten years from No? No, Well what about the day after that or the day after that or the day after that. And you start to realize as you do this thought experiment that it's hard to envision the day that you would ever if you could like push the button and say now it's time to go, and that it's very hard to answer that question. Yeah,

so true. I guess the best answer that I've come up with to that is is, like, you know, God bless the transhumanists for working on all this stuff. The whole idea of the preciousness that's embodied in fragility is a response to the world as it is. You know, if one day of the world totally transforms into something else, then maybe the theory will still hold and maybe it won't.

But for the next hundreds of years, this is the world we have, and in that world, this bittersweetness, in this existential longing, I believe is one of our great superpowers. So that's how I square the circle of what the transhumens are doing and my philosophy. What about the work you did learning from bereavement counselors, like in the Art of Dying, Well, I mean, what really came out of that experience? You know? I talked in the book about how I went to this conference, as you say, for

breeding may counselors, not a griefing counselor myself. I was like a person writing about this stuff, and we all had to go around the room and share an experience of loss. And I shared my story and I found myself like in floods of tears, embarrassingly so like much more than anybody else in the room who had shared. And because of that, that led to a deep conversation with the amazing guy who was leaving the center. His name is Simca Raphael. He does a lot of work

with agreement and death and so on. He's a death counselor. And he calls himself and wow, and he kind of diagnosed me for lack of a better word as suffering from a kind of inherited grief that I inherited through the generations of trauma of my family that had come

before me, and you and I talked about this. Actually, like that set me down a whole pathway of looking at their research on inherited grief and whether it's whether it's transmitted only culturally and familiarly, or whether it's also transmitted epigenetically, And I tend to think it's all three and the epigenetic evidence it's early, but it's really pretty fascinating the various studies that have went done by people like Rachel Jehuda who have looked at at the transmission

and epigenetic transmission children of Holocaust survivors. She's also looking now at grandchildren too. But then you also see it in these crazy Nige studies, you know, where you have like you take one traumatized mouse and have it mate and then remove it from the cage, so remove it from the community, so it's no longer influencing its fellow nice on a behavioral level. It's gone. But six generations later, you see the descendants of the traumatized mouse exhibiting the

same the same symptoms of having been traumatized. So there was something that seems to have been passing understanding all that. It's like, it's fascinating, it's validating to people who feel they've experienced it. And I think it's also liberating because once you, once you suspect that this might be at play in your in your own history, there are different ways of like absorbing that knowledge and transforming it into something that you can really live with and experience with

some beauty. Yeah, and it can even be a guide for self actualization. Dare I say, because you know, I'm creating this form of coaching I'm calling self actualization coaching, and I'm creating a program, whope, training program for it, and I would love to incorporate some of your ideas into it. I would love to. In particular, you said something that really hit again. You said a lot of things that hit in your ted talk and then in your book and your book, but something it really hit

you've talked about you said, follow your longing. Yeah, I would modify say follow your existential longing. You know, there is a really deep, profound there's deep profound wisdom there on as a guide to how to really self actualize in your life and is not running away from those longings but actually following them, and it's just so beautiful. Did do you want to elaborate a little at all on what you meant by by follow your wonging? Yeah, I guess I'll give you two examples of it, you know,

one in terms of inherited grief. For a second before kind of go out from there, there's this, really there's this masterpiece of a song by the musician Dara Williams. It's called after All, and she talks about how she had fallen into Oh this is all in the song.

It's like a storytelling song, and it talks about how she had fallen into a depression and she started realizing that the only way out was to travel down, which she caused the whispering well of her family, and so she starts learning about what her mother had been through, her father had been through, and the generations and then she comes back up out of the well and suddenly the world is bright and still of colors again. And

she does this all really beautifully. But it is a way of showing how not turning away from these things but instead like diving into them with full knowledge of what they are, can rescue us and can also transform them into She said, it worked me over like a work of art. That's the line in the song that process had worked her over like a work of art. And then I'll also, if you want, I'll tell you a story of how longing was like the great sack of self actualizing force in my life. Do you want

to hear the story? Yes? Please? Yes? Please? Okay, I guess I alluded to it in the Ted Talk, but so a bad boy artist who got obsessed with yes, yes, yes, yeah, yeah. I guess we're coming to the end, so I'll try to give you a shortened version. But you know, I had wanted to be a writer since I was four. I had totally forgotten about that and became a corporate lawyer and practice law for almost a decade and got

really ambitious about it. Wanted to make partner until the day came that basically I found out I wasn't making partner, and I left the firm like that very day, and also at the same time left a relationship that had always felt long. It was a seven year relationship. So like I'm suddenly in my early thirties and I'm floating around with no career and no love and I don't

have a place to live. Yeah, and I fall into this relationship with a lyricist and musician and very lit up person who I developed like a crazy obsession for, and I could not shake myself from this obsession. It was simultaneously the best and the worst feeling in the world. And I had this friend, Naomi, and I would tell her every time I saw her. I was sure I

bored her silly with stories of this guy. And then one day she said to me, if you were this obsessed with him, it's because he represents something you are longing for. So it's not him, it's like, what are you longing for that he represents to you? And and it was so clear, it was like instantly I knew, well he was representing the world of writing and art that I had wanted to be a part of since I was four years old, and gone and was massive

detour in the wrong direction. And as soon as she said that, and I had that realization, the obsession was gone. It was wod And I know that sounds to cinematic to believe, but truly it was gone. And I just started writing and I still loved him, but not like that, you know, the obsessive quality was no longer. Yeah, I rever you. Yeah, the power over you yeah yeah. And that's and that was a case of just following my longing.

And I promise you I had no idea at that moment that I could ever make a living from being a writer. It was just that I then organized my life around writing and that was enough to satisfy and belonging. Susan. Wow, this was so great chatting with you, and I just want to thank you so much for coming back with my Psychology podcast and for just keeping it soulful. You know, you just you keep you keep keeping it soulful, and I really appreciate it. Well. Thank you so much, SPK.

I'm sure that is no small explanation of why we've been friends for such a long time, the desire to keep it soulful. So thank you for all you do and have been doing. And I have been watching it all for years with so much excitement and happiness for you. So thank you. Thank you, Susan. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com.

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