Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Susan Cain (100%)

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  "title": "Bittersweet",
  "authors": [
    "Susan Cain"
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  "publisher": "Crown",
  "publishedDate": "2022-04-05",
  "description": "#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Sadness is your superpower. In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet explores the power of the bittersweet personality, revealing a misunderstood side of mental health and creativity while offering a roadmap to facing grief in order to live life to the fullest. “Bittersweet grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go.”—BRENÉ BROWN, author of Atlas of the Heart “Susan Cain has described and validated my existence once again!”—GLENNON DOYLE, author of Untamed “The perfect cure for toxic positivity.”—ADAM GRANT, author of Think Again ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Oprah Daily, BookPage Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of long­ing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute aware­ness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. If you’ve ever wondered why you like sad music . . . If you find comfort or inspiration in a rainy day . . . If you react intensely to music, art, nature, and beauty . . . Then you probably identify with the bitter­sweet state of mind. With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an un­tapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she em­ploys the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and how embracing the bittersweetness at the heart of life is the true path to creativity, con­nection, and transcendence. Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain, whether from a death or breakup, addiction or illness. If we don’t acknowledge our own heartache, she says, we can end up inflicting it on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward one another. At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.",
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  "language": "en",
  "categories": [
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  "pageCount": 352,
  "isbn10": "0451499808",
  "isbn13": "9780451499806",
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• This romantic vision of melancholia has waxed and waned over time; most recently, it’s waned. In an influential 1918 essay, Sigmund Freud dismissed melancholy as narcissism, and ever since, it’s disappeared into the maw of psychopathology. Mainstream psychology sees it as synonymous with clinical depression.
• If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.[*2] This idea—of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of this book.
• Harvard psychologist Dr. Susan David found that one-third of us judge ourselves for having “negative” emotions such as sadness and grief.
• Which led to his epiphany: The real reason for his emotions—for all our emotions—is to connect us. And Sadness, of all the emotions, was the ultimate bonding agent.
• something . It's Information
• Fear keeps you safe. Anger protects you from getting taken advantage of. And Sadness—what does Sadness do? Keltner had explained that Sadness triggers compassion. It brings people together.
• But because we were primed to care for small and vulnerable infants in general, says Keltner, we also developed the capacity to care for anything infant-like—from a houseplant to a stranger in distress.
• For Darwin, says Keltner, “survival of the kindest” would have been a better moniker.
• “This is very dangerous,” he says cheerfully. “I don’t know you, but I know you’re not easy to live with. If you insist on believing that you are, you won’t live with anyone!
• Portuguese speakers have the concept of saudade, a sweetly piercing nostalgia, often expressed musically, for something deeply cherished, long gone, that may never have existed in the first place. In
• Other studies have found that sad moods tend to sharpen our attention: They make us more focused and detail oriented; they improve our memories, correct our cognitive biases.
• In other words: an intense awareness of passing time—the hallmark of bittersweetness itself.
• And there was the other me, who surfaced during times of discord, who assumed that other people’s interpretations of events must be correct and should naturally trump mine. I’ve come such a long way; I’m still working on it; I will always be working on it.
• Even once you break free (and you can break free), these siren songs may call you back to your accustomed ways of seeing and thinking and reacting. You can learn to block your ears most of the time, but you’ll have to accept that they’re always out there singing.
• The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring.
• “In your pain you find your values, and in your values, you find your pain.”
• Indeed, the ability to accept difficult emotions—not just observe them, not just breathe through them, but actually, nonjudgmentally, accept them—has been linked repeatedly to long-term thriving.
• “Connecting with what matters” is realizing that the pain of loss can help point you to the people and principles that matter most to you—to the meaning in your life.
• So now, ask yourself that question again: What are you separated from, what or whom have you lost? And also ask: Where is your particular pain of separation pointing you? What matters most deeply to you? And how can you bring it into being?
• Fear causes you to shrink and withhold; love opens you up.
• the very meaning of the word compassion is “to suffer with” someone. But the term loser now evoked not empathy but contempt.
• “I understand,” Susan tells them. “But you have dead people’s goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.”
• suffering is at the heart of most religions, yet forbidden to be expressed at work.
• We think we long for eternal life, but maybe what we’re really longing for is perfect and unconditional love; a world in which lions actually do lay down with lambs; a world free of famines and floods, concentration camps and Gulag archipelagos; a world in which we grow up to love others in the same helplessly exuberant way we once loved our parents; a world in which we’re forever adored like a precious baby; a world built on an entirely different logic from our own, one in which life needn’t eat life in order to survive.
• She found that the older people reported less stress, anger, worry, and distress than the young and middle-aged. She also discovered what she and her colleagues call a “positivity effect” as we age. While younger adults tend to have a “negativity bias,” predisposing them to focus on unpleasant or threatening cues, older people, Carstensen found, are more likely to notice and remember the positive. They focus on smiling faces; they tend to ignore the frowning and angry.
• As we come to the end, we forgo expansion in favor of communion and meaning.
• Again and again, Carstensen’s studies showed that the important variable is not how many years since you were born—but how few good years you feel you have left.
• My father introduced me to the music of the great Belgian songwriter Jacques Brel when I was a teenager. We both adored his songs—the brilliance and pathos of them.
• She hasn’t moved on from Aaron, she says. She’s “moved forward with him.”
• “We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; you’ll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath.
• “And the big event that I now deal with every day is the diagnosis of life-threatening cancer. That really knocks you off your life trajectory. The challenge is—how do you transcend this new trajectory? Your responsibility is to create a life of meaning. Of growth, and transformation. It so happens that very few people grow from success. People grow from failure. They grow from adversity. They grow from pain.”
• we all have two existential obligations. The first is simply to survive. But the second is to create a life worth living. If on your deathbed you look back and see a life lived fully, you feel peace. People who believe that they didn’t do enough with their lives too often feel shame. But the key to fulfillment, says Breitbart, is learning to love who you are (which is unconditional and unceasing) rather than what you’ve done.
• As I watch him now—tying double knots at the crack of dawn on our sons’ soccer cleats; planting a literal thousand wildflowers in the garden outside my office; playing fetch with our puppy for minutes that turn into hours—it dawns on me that we share something more. These small moments of quotidian devotion are a form of artistic expression for him: quiet, ritualistic, bittersweet celebrations of a small peace.
• There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in —L. C., “ANTHEM”