Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole is a 2022 nonfiction book written by American author Susan Cain.

Bittersweet is based on the premise that "light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired". Cain encourages the reader to accept feelings of sorrow and longing as inspiration to experience sublime emotions—such as beauty and wonder and transcendence—to counterbalance the "normative sunshine" of society's pressure to constantly be positive. The book advises that sensitivity to the bittersweet—both the bitter and the sweet in life—elevates our way of creating, leading, raising children, loving, and achieving a deeper and more enriching life.

Background Cain describes her first moment of clarity with the concept of longing, which occurred during a time of transition after leaving a New York law firm, ending one long-term relationship, and becoming consumed in an obsessive relationship with a lyricist/musician. A friend offered that what Cain was actually longing for was what the lyricist/musician represented, and Cain knew instantly that what she was longing for was the writer's life.

Years earlier, a law school classmate's humorous question of why Cain listened to "funeral music" started her thinking for 25 years, pondering why she found sad music uplifting, or even something closer to joy. Calling herself "melancholic by nature", she said that minor-key music eventually became an impetus to start writing Bittersweet. Release of Cain's third TED talk (July 2019), "The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days", was timed to closely precede the April 2022 publication of Bittersweet. A Washington Post review described how, "drawing on the music of Leonard Cohen, psychological research and her own inheritance as a descendant of Holocaust victims, Cain delivers a book-length treatise on how to live alongside pain. ... (T)he art of suffering becomes the book's central example to show how pain opens a path to beauty."

Content and concepts

As Bittersweet was published ten years after Cain's first book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts..., a Vanity Fair commentator wrote that Bittersweet "pivots away from the Quiet franchise championing the overlooked introvert in favor of championing... overlooked feelings". Cain remarked that, a short time after starting to write Bittersweet, she "realized that as in Quiet, Bittersweet is also about a way of being in the world, which properly understood is like a superpower, but that normal culture does not recognize as such."

The book has been described as "part memoir and partly a look at neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, religion, epigenetics, music, poetry and art". It has also been described as "a mix of psychology, historic references, and interviews deployed to consider how a healthy dose of melancholy...can inform our experiences of connection, grief, and mortality". The book includes examples of beauty flowing from embracing the melancholy, and offers advice for moving through loss, allowing pain to inform leadership, and reckoning with the inevitability of death.

Bittersweet is based on the premise that "light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired". Cain defines bittersweetness as "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." Bittersweet asserts that the power of bittersweetness to encourage creativity and fulfillment is dramatically overlooked in modern society, stymying people and companies from reaching their goals. A Toronto Star reviewer described the book as positioning dark-side feelings as guiding lights, "letting pain become your superpower", an "appeal against America's monocracy of the can-do", and providing respite from the "tyranny of positivity".

Benefits

Cain lists three main benefits of embracing the bittersweet: creativity, connection, and transcendence. She cites research indicating that people attuned to life's fragility, and people who are in transitional states of life (divorce, approaching death), tend to find a sense of meaning in their lives, have a greater sense of gratitude, are more focused on deeper relationships, and are less likely to feel angry and irritable.

Creativity Cain cites studies variously indicating a large percentage of highly creative people were orphaned in childhood, but also that creative people whose parents live to old age are disproportionately prone to sorrow; that people who work in the arts are much more likely than others to suffer mood disorders; that artists' negative emotions were predictive of their creative output; and that sadness is the main negative feeling that drives creativity. She also cites research indicating that sad moods tend to sharpen our attention, make us more focused and detail oriented, improve our memories, and correct our cognitive biases.

Recognizing that many creative people are sanguine (happy) in nature, Cain suggests that "it's not that pain equals art. It's that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better." Referring to Leonard Cohen's life story, Cain wrote that "the quest to transform pain into beauty is one of the great catalysts of artistic expression."

Connection Cain writes that "the sadness from which compassion springs is a pro-social emotion", and that our instinct to feel bad when we see somebody else feeling bad–and to want to do something about it–"is as much a part of humanity as our need to breathe". The sharing of our individual longing is one of our "deepest sources of communion" with others, and if we don't acknowledge our own pain, we may end up inflicting it on others through abuse, domination or neglect. Describing Maya Angelou, Cain describes "wounded healers" as "people whose capacity for joy and connection is strengthened by their ability to experience melancholy or sorrow".

Transcendence

Calling herself "deeply agnostic", Cain says that there have been both religious and secular expressions of transcendence flowing from a longing for a more perfect and beautiful world. Positing a definition of transcendence as "a moment in which your self fades away and you feel connected to the all", Bittersweet relates that Cain experiences something close to this state when listening to melancholy music. She advises that our own longings reveal to us the path that we should be following, "pointing you in the direction of the sacred (and) wondrous".

Physiological and epigenetic basis Cain's research indicates that the vagus nerve—responsible for digestion, breathing and heart rate—is also associated with compassion, our instinct to protect our young, and desire to experience pleasure. Cain says this nerve is also the site of the very "sadness-joy-survival continuum" that makes us human, and that we are "deeply evolutionarily primed" to respond to each other's sadness.

Bittersweet also discusses transgenerational trauma, which Cain refers to as "inherited grief". Cain describes this new area of scientific research into biomarkers—for example, possessed by descendants of Holocaust survivors—that allow them to feel empathy and love for ancestors they have never met, or more generally for people who have intense reactions to losses they did not themselves experience.

Pressure from culture Cain said that, historically and especially in the nineteenth century, boom-and-bust cycles led not only to reverence for successful businessmen, but also to attributing lack of success not to external circumstance but to a failure of character. Cain documents this perceived failure of character as being reflected in the evolving definition of the term, loser. The result is a culture with a "positivity mandate"—an imperative to act "unfailingly cheerful and positive, ... like a winner".

Modern culture condemns painful emotions as useless and shameful and to be suppressed rather than, as Cain posits, as an inspiration to creativity and transformative potential. Young people, especially, are pressured by the idea of "effortless perfection" to conceal and feel ashamed of feelings of sadness or imperfection that are normal parts of human experience—rather than using painful experiences as an opportunity to learn. Cain argues against society's unrelenting obsession with "normative sunshine", saying we have a culture that is "afraid of sorrow and longing, and therefore unable to draw on its powers".

In the workplace, Cain perceives some progress in the recognition of the value of compassionate management, and allowing employees to share their troubles and voice concerns rather than repress them. She cites research indicating that bosses exhibiting anger are perceived as having "position power" that projects status and influence, whereas melancholic bosses were perceived as having "personal power" that inspires loyalty and can enhance productivity. Cain cites instances indicating in which sharing troubles with co-workers creates a supportive environment, increase productivity, reduce turnover, and increase workplace safety.

Historical antecedents and recent misinterpretation

An ancient belief held the human body contains four "humors" corresponding to respective temperaments, namely, melancholic (sad), sanguine (happy), choleric (aggressive), and phlegmatic (calm). Cain says that Aristotle wondered why great poets, philosophers, artists, and politicians often had melancholic personalities—personalities corresponding to Cain's concept of bittersweetness. Cain also related that philosopher Marsilio Ficino proposed that Roman god Saturn, associated with melancholy, "claims for himself a life sequestered and divine"; artist Albrecht Dürer famously depicted melancholy as a downcast angel surrounded by symbols of creativity, knowledge, and yearning; and poet Charles Baudelaire could "scarcely conceive of a type of beauty" in which there is no melancholy.

More recently, however, melancholy was dismissed by Sigmund Freud as narcissism and subsequently became viewed as pathological, with mainstream psychology viewing it as synonymous with clinical depression. Similarly, Cain said that Abraham Maslow disproportionately emphasized being upbeat and happy as the norm, and saw human sorrow and yearning for something more as primarily pathological—contributing to "toxic positivity" in our culture. Cain thus considers bittersweetness to be "dramatically overlooked" as it is "brimming with human potential".

Distinguished from depression Cain says her work is "a clear-eyed view of what life is"—necessarily both bitter and sweet—and that we experience our deepest states of love, happiness, awe and creativity precisely because life is imperfect, not in spite of that fact. She emphatically distinguishes depression—"extremely painful... kind of an emotional black hole"—from bittersweetness, which is "a normal part of human experience and one of (its) most generative parts". Melancholy is said to allow one to "feel connected to the ecstasies of the universe", but depression is a source of despair. Though the two states "take you to completely different destinations", Cain posits that melancholy and depression themselves probably differ as a matter of degree rather than as a matter of kind. Cain's research for Bittersweet found that this distinction was present in the history of psychology for thousands of years but has been lost in modern times.

Bittersweet outlook