Discover Your Capacity to Create, Connect & Love – Susan Cain : 952

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You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about something you probably didn't think we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about what creativity, connection and love have to do with sorrow and longing and how longing is something called momentum in disguise. With an expert who's actually spent a lot of time looking at these weird psychological aspects. What I believe is that many of the things that we do are based in our operating system, our subconscious, the stuff our body and even parts of our mind do that is entirely invisible to us by design. And then eventually we get this feeling and then we make up a story to support the feeling. And it's really interesting to go in on that in this episode so you can figure out what you're doing actually versus what you think you're doing. And the benefits or costs that it has to do that are all entirely invisible unless you know how to look for them. And the idea is that you can learn how to live and work and be authentic in an environment of what I'm going to call enforced positivity, where you get to say the glass is half full even if there's no water in it at all. I think we're going to learn about that and we're also going to learn about grief and what it is. And if you haven't felt any grief over the last two years, you're quite unusual because that means you still have your job, you still have your business, and you don't know anyone who's passed away. Although people normally pass away at the of the day end these rates anyway, but just from other causes. So we won't go into that, but there's just been a lot of societal upheaval and some unexpected things and that does usually require grief as a part of it. So we're going to talk about the actual tools that you have on board that you probably don't know you have on board. And our guest today, Jump started a global conversation about being an introvert about 10 years ago. And she challenged assumptions, things everyone believed about introverts versus extroverts. And her first book was called the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. Seven years on the New York Times bestseller list and translated into 40 languages. Her name is Susan Cain. So incredibly successful author. And by the way, guys, seven years on the New York Times list is Like, I think it's God mode for authors. I've been on the New York Times list enough weeks that I don't know, but it's through a series of books. And I was like, I just read this one book. It's seven years, you know, like me and Oprah kind of thing. So she's a big deal for writers. And her new book is called Bittersweet How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Susan, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's so great to be on the show with you.

Are you an introvert?

Yes. I mean, who else would write a book all about the power of introverts?

You can go deeper into the topics of bittersweet and quiet with Susan's 30 day online courses where you get to interact with her and her team. You can harness the power of a bittersweet mindset or learn to lead as an introvert wherever it is you work. Go to susancain.net that's S A N C A I N.net use code asprey15 and she'll gift you a 15% discount. Susan cain.net aspry15 Are you an introvert?

Yes. I mean, who else would write a book all about the power of introverts? Yes, I'm totally an introvert, but I mean, people ask me that question all the time. Well, actually the formulation they ask is like, now that you wrote this book and you go out and speak all the time, do all these interviews and stuff, surely you're not an introvert anymore and the whole premise of that question is all wrong because, yeah, introverts do extroverted things constantly. You know, nobody is all one thing.

Also, it just costs you more to do extroverted things, right? It's more tapping of your energy. Is that a good way of putting it?

Yeah, it's a really good way of putting it. Yeah. I think people kind of confuse energy with skills. So, you know, you can have, as an introvert, you can have the skills of public speaking or the skills of doing interviews or whatever it is, skills of going to a cocktail party. But yeah, as you say, it just, it takes more energy. You need more recharge time when you're done.

LinkedIn named you the sixth top influencer in the world. Did you have a panic attack when that happened?

No, not at all. Because I don't know, you know, to me those things are just like media nonsense. Do you know what I mean? It's like, I know exactly, like, I'm really happy to be. I'm like, yeah, so, like, I'm on LinkedIn a lot. I'm lucky to have a lot of people who I'm connected with there. And I post on there almost every day, so I love those posts. So, like, if they want to put me on some list, that's awesome. But I don't really think about that so much.

Are you one of those people who tries to fill in your weaknesses by being really good at them?

Oh, that's an interesting question, actually. Honestly, I really don't think so. I'm much more interested in living a life that I super enjoy. It's just like, when it comes to things like public speaking, I had to fill in my weaknesses in order to do the thing that I love most, which is I wanted to be a writer since I was 4 years old. It's what I want to keep doing for the rest of my life. And in this world that we live in, you can't do that without also doing all the public facing stuff. So I kind of had to figure that out. But I don't think I would have figured out all that public facing stuff if I hadn't needed to in the service of something else.

Your online presence and your achievements, 16 years as an attorney, top Wall street firm, all that kind of stuff, it's. It's very interesting. You're like, I'm an introvert, but look at all the stuff I do that doesn't look introverted. So I'm trying to get to like, why you're doing it. And you're saying because it lets you write. And that's your answer?

Yeah. Okay. So first of all, I would just say, you know, lots of introverts are achievement oriented and ambitious, and there's no. I think that that's actually one of the great misconceptions of what an introvert would be like, the assumption that you would be less. Less achievement oriented. I. I think those two things are just not correlated at all.

Agreed.

So, yeah, so I am. So I probably am kind of a cheevy. You know, I was sort of raised that way, but I don't know. You know, for so many years, public speaking was such a gigantic phobia for me and something I hated so deeply and desperately. And then it was like suddenly I had this moment where my life dream of publishing a book was coming true and I was invited to give this TED Talk and I was totally terrified. I kind of had to go after it to the maximum degree in order just to fight the fear at all. You know what I mean? I wouldn't even have given that TED Talk in the first place if my husband hadn't been coaxing it along the whole way through. Like, I wasn't even sending in my application to ted. He had to keep telling me to put it in the mailbox over and over again because at the same time that I was trying to do it, you know, of course, I also had the resistance that always comes with fear.

I don't believe that introverts have a hard time, you know, being successful or that they're less success oriented. I'm just looking at the type of work you've done that requires you to, like, go out and be less introverted. It's interesting, the career path and all the things that you've done, but if it's in service to what you want to do, I get it. I'm actually not that much of a public person. You guys wouldn't believe that now. But before I started this, you couldn't even. You couldn't tell anything about me because I'm a computer hacker. I'm like, I should be digitally invisible. And I pulled it off. But let's talk about sorrow, because you went from kind of introversion, and then you waited quite a while and then said, all right, I'm going to write a book. And you went through some personal loss and. And you said, all right. You wrote Bittersweet. Talk to me about what sorrow even is. I'm not sure that I really know. It's like a feeling. But how would you define sorrow?

Well, I mean, I really wrote the book because, well, I started off trying to solve this lifelong question that I've had, which is the reaction that I and many other people have to sad music. Like, in my case, Leonard Cohen is like my patron saint. I just love him. Like, love him, love him, love him. But I. But all minor key sad music for years, has evoked in me this incredibly transcendent feeling of love. Really, that's, like, the only way to describe it. And I. And I. And I had this experience back when I was in law school and sitting in my dorm and some friends came to my dorm room to pick me up for class, and they arrived and I was like, blasting my sad music. And. And they thought that was hilarious. And they were like, why are you listening to these funeral tunes? And. And at the time I thought it was funny, and I laughed and we went to class and that was that. But. But I really couldn't stop thinking about it. About, like, well, first of all, what was it in our culture that made it so funny to be listening in the first place. But also, what was it about that music that evoked in me the first. The furthest thing from sadness. Like, it really feels to me like the. The doorway to transcendence, you know, like, which you could define as being. Like a moment where you're transcending just your own self and you feel connected to something much bigger. And. And after I listen to that music for a few minutes, I can contemplate the fact that I'm gonna die one day and everybody else will die one day. And that's fine. It feels like it's totally fine somehow because of that music. And that was really the question that got me. That was the question I wanted to answer of, like, what was it? And so it started off as a question just about music, but it quickly led me to realizing that there is this tradition, like a literary tradition, an artistic tradition, religions or wisdom traditions have all been talking about this kind of bittersweet mode of being. And this spans centuries that they've been talking about it. It's in every culture. And all of these traditions are pointing towards this bittersweet state of being as being connected to creativity and like. Like a really deep communion. And you wouldn't know any of that if you look in our culture. There's nothing in our culture that is sending us that message. It's telling us to be afraid of these kinds of emotions. And I think it's a huge spiritual impoverishment, so hence the book.

Okay, so you're saying that when people feel both sides of the emotions, that it creates a better sense of peace and all. And that's something Buddhists and others would say as well. You know, you have to feel everything, not just some things.

Yeah. And you have to feel them quite well, that it's helpful to feel them quite intensely. You know, and for me, that's. I get into that state reliably and predictably when I listen to that kind of music. But everyone has their own ways of getting into that state. You know, it can look different for different people. Although we do know from the research that music as an incredibly common gateway. You know, like, there's a reason that, like, musicologists have looked at this, that the music that gives people the chills and goosebumps, it's always the sad slow music. It's not the happy dance music.

What's the single saddest song on earth that you know of?

Oh, wow. I don't know, but I love Leonard Cohen's famous Blue Raincoat, you know, which is just like the. Maybe the gloomiest of all his gloomy song. So that's a really good one. But I also think his song Hallelujah, which has been covered so many gazillions of times, and, you know, so many people listen to it performed on like American Idol with tears streaming down their faces. And like, what is it about that song that spoke to people so deeply? And I think it's because the essence of that song is what he calls the broken Hallelujah. You know, it's like the. The longing for transcendence or divinity or whatever word one uses for it, together with the acknowledgement that the world that we're living in is fundamentally a broken world. Like those two states together, I think are kind of the essence of what it is to be human. And people know it the minute they feel it. They know it's something deep.

Wow. I love it that you named Hallelujah. It's one of my all time favorite songs. So when you, when you look at that feeling, I think listeners know, like, they like that. I wouldn't identify that feeling with sorrow. I'd be like, like it's maybe more longing and you're in bittersweet. You talk about how sorrow and longing make us whole. Is that more of like a longing song or is that more of a sorrow song in the way you're defining? So I don't even know the right words for which feelings are where in my body when we go into this stuff. So I'm trying to get a sense for it.

That's a, That's a really astute question because in the book I really do talk about both states of mind. And I think you're right that, that. Well, I mean, Hallelujah is definitely about sorrow, but I would say it's more squarely about longing. It's about, I think, just this feeling of like the. There is a sense with which all of us enter the world where, like you come into this world crying, right? And you know, psychologists would say or psychoanalysts would say that we're crying because we're longing for the womb that we've just left, you know, for its comforts. The, the religious interpretation would be that we're longing for the divine world that we feel we belong to, from which we've been exiled. I'm not sure it matters which interpretation one uses. The fact is that this is our emotional core. It's our emotional DNA, this sense of longing for a kind of like ultimate communion and ultimate love. And I believe that that that state that state of existential or spiritual longing is at the heart of some of the best things that we do, you know, because we're like, we're longing for a better state. So in the surface of that longing, we're like trying to create things. We're trying to, oh, wow. To turn pain into beauty. We're trying to just get closer to the state that we long to be in. And that's also like, what inspires us. You know, like, you see a moment of like, Simone Biles, like, you know, turning some like, improbable somersaults or some amazing scientific achievement, and it's like for a moment you're glimpsing that perfect world that all humans want to be part of, and then you're inspired to get ever closer to it. We're not in that world right now, but we want to be. We deeply want to be.

I'm getting it now. So I think one of the most powerful forces of transformation for humanity is laziness. Like, we just don't want to waste time and energy doing stuff. In fact, I can prove it down to mitochondria in cells that were energy conserving beings. I'll use baking powder instead of spending four hours to make the bread rise because I wanted to save time. That's why a lot of entrepreneurial stuff does that. But I had discounted until you've just said it in the right way. For me, that longing is also a major force of creativity and problem solving in humans. And because we're saying, oh, it could be better, I long for a better world. Therefore, that power of longing is there. And I have different language because I'm a computer hacker. But I experienced something a couple years ago at Burning man, as these stories go, that I would call TechGasm. And it was watching several thousand drones go up in the air and put on a drone show at scale I'd never seen before. And I was like, this is such an achievement of engineering, of human ingenuity for one of those drones to it. But for them to be. It was beautiful at multiple levels where you're just like, how many hundreds of thousands of lives of technology innovation culminated in that one thing. And you see this state of beauty of what humans can achieve because of its complexity and its beauty. And yeah, there's a sense of longing. Like, why can't we do that with, I don't know, our legal system or any of the other parts of the world that are irretrievably broken? And I say that to an attorney of course.

Which is funny, but I'm not an attorney anymore, though. You can say anything.

All right, there we go. To a former attorney. But it's like, yeah, there is something there. So the desire for things to be better than they are is different than laziness, and I think they're both powerful. So thank you for adding that to my stack of motivation.

Yeah, absolutely. I would also riff on that for your stack of motivation that. I mean, you must know this feeling. As a computer hacker, part of the creative process is having a shining vision of the perfect thing that you want to create. And you know very well when you're working on it that you're never going to get to that full perfect thing you're imagining. But the sheer act of trying to is itself an uplifting experience. And to me, it's actually the opposite of laziness, honestly, because I always feel like when I have that. That vision in my head, like, I'll do anything. That's why I spent so many years on my books. Like, I'll just work and work and work at it in the service of trying to get closer. Even then I know it's an asymptote and I'll never actually reach it. And I know it's not just me. I've heard many creative people describe their experience that way.

It makes sense for me. I am seeing, like, there's a perfect efficiency ratio, like, right now. How do I raise the. This will sound super nerdy, but the ability of my cells to turn air and food into electricity with zero waste. And I know I've shifted that in a very powerful direction, but I know there's always going to be, like, one more electron I could save. Right? And it's not about perfectionism at all. It's about the game of, like, how close could you get? Like, is it worth it? And at a certain point, like, the ROI on something like that isn't there for a normal person. But if you're, like, an artist, and that's your art, you're like, okay, I just wanted to see what was possible because I was curious. And where does curiosity play into longing versus sorrow? Is that, like, completely a different spectrum? Because these are all words that, like, they're so mushy, I could define them, like, with electrodes on your head. But, like, where does curiosity fit in your stack of how people work? Where does curiosity fit in your stack of how people work?

I know. I have to say, the biggest challenge of writing this book is, was that it's such an ineffable topic. And yet, like, I feel like it's a deeply important one that we need to talk about. And yet it's so hard to put it into words. So I'm not surprised that you're asking these kinds of questions. I don't know. I. I do think of curiosity as being sort of a different question. You're, you know, you're probably a super curious person, so you apply this, this human way of being, of trying to transform sorrow into beauty or, or to go down the path of longing. You probably do that in the path of curiosity. But I think a less curious person would have their own ways of doing the same thing. I don't. Let me just say it more categorically. I don't enjoy sorrow or sadness experiencing it any more than any other human does. And if you asked me, would there be a way to design the world without any sorrow or sadness in it? I might say, despite this book that I've just written, yeah, go for it. But what I'm responding to is the world that we have and the humanity that we have which is destined to experience sorrow and sadness over various circumstances. And what I'm saying is in that world, this world that we have, there are things that sorrow does for us that we're not paying enough attention to. And one of the things it does is it kind of creates. These are someone else's words, not mine, but a union between souls because we all experience, because, because we're in it together. And we are all these beings who are destined to love and lose and experience bereavement and all the rest of it. We're in it together. And we. And there's a kind of love that comes from that. Like, the word compassion literally means, like it's etymology, it means, you know, to suffer with someone. And we are designed to, we're designed to respond to the cries of our infants like that's how we survive as a species. And because of that, we're designed to respond, you know, kind of radiates outward from there. And we're also designed to respond to the distress of other beings. And it bonds us together when we share about it and talk about it. So what we lose when we, when we live in a culture that says, well, you know, hide all that and walk around with a smile plastered on your face, regardless of what you might be experiencing. First of all, we're losing the truth. And I think that humans are truth seeking beings. We're also losing this ability to connect with each other as much as we otherwise could and, you know, part of the reason that we love artists the way we do, like musicians or novelists or whatever, is that they're telling the truth of human experience. And they're. They usually are expressing some kind of pain that they and every other human has been through. And we feel like, oh, my gosh, they're doing that for us. And when you. When you read their novel or you listen to their song, you're like, oh, my God, you're saying, that artist has been through this. Everybody who's listening to it has been through this. And therefore, we're all connected. So it's a kind of glue that we have that bonds us at a deep level.

If I fully tapped into the sense of longing, I know how perfect, or at least close to perfect, we can make the world. And I look at the stupid shit that people do all of the time that sabotages it for no good reason, sometimes greedy, usually ego, all that stuff. If I actually, like, went full into that, I feel like I just want to jump off a bridge. Right? Like, that is a kind of longing that doesn't feel beneficial because, like, how would you mourn for the overall stupidity of the organism of humanity? So how do you avoid from, like, longing so much that you just lose. Either become bitter or just become unmotivated?

Yeah, it's a question people ask a lot. And, you know, and I think related to that question is like, well, what's the difference between this and, know, clinical depression. And they're actually, like, completely. They're very different states. But of course, I see the thing people are worried about, or that's in your question. You know, I'll give you etymology again. Like, the word longing literally means to grow longer, and it means to reach for. So the answer to your question is you feel. To feel the thing that you're lamenting, but then to try to turn it into the direction of beauty or solving the problem or whatever it is. And this has always been understood. Like, traditionally, you look at Homer's Odyssey, and that's basically a story of epic adventure. But it's understood that the adventure begins with Ulysses, the main character, weeping on a beach out of homesickness for his native country of Ithaca that he hasn't seen in a really long time. So it's like longing and sorrow and homesickness are what propels him on the journey in the first place. And you see the same thing with so many of the children's stories that become canonical. You know, it's like Harry Potter enters the story at the exact moment that he becomes an orphan, and he's now going to spend the rest of his life yearning for the parents who he's never going to be able to remember. That's what starts us on the journey. So the idea is not to, like, be. It's not like to be in tune with what's wrong and then follow it down a black hole. It's rather to be in tune with what's wrong and then follow it to the adventure, follow it to the transformation.

So you're basically talking about the magic power of transmogrifying one emotion into another, to quote Calvin and Hobbes, who I think made up that word. But you can turn anger into motivation, although it'll burn you if you do that for a long time. And you're saying you can turn longing, which could turn, we'll say talk, into toxic longing, like, good God, how can people do so many bad things? You can turn it into motivational longing. And that's the hack. That's the trick is to say, wow, I feel sorrow that things aren't as good as they could be, therefore I'm motivated to make them better, versus therefore I'm motivated to just go, good God, why am I here? Which may be more of the clinical depressed path.

Yeah, I think it's something like that. I mean, Leonard Cohen's whole. Just to use him as one example, there's a bunch that I talk about in the book, but his artistic career, you could really say, began when he was nine years old and his father died. And he reacts to that by taking one of his father's bow ties and writing his very first poem and burying both of them in the family garden in a kind of sacred act. His whole career echoes that act. So, yeah, it's a kind of transformation of a grief into an offering. And what I say to people is like, whatever pain you can't get, I say it in the book. Whatever pain you can't get rid of. Make that your creative offering.

So you recommend people get rid of their pain to the extent they can, and then what they can't get rid of, then they get rid of as a creative offering. Are there other, like, pain draining technologies?

Oh, gosh. Pain draining technologies.

I am a biohacker. All right. You know, just different language.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I'd say call the friend who makes you laugh. Like, any. Any form of connection, I actually think is really the answer to pain, because other than physical pain, you know, that's caused by an illness or an injury or something like that. Most pain has to do with some kind of failure of connection or loss of connection. And like, one of the insights that I took from all these different traditions is that, you know, usually when you're talking about a true lost love, you usually don't get back the lost love in exactly the form that it once existed. But love itself returns in different forms. So I would say to turn in the direction of connection, whether that's calling a friend or. Or some other kind of act that makes you feel bonded to people. Generally when you feel pain from something, it's because it's because whatever just happened is something that you actually really value a lot, you know. So like, let's say you're feeling the pain of a breakup that's telling you that you value connections of love. So, you know, go in that direction.

It makes. It makes a lot of sense what you're saying, though. And I'm just trying to get a sense because it's very hard to write a book like this. And congratulations, by the way, on writing bittersweet, because these are all ineffable concepts. Ineffable is one of my favorite words because it means there isn't a word for it. So, like, how do you do this? And that's most of the meditation stuff that I've studied. Especially if you go to Tibet or any ancient lineage, it almost reads like nonsense because they're trying to describe a felt state. And if you haven't felt the state, how would you know the word for it? Right? So there's all this kind of, here's what the edges look like, but they never tell you what the middle looks like because until you feel it, you can't really know. Now, you said something in bittersweet that was pretty surprising. You say bitter. Bittersweetness is the hidden source of our moonshots masterpieces and love stories. And the two biggest moonshot guys ever, Peter Diamandis and Naveen Jain, are friends and have been guests on the show multiple times. Naveen wrote a book about moonshots. And Peter Diamandis runs Abundance360 and started the X Prize and all this stuff. And I don't know if those guys, from knowing both of them, neither one of them is particularly bittersweet. I mean, these guys are positive. Like the world is abundant. There's so many things we can do, and it's just this full charge optimism. And they're the highest achieving moonshot guys I know. They teach other people to do moonshots. How do you contrast your perspective on it? With kind of what people are doing for moonshots. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just kind of. I want to get your thinking.

Yeah, no, I hear you. And I haven't spoken to those two in particular. What I would say is there is. It's kind of like what we were talking about before, that there's always at the heart of a creative drive, you know, or the desire for a moonshot. There is always an awareness of the gap between the amazing thing that could be versus that which currently is.

Okay. That motivates them 100%. That's exactly what they do. It's what I do, too. Right. We have to do that because it's kind of painful not to. Okay, so the longing. Yeah, I would say longing for a better whatever is a big part of that. Okay, I like it.

Yeah. I'll give you another example of it. Maybe this is slightly different, but in the book, I spent a lot of time at talking to people who are working on radical life extension and the quest for longevity. And I went to one of these conferences of people, and I was really struck by how much, on the one hand, the language of life extension enthusiasts is one of you could say it's like a radical optimism. And it was definitely like, a very optimistic vibe in the room and when you chat with them. But so many of the presentations by these scientists and other people in this field, they would start with a story of somebody talking about the loss of a beloved parent or child or something like that. Or there would be, like, a picture of somebody weeping over a grave. And I thought, oh, my gosh, you know, like, that's it. They're like. They're like, in a state. They're actually. They're actually. This was a collection of people who are actually more sensitive than the average person is to the grief of mortality. And they feel like this grief is so unacceptable that they have to spend their lives devoted to closing that gap between the world they're dreaming of and this one. So I think that's often an element.

You're 100% right. It's the unspoken thing. I've noted. I've noted that for 25 years of running a nonprofit in the space, there are people who are running away from death, and sometimes they have billions of dollars and they're willing to fund. To fund things. And not all of the movement is that, though, because there are those of us who are. Are into, like, what's possible. Right. I just want to thank you for saying it. Very few people in that movement where I'm. We'll say a well known figure will talk about that. Oh my God, I'm afraid to die. I'm not afraid to die. I just decided to believe in reincarnation. So it removes fear of death. And if I'm wrong, I won't know. And if I'm right, then I win. It's very easy to do it that way. And so then when you don't have fear of death, you're like, well, how long can I live? It's a game instead of a race to not die.

Right.

Which allows me to play with longing instead of play with fear. Because playing with fear isn't really that interesting except in a few contexts.

Yeah. And it's also more inhibiting. Fear is not as motivating. You know, fear is more like, causes you to withdraw, whereas longing causes you to move forward.

You talk in your book too about unconditional love and why we long for it. Why do you think we long for perfect unconditional love?

I mean, I don't know if I have the, the answer any more than anybody else does, but for sure that's, that's, that's who we are. Like that we're destined to do that, you know, and whether that's because our first experience of life is nine months inside a womb where everything feels like love and all our needs are met and then suddenly, you know, out into the world and things are different. Or is it because there's some kind of divinity to whom we are, to whom we feel we belong and want to return there, you know, like the Sufis call it the, the longing for the beloved of the soul. And the idea is that there's no distinction between the divine, divine being we long for and ourselves. Like what we're really longing for is, is an ultimate union. I don't think I know the answer any more than anyone else does. I just know that we see different manifestations of that same wish. And that so much of the reason that people have trouble with their real life love relationships is because they don't match the perfect unconditional blissful union for which we long. And so, you know, especially like in romantic relationships, you spend the first six months, first few months with someone and it feels a little bit like you're in that Garden of Eden state. If it's a great beginning to a relationship, it feels that way. And then suddenly you start to realize you're not perfect, they're not perfect. You see all the ways in which you're individually not perfect. And your union together isn't perfect. And then you feel like, oh gosh, you're thrust back into that state of wishing for the Garden of Eden, like state. And so if you're not careful, you might move on to the next relationship, even if that original one could have been really great, just because this DNA of ours kind of thrust us to keep looking for it. So I think it's really helpful to understand that about ourselves so that we can distinguish between, you know, the quote, a quote, wrong relationship and a quite wonderful relationship which will still always necessarily be imperfect.

And so that's where that little gap for longing is. And then there's a ton of songs and most everyone has experienced lost love and In Bittersweet you talk about the Acceptance commitment therapy topic. Can you walk listeners through what is act? Right now your body might be wasting energy on stress instead of healing. That's why your gut feels off, your brain feels dull, and your immune system keeps letting you down. What if you could switch your healing state back on without meds, stimulants or guesswork? Vibrant Blue Oil's parasympathetic essential oil blend is a powerful, powerful, non invasive way to activate your nervous system and shift your body into healing mode just through scent. A drop behind your ears can help switch off your stress response, calm inflammation and support digestion, detox and immune function. And it can even help clear up your stubborn brain fog. It's natural, easy to use, and thousands of happy customers already love it. And right now the Human Upgrade podcast listeners can grab a full size Bottle for over 50% off at vibrantblue oils.com Dave that's vibrantblue oils.com Dave don't wait to start feeling like yourself again. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey In Bittersweet, you talk about the acceptance of commitment therapy topic. Can you walk listeners through what is act?

The idea of it is that when something goes wrong, when you have a loss or a pain or a sorrow or a bereavement, you know, the acceptance piece is to first like really accept all the emotions that are happening. Everything that's just happened, you're just kind of like leaning into it. You're. You're going to experience feelings of overwhelm. And that's okay too. Like you're giving yourself full permission to accept everything that's happening. But then the second piece of it is the commitment piece. And that idea is to say to yourself, as we were talking before, if something has caused me this much pain, it's because it's an area of my life that I really care about, and what could I do to commit myself to this thing that I care so much about? So, you know, if it's the loss of a love relationship that's telling and it's causing you that much pain, it's telling you that love really matters to you, and you want to organize your life around love. But there's other kinds of pains, too. It's like, you know, why is it that after 9, 11, suddenly in the U.S. so many people sign up to be firefighters, and in the wake of the pandemic, so many people sign up for medical school? There's, like, a way in which these kinds of painful experiences remind us of what we've lost and make us realize what we really care about. And so you can kind of like, turn in the direction of that caring. And it doesn't bring in the examples I just gave you. That doesn't bring back the towers, and it doesn't bring back the people who are lost at the pandemic. But. But it's a way of saying, you know, I care about having our health be intact, so I'm going to. I'm going to lean into that. You don't get your people back, but you. But you still get to move in that direction.

Okay, I get it. And so this is a way of working through loss and love and longing. And it's cool that you worked it into your. Your book so that people can see that it means you valued something. And there's so many people walking around right now with a ton of pain and trauma and loss and sadness who don't really know what to do with it, which is it's an act of service to teach them what to do. There's something else going on, though, that's probably driven mostly by social media, but everyone's a winner and a loser, and everything is polarized. And if you realize that the real world is more like shades of gray, there's some wins and some losses and all of that. How do you recommend people live just in authenticity when everything is you won or you lost or this toxic positivity? Look at my jet. Not mentioning that you just stood next to someone else's for the photo kind of thing.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really helpful for people to be aware of how much, and this has been going on since the 19th century, but how much U.S. culture, maybe more broadly than that, tends to look at ourselves, at others in a dichotomous way, that you're either A winner or you're a loser. And literally, in the 19th century, like, as we became more of a business culture to people started asking the question more and more of, like, if somebody has success or failure, is that because they got lucky or unlucky? Or is it because of something inside of them that predetermined this outcome? And increasingly, the answer that was given, the answer became that it's because of something inside you. And the more that that happened, the more it became really important for people to start acting like only permitting themselves the emotions that they would associate with winning and not with loss. And it became this kind of false duality. So it got to the point in the 19th century, like the psychologist William James starts noticing that people won't even talk about bad weather. Like, it became sort of distasteful to notice that there was bad weather outside and to comment on it, because you weren't supposed to. Well, on anything that was negative. And the use of the word loser has just increased. It's gone up and up and up over time. And this started a long time ago. Like, you know, in 1929, with the great Depression. There were newspaper headlines that would say things like, loser commits suicide in streets, you know, after becoming bankrupt. So even in a context like that, and it's like, that's why people are presenting themselves this way in social media or anywhere. If the choice is be a winner or a loser, then you know which direction you're going to take. Instead of just viewing life and humanity is like a constant interplay between winning and loss and everything in between. That's what life is. So. So the main thing I'd say is to become aware of that and reject the false dichotomy.

So you just reject it and say, all right, maybe I don't have to smile all the time. And you talk about. In bittersweet, you talk about how Americans smile way more than anyone. And it's funny, about three days before I recorded this, I was in the Maldives, and that's one of the countries you cite, where if people smile, it's because they're dishonest or they're foolish or probably both. Tell me more about why smiling means you might be a loser.

There's even a quote there from a guy in Russia saying, life is hard. Why are Americans smiling all the time? Life is hard. So there's a feeling of, like, if you're smiling in the face of. If you're constantly smiling in the face of knowing that life contains all these difficulties, then you're either not Telling the truth, or you're too unaware to even realize what the difficulties are. And it's not to say never smile. It's just that. It's just a different sensibility.

So they don't do it reflexively and falsely the way that Americans do sometimes.

Right? Right. It's like a feeling of, yeah, it can't possibly be true that you always feel like smiling and that. And yet there you are smiling all the time. So what are you not showing? What truth are you either not seeing or not telling?

In that same part of your book where you talk about smiling, you also talk about a Stanford term called effortless perfection, where it's not enough to be perfect, you have to look like you didn't try to be perfect. And I like seeing that, because when I was much younger and pretty much an asshole, I'm reasonably intelligent and I love to. In high school, I'd finish the test first and I already knew I aced it. And then you slam your pencil down and make a lot of noise with your backpack and you're like, ha, I did it. It was easy. Right? You're kind of rubbing people's faces and no people. I don't run on that operating system anymore, but I used to be like that. And it's something that I think is much bigger and more toxic than anyone's really talked about, where people work their asses off, and sometimes they're successful and they're usually lucky and worked hard, but then the media will portray them as effortless perfection or effortless success, when in reality there's a lot of pain and struggle and work, you just don't see it. And that leads younger people to believe that if they have to work hard in order to get success, that something's wrong with them because it wasn't effortless. And you're supposed to just wave your hand and say, I deserve a promotion. And you're like, actually, you didn't learn the skills of the job. You actually deserve to be fired, not to get a promotion. And then there's all sorts of pain and all that stuff. How would you go about reversing our epidemic of effortless perfection if you had a magic wand?

I mean, if I had a magic wand, I'm a big believer in. In influential people being able to pave the way. So I would say it's really incumbent on anybody who has any degree of influence, whether in their company or school or whatever it is, to start just talking more honestly about what they've actually experienced and what they actually feel And I want to say I'm saying this at the same time that I'm an extremely private introvert by nature. So I'm not saying, you know, you are now, like, obligated to divulge everything about your personal life. Like, I don't mean it like that. I just mean, like, you know, make. Make a few adjustments of what you're willing to share. And I. And we are starting to do this a little bit more. But, you know, even if you look at the last 10 years or so, there's been much more of a narrative of talking about failure. You know, I'm sure if we googled it, the word failure is used much more in the business press. But always it's like people will only talk about failure in the context of the narrative. Narrative of it leading to an ultimate success. That's the only context in which we're comfortable with failure as opposed to just talking about it as part of life. And sometimes it doesn't lead to success, it just is. And that's okay too. It's not. I mean, it doesn't feel good when it happens, but it is part of this human experience. So, yeah, I'm a big believer in influential people leading the way in doing this, but then also in creating spaces for everyone to do it. And we might be needing to start anonymously, like social media platforms that would encourage people to talk about what they truly feel. And maybe that would only happen with anonymous platforms, I don't know.

There was an app called Whisper that was all the rage about seven, eight years ago. It was really cool because you could go in and you could just say something and it was by definition anonymous. And it would share it with people within 100 miles of wherever you were, but you'd never know who they were. And there wasn't a permanence in the connection. But people could respond to what you said. And it caught on big time in, in tech circles. So you go to San Francisco or Silicon Valley or New York or somewhere and you'd just be like, wow, these people are talking about their real life, like big failures or cheating on marriage or not knowing what to do. And you're going, wow, there's all this hidden stuff that you never see anywhere. And of course then they didn't get funded and went out of business or stopped growing. I don't know what happened. Someone told the wrong secret. But it was a really neat experiment in what you're about talking, talking about. And I was on there for a little while. I was like, this is really really cool. I even shared a couple things and got really interesting feedback on it. Stuff that you just wouldn't really bring up in a boardroom or when you're raising funding or whatever. And clearly, these are people who were real people who knew a lot of stuff. And I was like, wow, I'm intrigued. So there's something going on there that's really interesting.

Why did they not get funded, though, if it was catching on?

I don't know what happened to whis. It was, like, all over the place, and then it just kind of crashed. I think maybe they didn't have any way to make money. It was just cool. And the very early Internet, circa 1992, was like, that anyone could be anonymous at any time, and it was easy. And so people would share all kinds of neat stuff. And there was this rapid learning. And once we started forcing identity, once they shut down, the last bastion of privacy was called anand. It was a server in Finland where anyone can send an email, and it would anonymously send it to someone else so you could say something without them knowing who you were. And when some government, probably the US Tried to get them to give up their server, they're like, nope, we just deleted everything. See y' all later. And after that, anonymity went away. And sometimes for us to express the hard stuff, you need anonymity. So I'm hopeful that we have that.

Yeah. I'm so struck by you saying that was, like, a feature of the early Internet, because I remember that so distinctly. Like, I was so excited when. When the Internet came to be. For specifically that reason. I felt. It felt to me like, you know, the feeling of, like, you might read a novel, and. And part of the gratitude to the author is that they're, like, really, really telling the truth, you know, and they're, like, really expressing something that's difficult to express in regular life. But they just did it in this book. And I remember feeling like the early Internet was that it was like thousands upon thousands of novels of people telling the actual truth, because suddenly there was this anonymous way to do it. And, yeah, the fact that we've lost all that in the last decade, plus, it's such a huge loss that somebody should figure out how to fix.

Now, you went to some places in your book that I didn't think you'd go. You talk about preconception trauma and maybe even generational trauma, and you talk about Rachel Yehuda's work, who's actually been a guest on the show. So do you think that there's Generational sorrow or generational longing. And that plays a role into how we behave?

Yeah, I do think so. And I actually hadn't been planning to go in that direction. But what happened? I mean, I wrote about this. I went to a seminar for. Well, it's a whole long story, but basically I went to a seminar for bereavement counselors just in my effort to understand more about that. And that seminar ended up opening up this whole question of inherited trauma and inherited sorrow. And I started realizing ways in which, like. Well, for me personally, that there's a kind of sorrow that I have always felt on some level that I can remember from a very early age that would happen. It always happened at moments of finality. You know, like I would be leaving summer camp, and I had been feeling ambivalent about summer camp to begin with. It wasn't like it had been pure, unadulterated joy, and yet, like, just the fact that it was the last day of camp and camp would never be again just provoked in me, you know, feelings of disproportionate sorrow and anguish. And anyway, I started talking with this bereavement counselor who was suggesting the role of inherited sorrow and trauma in that for me, because I come from a family with a lot of that. And then I started researching that whole area, Rachel Yehuda's work and others. And I think it's absolutely fascinating and also just really helpful in understanding oneself, like understanding the ways in which you may have inherited a family dynamic, whether it was transmitted to you culturally, familially, or through your DNA. A dynamic that shapes you and your reactions in all kinds of ways that you might not be aware of. And the fact of. Just the sheer fact of awareness of it is transformative in and of itself because you can understand your reactions and move with them.

I love the way you write about it in the book. It reminds me of Stephen Porges, who's known as the father of polyvagal theory, about how the vagal nerve works. And. And you reference the vagal nerve in your book. He has some sounds he can play going back to sad music, and they cause a lot of people to go into their vagal system, which is usually profoundly healing. And so when he plays it in the. Usually people. A few people in the room just start sobbing uncontrollably. He has therapists. He helps him. He goes to London and he plays the same song to a room full of hundreds of people. And after 30 seconds or something, he has to turn off the sound because the entire room is losing it. And his explanation for that was that, well, look at London. Anyone who's a London native went through extreme bombing and fear during World War II, and they have generational trauma from that societal trauma. And anyone who's not from London got kicked out of their country, which is pretty much what an immigrant is, is. So these are people who now have trauma because they left their country. So it's a really traumatized part of the world, either societally or generationally. And he was seeing it in the effect on vagal tone in people and in how they had to heal from their traumas. So I think there's abundant evidence that generational trauma is real. And the stuff that your grandmother was worried about probably is in there somewhere. Even if you don't know it. And just recognizing that could be possible, it matters. And when I do 40 years of Zen, which is my neurofeedback brain upgrade program for entrepreneurs and types, it's excessively common for people to step in family trauma or generational trauma. And sometimes even for your people, if you're dealing with an oppressed population somewhere, sometimes there's just a chip on your shoulder you didn't know you had or a fear. And it's something that you end up healing when you know it's real. But if you don't recognize it in the context of life, then you don't know that you could heal it because you don't know it's there. It's these invisible things that are cool. And I think you did a great job with Bittersweet of pointing out some stuff that's either invisible or very hard to see and saying it leads to behaviors including to make the world a better place and sometimes not. So it's a fascinating read, and I want to thank you for being on the Human Upgrade today and sharing your work with the world and stepping out of your introvert bubble and interacting in the outer external world and having us all look at you. You did a great job.

Well, thank you so much. It was really fun to talk to you and really a pleasure to be here.

If you liked this episode, you might want to read Bittersweet or maybe do the Audible version. But frankly, as an author, I know she wants you to buy the hardcover because. Because that's what gets her on the New York Times for another seven years. But whatever you do, it would be awesome. If you read Bittersweet and you like it, do the same thing you do when you get a really good cup of coffee. You tip your barista, but the way you do that for an author is you just leave a review. So read Bittersweet and when you're done going oh my God, then go on Amazon or wherever you like to read books and just leave the number of stars you think are appropriate so that way she won't be feeling sorrow later because she didn't get your review. See, it all works. You can go deeper into the topics of Bittersweet and quiet with Susan's 30 day online courses where you get to interact with her and her team. You can harness the power of a bittersweet mindset or learn to lead as an introvert. Wherever it is you work, go to Susan cain.net that's s u s a n c dash a dash I n dot net use code asprey15 and she'll gift you a 15% discount. Susancain.net asprey15 you're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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