Susan Cain’s ‘Bittersweet’ to Transform Longing into Wholeness

‘Bittersweet’ by Susan Cain dives deep into the transformative power of sorrow and longing. This eye-opening book challenges readers to embrace life’s bittersweet moments, revealing how melancholy can lead to creativity, connection, and personal growth.

Discover how embracing your bittersweet nature can unlock hidden strengths and deepen your appreciation for life’s beauty.

Genres

Mindfulness, Happiness, Personal Development, Religion, Spirituality, Self-Help, Relationships, Emotional Mental Health, Love and Loss, Popular Psychology Personality Study, Science, Philosophy, Sociology, Self-Improvement, Personal Transformation

Summary

‘Bittersweet’ explores the often-overlooked benefits of embracing sorrow and longing. Cain argues that these emotions, typically viewed negatively, can be powerful catalysts for creativity, empathy, and personal growth. She draws on research, personal experiences, and cultural examples to illustrate how a bittersweet outlook can lead to a richer, more fulfilling life.

The book delves into various aspects of bittersweetness, including its role in art, music, and literature. Cain examines how great creators throughout history have harnessed melancholy to produce profound works. She also discusses the concept of “twin self,” suggesting that acknowledging and integrating both light and dark aspects of our personalities leads to wholeness.

Cain challenges the relentless pursuit of happiness in modern society, proposing that accepting and working through difficult emotions can result in deeper connections and a more authentic life. She offers practical strategies for cultivating a bittersweet mindset, such as creating “transcendent playlists” and practicing mindfulness.

Throughout the book, Cain weaves personal anecdotes with scientific research, creating a compelling narrative that resonates with readers. She explores topics like the psychology of nostalgia, the power of sad music, and the importance of acknowledging mortality to live more fully.

Review

‘Bittersweet’ offers a refreshing perspective on emotions often seen as negative. Cain’s writing style is engaging and accessible, making complex psychological concepts easy to understand. Her use of personal stories and diverse examples keeps the reader invested throughout.

The book’s strength lies in its ability to challenge conventional wisdom about happiness and success. By reframing sorrow and longing as potentially positive forces, Cain provides readers with a new lens through which to view their experiences.

While the concepts presented are thought-provoking, some readers might find certain sections repetitive. Additionally, the book’s focus on Western cultural examples may limit its relatability for some international readers.

Despite these minor drawbacks, ‘Bittersweet’ succeeds in offering valuable insights and practical tools for personal growth. It’s particularly relevant in today’s fast-paced, happiness-obsessed world, providing a much-needed reminder of the beauty and growth potential in life’s more somber moments.

This book is recommended for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of their emotional landscape or looking to find meaning in life’s challenges. It’s a valuable addition to the self-help genre, offering a unique perspective that can lead to profound personal transformation.

Introduction: Open yourself up to both joy and pain.

Bittersweet (2022) is a profound meditation on an often-overlooked emotional experience – the bittersweet. It argues that opening up to the bittersweet, where pain and joy mingle, allows us to experience life to the fullest. It also shows how vulnerability can be a strength, longing can be a guide, and sorrow can set us on the path to joy and fulfillment.

Imagine a world without sadness, loss, or suffering.

It’s pretty great. No one is ever in a bad mood. Tears are unheard of. You never wake up at 3:00 a.m. riddled with worry or anxiety about the future. Lovers never leave each other. Loved ones never die.

Could you be happy in this kind of world? Maybe you’re thinking, Of course! But it might be harder than you think.

See, sadness, pain, and loss all have an important role to play. Without them, life’s joys would be more mundane. The people you love wouldn’t feel so precious. And moments of happiness wouldn’t feel special at all. Without darkness, you don’t notice the light. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, you can’t recognize sweetness.

In other words, as you’ll learn in this summary, these two seemingly conflicting ideas often work in tandem. Learning to reconcile ourselves to – and even embrace – the bitter side of life can help us live more sweetly. And as you open yourself to the bittersweet, you might realize that relentless positivity is overrated. Because pain and loss have lessons to teach you in their own right.

As you’ll soon find out, there are reasons that you almost instinctively feel compassion – or why the track you play on repeat isn’t your favorite dance tune but the saddest song in your playlist. We’ll explore, and try to understand, the benefits of not only accepting but welcoming the bittersweet.

In this summary, you’ll learn

• why we’re hardwired to experience compassion;
• why we love listening to sad music; and
• why staying positive isn’t always a good thing.

Bitter-sweet TEACHINGS

1. Follow your longing where it’s telling you to go.
2. Transform your pain into beauty, your longing into belonging.
3. The art we love best, the music we love most, express our yearning for a perfect and beautiful world.
4. Upbeat tunes make us dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But sad music makes us want to touch the sky.
5. Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.
6. Creativity has the power to look pain in the eye and turn it into something else.
7. Our oldest problem is the pain of separation, our deepest dream is the desire for reunion.
8. You don’t have to believe in the deities of the ancient books to be transformed by spiritual longing.
9. We transcend grief only when we realize how connected we are with all the other humans who struggle to transcend theirs.
10. We are taught that when things are going well, that’s the main road. When things go wrong, it’s the detour. But there is no detour. Life is one road.
11. We’re just humans: flawed and beautiful and longing for love.

Emotions can’t be neatly compartmentalized.

It’s May 27, 1992, and Sarajevo, a city in former Yugoslavia, is under siege. There are gunfights in the streets and mortar shells falling from the sky. Amid the chaos, Sarajevo’s citizens still need to perform the mundane tasks necessary to stay alive – like lining up outside the bakery in a downtown marketplace to buy bread. Most days these citizens return home safe, carrying loaves under their arms. Other days they might not be so lucky. On this particular day, a mortar attack kills 22 of the people waiting in line.

The next day, the scene outside the bakery is bleak. Then, a man in a tuxedo arrives, finds a place in the rubble to set up a plastic chair, sits down, and begins to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor on his cello. The man is Vedran Smailović who, in times of peace, is a cellist for the Sarajevo Opera. He will play outside the bakery, as shells fall in the streets around him, for 22 days – one day for every life lost.

The sweetness of Smailović’s song doesn’t soften the bitter scene. And the desolation of the ruined city doesn’t detract from the beauty of his playing. Instead, pain and beauty combine to throw each other into even sharper relief.

This is the bittersweet, where painful and joyful feelings harmonize rather than clash.

Across generations and cultures, humans have long intuited that bitterness and sweetness, joy and sorrow are intrinsically intertwined. There are, in every life, “Days of honey, days of onion” as one Arabic saying goes. We can find pleasure in these intermingled emotions.

In Japan, festivals are held when the sakura, or cherry blossoms, bloom. Picnics are held under pink, fragrant boughs of cherry blossom trees each spring. There are other spring blossoms that are equally lovely, but the Japanese prize sakura most of all because they have the shortest season. Celebrating these ephemeral blossoms elicits a feeling they call mono no aware – which, roughly translated, means “a gentle sorrow connected to the knowledge that everything is impermanent.”

We are drawn to the bittersweet in music, too. Not everyone favors bittersweet songs over catchy pop melodies. But, as one study from the University of Michigan found, people whose favorite song is happy tend to listen to it 175 times on average. People whose favorite song is bittersweet, on the other hand, listen to that song roughly 800 times.

Why do we respond so viscerally to expressions of the bittersweet? Well, this reaction might be hardwired into us. While the strength of it varies from person to person, humans all share something called the compassion instinct. Our compassion is prompted when we observe others suffering or experiencing pain. Our instinct to act compassionately toward each other is just as primal as our instinct to eat when we are hungry or seek warmth when we feel cold. In our earliest days on Earth, our survival as a species depended on this instinct to protect and care for others.

In this sense, sadness – the bitter in the bittersweet – has an important evolutionary function. As psychologist Dacher Keltner puts it, “Sadness is about caring.” Paying attention to the sadness of others helps us build community and grow connections. Paying attention to our own sadness allows us to experience life in all its richness and complexity.

And yet, in the West, people tend to live in cultures that don’t honor bitterness. Popular psychology focuses on progress and positivity. Grief is framed as something which can be moved through in seven steps and then left behind. Trauma is something that needs closure. As a result, our experience of the bittersweet is diminished.

Perhaps it’s time we opened ourselves up to the bittersweet and all the possibilities it holds. The bittersweet recognizes there is a place for joy in sadness, and that beauty is tinged with pain.

The way we meet our pain defines who we are.

Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. Her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list. It describes some incredibly painful moments. When Angelou was eight, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. That boyfriend was later beaten to death in front of her eyes. These events left Angelou so traumatized she didn’t speak to anyone but her brother for the next five years.

Buckminster Fuller was a visionary architect who pioneered the geodesic dome – a structure so strong it can withstand extreme weather in many different climates. Fuller was also a philosopher, inventor, writer, and futurist, sometimes known as the Leonardo da Vinci of the twentieth century. When Fuller’s daughter was four years old, she died of meningitis. Fuller was so heartbroken he considered suicide.

These people were exceptional in their fields. And both were marked by pain and trauma. What is it that we can learn from their life stories – and many others like them?

We could give you a glib response to that question. Something along the lines of: These people turned their pain into a productive force. See? Everything does happen for a reason!

That wouldn’t be true, though. Not everything happens for a reason. Trauma, abuse, pain, and loss are senseless and unfair. But they are also inevitable. The bittersweet teaches us that pain exists alongside joy, love exists alongside loss, and inspiration exists alongside despair. If we turn away from the negative, we also turn away from all the good that comes with it. When we turn away from the bitter, we turn away from the sweet. Life might seem more bearable without pain. But it is also more muted.

A study from the University of Toronto found that people who accepted their negative emotions actually experienced less stress and a greater sense of well-being than their peers. This finding remained true even after these people experienced negative life events.

When we listen to our pain, it can tell us what’s important. When we use that pain to help others, we can become what Carl Jung called a “wounded healer,” just like Maya Angelou and Buckminster Fuller. Wounded healers use the pain they’ve experienced to move toward love.

Shortly after the events of September 11, 2001, one of the USA’s most painful national wounds, a record number of Americans applied to become firefighters, teachers, and health workers. When we listen to our pain, it can tell us what we need to do.

And there are ways that we can bring this concept into our lives more actively. The Buddhist practice of loving kindness meditation – also known as metta – allows practitioners to move from pain to love through the repetition of simple mantras. These mantras, like “May you be free from danger” and “May you be free from suffering” wish love on everyone in the world. To begin with, you wish this love on yourself. Then, radiating outward, you begin to wish love on family and friends, on acquaintances, and even strangers. Does all this sound more sweet than bitter? The meditation culminates in wishing love – from a safe distance – even on those who have caused you the most pain. In sending that love, you begin to release the pain’s hold on you.

There is a story from the same Buddhist tradition that gives us metta. A woman has lost her child. She carries its tiny corpse in her hands to the Buddha and asks him to please bring her child back to life – let her avoid this pain, this suffering. The Buddha agrees, on the condition that the woman bring him one mustard seed. The woman agrees, ecstatic. The Buddha then explains that this mustard seed must come from a house that has never seen pain or loss. Of course, the woman can’t produce this mustard seed. Suffering is as inevitable as love.

As the story teaches us, we can’t avoid pain and suffering. It touches us all. We will all have pain inflicted on us. We will all inflict it on others. The only thing within our control is how we welcome pain when it arrives on our doorstep.

We lose a lot when we think of ourselves as winners.

Americans are said to smile more than any other nation on Earth. But it’s not because they’re happier. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, about 30 percent of Americans will suffer anxiety over their lifetimes. Around 20 percent will suffer major depression.

Why consistently project positivity when you’re not consistently happy?

At least in this context, the answer might lie in colonial history. In the early days of the USA, New England was settled by white colonists who observed the Calvinist faith. In Calvinism, after death, some people ascend to heaven while others are cast into hell. Here’s the catch: it’s predestined, meaning God has already decided your fate. Either you’re a winner in this religious lottery, or you’re a loser. You can’t change your fate. What you can do, however, is act like a winner. Calvinists worked hard and acted devoutly to create the impression that they were among the winners.

Over the centuries, the US has grown increasingly secular. But the division between “winners” and “losers” has stuck. And while winning is desirable, losing is something to be avoided at all costs. Instead of extending compassion to those undergoing misfortunes, we treat loss and failure as if they’re contagious. The result? A society that smiles through sickness, disaster, and loss. A culture that believes it’s possible to “win” in terms of a career or romantic relationships – to “win” against illness and death.

But remember the story of the mustard seed? Loss and failure touch us all. Pretending they don’t doesn’t change that fact. And plastering a smile over negative feelings only makes them feel worse, thanks to a phenomenon psychologists call amplification. Essentially, the more you try not to think about something, the larger it looms in your mind. It’s like having a slice of delicious chocolate cake sitting in your fridge. The more you think about not eating it, the more you want to eat it. The same holds for negative emotions and experiences. The more we try to pretend they don’t affect us, the worse they become. Repressing these feelings doesn’t actually make them go away. They simply manifest in other parts of our lives. Someone who goes to great lengths to keep it together at work might find themselves snapping at their children or picking fights with their partner. Someone who wants a picture-perfect family life might secretly be a compulsive shopper, or drinker, or gambler.

So what could you do with these negative emotions?

You could follow the example of James Pennebaker and write them down. Just out of college and newly married, Pennebaker’s life stretched before him. But he and his wife hit a rough patch. He didn’t want to deal with this perceived failure. So he didn’t. And his dysfunctional coping mechanisms soon spiraled out of control. The more frequently he fought with his wife, the more Pennebaker drank; the more he drank, the more depressed he became; the more depressed he was, the more he fought with his wife.

One day, he tried something different. Instead of drinking or fighting away his negative feelings, he wrote them down. In committing his truth to the page, Pennebaker felt a sense of release. Admitting failures and shortcomings proved to be a pathway out of his negative spiral. He communicated more openly with his wife. He felt his depression ease.

Here’s the thing: Pennebaker isn’t just some guy who wrote down how he was feeling. He’s also a social psychologist. And when he saw the positive impact of expressive writing in his own life, it intrigued him. Pennebaker has since run several groundbreaking studies on the topic of expressive writing. In one such study, two groups were asked to write for 20 minutes. The first group wrote about their problems, ranging from bereavement to abuse. The other wrote about mundane topics, like the clothes they were wearing. They did this once a day for three days. At the end of those three days, after just 60 total minutes of expressive writing, the first group were calmer, happier, and less stressed than the second. And in follow-up tests, months later, the first group reported lower blood pressure, fewer health issues, and more success at work.

Pennebaker’s solution sounds simple. But in a culture that values winning over everything, admitting that you’ve failed is a big deal – even if you’re only admitting it to the page in front of you.

When you want to project that you’re a winner at all costs, you lose. Simple as that. But look at what you can gain if you’re frank with yourself and others about the ways you’ve failed and the misfortunes you’ve experienced. A fresh start, a repaired relationship, a new sense of purpose – these are things that are gained because of loss, not in spite of it.

Embracing life means accepting death.

At night, Tibetan monks turn over a water glass as a gentle reminder to themselves that they may not live to see the morning. To a Western mindset, this simple ritual might seem morbid. After all, our most important rituals celebrate life, not death. We mark our birthdays every year but don’t observe the Day of the Dead, as people in Mexico do. Embracing death, whether through vibrant festivals or small gestures, strikes us as strange. But perhaps it shouldn’t. After all, death shapes life and imbues it with meaning.

Death wasn’t always so removed from the Western imagination. For centuries, death was part of our everyday life. People died at home. Their corpses were washed and tended at home. And because we were comfortable with death, we were comfortable with grief. The Victorians, for example, observed strict rituals around mourning, wearing all black and withdrawing from society for a period after their bereavement. But around the 1930s things began to change. Death moved from the home to the hospital. And the work of tending to the dying and the dead was outsourced to health-care workers. As death became more removed from life, we grew less comfortable with grief and mourning. Now, the freshly bereaved are exhorted to be brave, to stay positive – they are told the deceased would have wanted it that way.

We no longer routinely engage with death. We no longer afford ourselves and others time and space to grieve. But in diminishing death, are we also diminishing life?

You don’t need to accept death with the tranquility of a Tibetan monk. But trying to live in a bittersweet state, where you recognize that life is fleeting and death is inevitable, can bring profound rewards. It turns out, cultivating an awareness of life’s impermanence can actually make us happier.

Dr. Laura Carstensen is a psychology professor at Stanford University. Through her research, she has identified a group of people predisposed to happiness. These people forgive easily, love unguardedly, are quick to experience gratitude and slow to experience anger. Who are these happy, well-adjusted beings? The elderly. The reason they’re happy is their heightened sense of impermanence. The older we become, as a rule, the more aware we are of death and loss. Moments of joy become more poignant. In other words, as life goes on, its bittersweet nature naturally emerges.

Dr. Carstensen believes moments of sweetness mean more to the elderly because these moments are shot through with a sharper awareness of their transience. Young people know, of course, that they will one day die – but death still feels far away. So they look outward. They explore, seeking out new people and experiences. But they also tend toward negativity bias, meaning they’re more likely to focus on and remember negative interactions and feelings.

Older people are more conscious that life is fragile. They tend to savor what they have rather than seek out what’s new. They pour care and love into the things they already treasure and, doing so, find more reasons to treasure them. Perhaps because of this, they show a positivity bias. They’re far more likely to focus on and recollect positive memories.

So, how can we learn to better live with death?

To start, we might need to reframe our thinking about grieving. People in grief are constantly told to “let go” of what they have lost, to “find closure” for their own pain. What if, instead of trying to deny grief, we focused on our incredible capacity to carry it with us through life without growing bent under its burden?

We might also remember the central truth of bittersweetness: there’s no sweetness without bitterness, no love without loss.

There’s a story Cain shares about the writer Franz Kafka. Kafka came across a little girl crying in a Berlin park. She had lost her doll and was inconsolable. Kafka informed the girl she was in luck. He happened to be a doll postman. Over the next weeks he delivered letters to the girl from her doll. In these letters, the doll told the girl all about her adventures. Finally, Kafka presented the girl with a new doll and one final note, concealed in the doll’s skirts for the girl to find much later – perhaps when she was an adult.

This note simply read, “Everything that you will love, you will eventually lose. But love will return again in a different form.”

Final Summary

Western cultures often downplay grief, diminish loss and pain, and pretend that death doesn’t exist. In short, we’re collectively in denial. And our lives are poorer for it. Closing yourself off to sadness shuts down the possibility of experiencing authentic joy. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

You’ve just learned about how various people have not only accepted, but leaned into the sorrows in life. They’ve paired these experiences right alongside the joy. And you, too, can commit to savoring the bittersweet in order to wholly appreciate life – in all of its complexities.

Practicing compassion toward yourself is a good place to start. If you’re going to accept the bitter in life, along with the sweet, be sure to extend yourself that same courtesy. Talk to yourself as kindly and gently as you would to a treasured friend. And maybe, similarly to the Buddhist mantras we mentioned earlier, by starting to value the bittersweetness in yourself, it will slowly ripple out to loved ones, strangers, and the rest of the world.

About the author

Named one of the top ten influencers in the world by LinkedIn, Susan Cain is a renowned speaker and author of the award-winning books Quiet Power, Quiet Journal, and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Translated into more than forty languages, Quiet has appeared on many best-of lists, spent more than seven years on the New York Times bestseller list, and was named the #1 best book of the year by Fast Company, which also named Cain one of its Most Creative People in Business. Her TED Talk on the power of introverts has been viewed over forty million times.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: The Power of Bittersweet

PART I Sorrow and Longing: How can we transform pain into creativity, transcendence, and love?
CHAPTER 1. What is sadness good for?
CHAPTER 2. Why do we long for “perfect” and unconditional love? (And what does this have to do with our love of sad songs, rainy days, and even the divine?)
CHAPTER 3. Is creativity associated with sorrow, longing—and transcendence?
CHAPTER 4. How should we cope with lost love?

PART II Winners and Losers: How can we live and work authentically in a “tyranny of positivity”?
CHAPTER 5. How did a nation founded on so much heartache turn into a culture of normative smiles?
CHAPTER 6. How can we transcend enforced positivity in the workplace, and beyond?

PART III Mortality, Impermanence, and Grief: How should we live, knowing that we and everyone we love will die?
CHAPTER 7. Should we try to live forever?
CHAPTER 8. Should we try to “get over” grief and impermanence?
CHAPTER 9. Do we inherit the pain of our parents and ancestors? And, if so, can we transform it generations later?

CODA: How to Go Home
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX