The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days | Susan Cain and Min Kym

**Elise Hu** (0:04)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. When you're really still, what do you long for? What kind of joy does your heart reach for so badly that it almost hurts? Here's one place a lot of us feel it, even if we've never quite put words to it. Sad music, the songs that ache a little, but we still play again and again.
Author Susan Cain thinks that quiet little habit is telling us something we've mostly stopped listening to.

**Susan Cain** (0:34)
People play the happy songs on their playlists about 175 times on average, but they play the sad songs 800 times.

**Elise Hu** (0:41)
Susan has spent years fascinated by that pull toward sorrow. Philosophers have a name for it, the paradox of tragedy. Why would we welcome sadness when the rest of the time will do just about anything to avoid it?
In her talk from 2019, Susan shares that for her, what we're feeling in those moments isn't really sadness at all. It's longing, a joy that's laced with sorrow. And she thinks we live in a culture that's forgotten how to sit with it.

**Susan Cain** (1:08)
Right now, our culture is afraid of the dark, and that all this normative sunshine can distract you from your rightful heritage.

**Elise Hu** (1:16)
Cultural scripts may tell us to be upbeat, but Susan argues the opposite, that listening to our broken hearts can actually be the source of our deepest creativity, connection, and love. And she's not making that case alone. She's joined on stage by the violinist Min Kym, who's playing you'll hear throughout. That's coming up right after a short break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Susan Cain** (1:48)
When I was in my early 30s, I was an associate at a Wall Street law firm, and I had been working 16-hour days for seven years straight. And even though ever since I was four years old, I'd had this beautiful and impossible dream of becoming a writer, I was also pretty ambitious and on the verge of making partner. Or so I thought. Because one day, a senior partner named Steve Shalin knocked on my office door. Steve was tall and distinguished and very decent, and he sat down and he reached for the squishy stress ball on my desk, and he said that I wasn't going to be making partner after all. And I remember very badly wishing that I had a stress ball too, but Steve Shalin was using mine. And I remember feeling sorry that it had fallen to Steve to be the one to tell me this news, because he really was a good guy. And I remember bursting into tears right in front of him. Such a non-partnerish thing to do. But that very afternoon, I up and left my law firm for good. And a few weeks after that ended a seven-year relationship that had always felt wrong. And so now I was in my early thirties, and suddenly I had no career, no love, no place to live. And immediately I fell into a relationship with a handsome musician who liked to compose lyrics by day and stand around a piano with friends singing at night. And he was the wrong guy for various reasons, but my feelings for him developed into this crazy obsession, the likes of which I have never experienced before or since, thankfully. No matter what I did, I couldn't escape it. Until one day a friend said to me, you are this hooked because he represents something you're longing for. What are you longing for?
And the answer came to me with a sudden clarity. It was like, of course, he was the writing life that I had longed for since I was four years old. He was an emissary from the beautiful world. And just like that, the obsession fell away, and I started writing for real.
Today, I want to talk with you about a state of mind that's ancient and universal, and enormously powerful and strangely these days overlooked. The author CS. Lewis called this state of mind the inconsolable longing for we know not what. And he was mesmerized by it all his life, as am I. When I was 22 years old and I was still in law school, some friends came by my dorm room to pick me up on the way to class, and I had been sitting and listening to bittersweet music, which is something I have been doing all my life.
OK, so the music's a little bit gloomy. It's full of longing, right? Maybe for a lost love that never existed in the first place. But the curious thing is, when I hear music like this, I don't really feel sad or not very sad. What I actually feel is something that's much closer to joy, and I could never understand why this was. But meanwhile, I noticed that my law school classmates were feeling very little joy. One of them asked me why I was listening to funeral music, and I laughed, and we went off to class. End of story. Except that I thought about that comment of his for literally the next 25 years. Like, why do I find sad music so uplifting? And what is it in our culture that makes it feel a fitting subject for a joke? And why even right this minute do I feel an intense desire to assure you that I love dance music too? Like, I really do. At first, these were just interesting questions, but as I looked for the answers over the years, I started to realize that really, they were the questions. They were the big ones. I just hadn't known it yet.