Why Sensitive People Enjoy Feeling Sad - Susan Cain - #485

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Susan Cain. She's a best-selling author and a speaker. There's a tyranny of positivity in the modern world. Talking about emotions like longing and sorrow are not usually encouraged. And yet, tons of people feel like this. And hearing others tell us about their melancholy brings us closer to them. So how can we integrate bittersweet emotions into our lives? And what can they teach us about ourselves? Expect to learn whether the world has become better for introverts, why sad music seems to make us happy, whether people are genetically predisposed to feeling bittersweet emotions, how to deal with impermanence in life when everyone we love is going to die, why I felt sad after looking at the moon, and much more. Susan definitely seems to be able to put her finger on an unspoken dynamic that's going on in society. Previously, it was about the power of introverts in a world that seems to be designed for extraversion and how quiet is actually a competitive advantage. And this is also true, this bittersweet, melancholic desire that some people have, why it is that we enjoy sad music or barren, sparse landscapes and imagery and stuff like that. It is very interesting. I hope you enjoy this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Susan Cain.
Susan Cain, welcome to the show.

**Susan Cain** (1:45)
Thank you so much, Chris. It's great to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
I watched your very famous TED Talk a few years ago, and in it, you hoped that the world was going to become a more introvert, friendly place. Doing a sort of analysis of what's happened over the last few years, how do you feel that's gone? What's the post-mortem?

**Susan Cain** (2:06)
I think it's gone amazingly well, and also that we still have a long way to go. And I think, you know, that's true of any social shift. You can sometimes see changes, but still know that there's still a distance to travel. But yeah, when I compare things to the way they were ten years ago, I think it's been a pretty seismic shift, just in terms of the degree to which people are aware of the fact that we are introverts or extroverts or maybe somewhere in between, and that that shapes so much of who we are.
And the willingness of companies and schools and organizations to talk about it. But I would say most of all, the biggest shift I've seen is in individual humans. You know, all the letters that I get from people telling me that they once had felt like they didn't have permission to be their true selves, and that now they do, and they embrace it. And there's this amazing paradox at the heart of so many of these letters, which is that the more people embrace their true quiet nature, the more successful they become in the outer facing world. I see this over and over again.

**Chris Williamson** (3:17)
It's very difficult to compete with somebody that's being themself, right? No one can beat you at being you.

**Susan Cain** (3:22)
Exactly, exactly. And I think humans really like truth, most of all. And when you feel like somebody is telling the truth about who they are and living that truth, we like it, you know, and we want to be with them.

**Chris Williamson** (3:39)
Yeah, I did a TEDx talk the start of last year, and this was the entire topic of it. It was about embracing your weirdness and about the fact that Dali was this Salvador Dali was this unbelievably unique human. But if he hadn't embraced everything that he was, we weren't going to get Dali out of Da Vinci, and we weren't going to get Dali out of Michelangelo. It was important for him to embrace all of the elements of him, the ones that got him locked in a deep sea diving suit that he had to be wrenched out of in the middle of a talk, and the one where he was throwing himself down the stairs at nine years old because he just liked pain. Like, you know, he was a bizarre guy beyond the facial hair. And yeah, it's very, very right. There is a resonance that you get when you can see somebody just being themselves and just being truthful. And it's very alluring, which is bizarre because a lot of the time, especially with introverts, that's exactly not what they want. They want, like, the allure to kind of come and go as they please. And some of the people that are the most engaging are the ones who are not necessarily looking for it.