Paul Bloom, THE SWEET SPOT: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning
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[0:41]Paul Bloom is the author of The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.
[0:46]Paul is the professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and Brooks and Suzanne
[0:50]Reagan, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University.
[0:54]Paul studies how children and adults make sense of the world,
[0:57]with special focus on pleasure, morality, religion, fiction, and art.
[1:01]He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching.
[1:03]He has passed president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and Co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
[1:10]He has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science and for popular outlets,
[1:14]such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly.
[1:18]He is the author of six books, including his most recent, The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.
[1:23]Welcome, Paul.
[1:24]Thanks so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read books to discuss The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.
[1:31]Thanks so much for having me here.
[1:32]It's my pleasure.
[1:33]I actually was a psychology major at Yale back in the day and took a million classes there.
[1:39]So when I saw that, it was your background.
[1:40]I was very excited to chat.
[1:43]Did you take my intro site course?
[1:45]I took Professor Salve's intro site course.
[1:47]My competition.
[1:49]Yeah.
[1:50]I don't know though.
[1:51]I was there.
[1:52]I graduated in 98.
[1:53]So maybe you weren't even there yet.
[1:54]I don't know.
[1:55]I got there in 99.
[1:56]Yeah.
[1:57]Well, there you go.
[1:58]What else did you teach?
[1:59]I don't think I took your, I'm pretty sure I didn't take your class.
[2:02]But.
[2:03]I thought the intro site, a bunch of small seven hours on different topics of interest.
[2:06]Interesting.
[2:07]Okay.
[2:08]Well, now we have all of this data about The Sweet Spot and making, this is sort of making lemons into lemonade in book form, right?
[2:17]Why is it?
[2:18]Why is it good?
[2:19]What good does it do us for the, for the bad, essentially?
[2:22]I'm not saying that very well.
[2:24]But talk to me about your book and how you came up with this idea and all the, the reasons behind it.
[2:31]Yeah.
[2:32]I've, I've long been interested in why we sometimes choose to suffer.
[2:35]We choose different big ways and small ways.
[2:37]Some of us like spicy foods or hot bass or songs that make us cry or movies.
[2:43]Sato masochist execs all sorts of things.
[2:46]And so to solve these puzzles and figure out why do we choose to suffer.
[2:50]I began to explore the way suffering leads to great, the pleasure.
[2:54]And then the course of this.
[2:56]And that sort of starts off the boat talking about these, these puzzles.
[2:59]I began to become interested in the question of chosen suffering as part of a life well lived.
[3:05]So I talk about all sorts of pursuits we take on voluntarily that are, that are,
[3:09]difficult that are, that involve struggle and pain, including having kids.
[3:13]Actually, which is a central part of my book.
[3:15]And so I'm very interested in why we do this.
[3:18]And why do, why do we do this?
[3:20]Well, there's all sorts of reasons.
[3:22]Sometimes suffering could accelerate pleasure.
[3:24]We, we're very good playing with contrast.
[3:27]We might cause ourselves a bit of pain because when it's over,
[3:30]we get a blast of pleasure afterwards.
[3:32]Sometimes suffering gives us the feeling of mastery and control.
[3:36]Sometimes it gives us an escape from ourselves.
[3:39]Some people talk about high intensity exercise and they said,
[3:42]when I'm doing it, I don't think about anything else.
[3:44]And those are all answers revolving around fun.
[3:47]But I think more importantly,
[3:49]my book defense and I call motivational pluralism,
[3:52]which is we want more than one thing.
[3:53]We don't just want pleasure.
[3:54]We want to be good people.
[3:56]We often want meaning, we want purpose, we want intimacy, we want variety.
[4:00]And some often suffering and meaning are very tied in together.
[4:04]It sounds like an oversimplification, but I think it's true,
[4:07]which is anything that's valuable to us.
[4:09]Anything we would take pride in, we think it's important,
[4:12]is going to involve risk and difficulty and anxiety and all that good stuff.
[4:16]And so when did you notice?
[4:18]Like when did you get the inkling that this is the book you wanted to write next?
[4:21]Like what, what study or what, like why this book?
[4:25]What came to the forefront that you were like,
[4:27]oh yeah, this I want to examine more.
[4:29]Well, my last book was on morality and had a little good life.
[4:33]And that would be a more like good person.
[4:35]This book was kind of fun.
[4:37]I found myself just endlessly listening to people who,
[4:40]who love eating spicy foods or training for a triathlon or doing,
[4:46]doing hard things.
[4:47]So in fact, this book's been brimming up with me for a long time.
[4:50]I was very happy to get the chance to write it.
[4:52]So that's sort of very of the moment quote Glen and Doyle's,
[4:56]we can do hard things, right?
[4:58]And then we should all be getting behind this movement
[5:01]just to push through.
[5:03]Are there any downsides to pushing through the hard things?
[5:07]I mean, absolutely chosen suffering is something which I think is very important
[5:11]and I make a case for it and try to explore why.
[5:13]But people could choose too much.
[5:15]Could make the wrong choices.
[5:16]One example is we get pleasure depriving ourselves of things,
[5:20]but taking too far it could lead to, you know,
[5:23]horrible eating habits,
[5:25]obsessive exercise,
[5:26]could lead people to actually damage or destroy their bodies.
[5:29]We think suffering is good,
[5:31]but sometimes we go a bit too far on this.
[5:33]And we, you know, when people do good things and enjoy them,
[5:37]there's studies finding that we discount it.
[5:40]So we can take suffering too seriously.
[5:42]I guess for me, the big thing is my claim is about chosen suffering.
[5:46]I think people get unchosen suffering.
[5:48]The bad stuff that happens to us really long.
[5:51]We take, we tend to be in a mistaken view that that's necessarily good for us.
[5:55]And that's not really the case.
[5:57]So unchosen suffering is still bad.
[6:00]Yes, I've been accused of saying unintuitive things in my career,
[6:05]but I'll tell you this, which is bad things are bad for you.
[6:08]And for the thing where, where, you know,
[6:10]your house burns down and you get a horrible disease,
[6:13]bad, don't get it, don't try to avoid it.
[6:15]Okay.
[6:16]Good tip.
[6:18]You heard it here.
[6:20]What's the time when you really suffered and it turned out,
[6:25]okay, in the end, as opposed to a time you suffered when it was just purely bad.
[6:29]Well, this times I've suffered that it was purely bad.
[6:32]We're suffering.
[6:33]I didn't, I didn't choose.
[6:34]I think a very minor thing, which is my, my partner and I got,
[6:38]got COVID over, over the holidays.
[6:40]That was no, no picnic.
[6:41]No, there was no good to it.
[6:43]I guess now we're sort of, we're not going to get it again,
[6:46]which is kind of nice, but there's nothing good to be said about it.
[6:48]We just say simple as that.
[6:50]The times where, where I chose to suffer and it was good.
[6:53]I, I talk in a, in a book about a running New York marathon,
[6:56]a long time ago and I was, I said a shape, you know,
[6:59]but I didn't run it very well.
[7:01]But, but I enjoyed training for it and working at it and it was surprisingly difficult
[7:07]and a difficulty in struggle and anxiety.
[7:10]We were part of what gave it, gave it a certain richness to it.
[7:13]That's why I'm talking about it now.
[7:15]It gave it weight.
[7:17]One might argue that writing a book is a form of suffering.
[7:20]You could.
[7:21]I mean, in some way, you could say some sorts of suffering have,
[7:24]have payoffs at the end.
[7:26]They don't really count.
[7:27]So, you know, you write a book because you have sort of career goals,
[7:29]you wonder is an idea you want to get out.
[7:31]But yeah, I think a lot of people have the wrong idea about the good life
[7:35]where they think what makes people fulfilled is and what,
[7:39]what the way to live if you could is you get to sit in a self
[7:42]and watch Netflix and, and, you know,
[7:44]and drink pina coladas and sip out of each and have all these good times
[7:47]and I'm not against good times.
[7:49]But there's a lot of evidence suggesting that people actually really value
[7:54]intense focus work.
[7:56]What I mean, how each extent may I cause flow.
[7:59]Where a flow state is something where you really get immersed in it.
[8:02]You get lost in it.
[8:03]You, you, you forget to eat.
[8:04]You forget to pick up the kids at school.
[8:06]You just, you just get lost in that.
[8:07]And it's not fun in any simple sense.
[8:10]But it's what people experience who are athletes, who are musicians,
[8:14]who are writers.
[8:15]And, and I think that there's a real payoff to that,
[8:18]which sometimes gets forgotten.
[8:20]Very true.
[8:21]So how did you end up in 1999 becoming a psychology professor at Yale?
[8:26]Where did you, did you know you wanted to be a professor?
[8:28]Like when did you, when did that interest percolate in you?
[8:32]And, and how did you end up there?
[8:34]My brother is severely autistic.
[8:36]When I was a teenager, I would work in, in camps and programs for kids with autism
[8:41]and other sort of various psychological disabilities.
[8:45]And so I kind of was an undergraduate at McGill.
[8:48]I thought I was going to become a therapist working with these kids.
[8:51]And I kind of realized it's not where my heart was.
[8:53]I don't have the patience.
[8:54]I don't have the skills.
[8:55]But it began very,
[8:56]become very interested in research.
[8:58]And by, by chance, I met a professor, John McNamara, who inspired me.
[9:03]And so I went off to graduate school at MIT.
[9:06]And then I, I, my first job at University of Arizona for about nine years.
[9:11]And then Yale contacted me and my, my then wife.
[9:14]And we moved, we moved to Yale.
[9:16]And now I'm at a university trial.
[9:18]So it's been, it's been an exciting career trajectory.
[9:22]Wow. That's amazing.
[9:24]Have you seen a noted shift in the, I mean, I know psychology has just gotten more and more mainstream
[9:30]as time has gone on.
[9:31]But in the last, you know, 20 plus years you've been doing this.
[9:34]Have you noticed a big shift in the people you're teaching and the students?
[9:39]And their consumption of it or reaction to it or anything?
[9:43]You know, I know a lot of people say that the students, they, they teach, have changed.
[9:48]I think often what happens is just you get older and that people, you know, people seem different to you.
[9:52]I haven't noticed that bigger shift in a politics shift.
[9:56]What's, what people like, what do offend people just kind of shifts in interesting ways.
[10:00]I find a lot of students are very sophisticated.
[10:02]I find a lot of students from a come to psychology are aware of what's been happening
[10:07]over the last many years to the crisis and psychology where so much of what we've said
[10:12]we've discovered we haven't discovered so much of our work has been overturned as
[10:16]very shoddy and sort of as an interest in, you know, distinguishing the real science
[10:21]from the from the nonsense.
[10:23]And I find the students then to be very sophisticated about psychology.
[10:26]And in all of your research, have you done research on what the impact of having
[10:32]a sibling with a mental health condition has done can do or anything like that?
[10:38]No, not really.
[10:39]Next book for us.
[10:41]Not my kind of thing, you know, obviously, you know, it's pretty clear that there are things
[10:47]genetically comorbid with autism, but I seem to have, I think maybe I'm mildly
[10:53]in a spectrum.
[10:54]Many professors are, but otherwise, you know, the terminus of what shapes you and what
[10:58]changes you, you know, it's another revolution in psychology.
[11:02]We know that genes play a very powerful role and we also know that the environmental forces
[11:07]at shapeless are so mysterious, you know, yeah, too.
[11:11]So when you start working on a book, what's the process like for you?
[11:15]How long does it take you and what does it look like?
[11:17]It takes me about a year and a half to two years to write a book.
[11:21]And roughly, I kind of, I wake up, you got a cup of coffee and I write for an hour each
[11:26]morning, including, you know, I have some exceptions, sometimes I end up skipping
[11:30]it, whatever, but mostly this, I write an hour each morning, typically not anymore.
[11:34]And then over, you know, a couple of years, a book forms, you know, and it's a bit before
[11:38]that I'm running a proposal, working my agent, you know, pitching a proposal, but
[11:42]writing itself, which I love, I love, I love writing a book much more than I love, kind
[11:48]of, well, trying to sell a book later on and getting blurbs and all that stuff, which
[11:52]is unpleasant.
[11:53]But I really like writing a book and I, I just do it in the mornings.
[11:56]The mornings are my, my most productive time.
[11:59]What about you?
[12:00]Are you also a morning writer?
[12:03]When I actually don't have my kids and I have the luxury of writing in the morning, yes,
[12:07]that is my, that way, my dream would be, you know, waking up and just staying in my pajamas
[12:11]this whole day.
[12:12]But that's sort of my dream for every day.
[12:13]So I could just work in my pajamas.
[12:15]I mean, there's a lot to be said for having kids, but, but it kind of busts up a morning
[12:21]schedule.
[12:22]It does.
[12:23]Yes.
[12:24]My sons are off in the world now.
[12:25]So, so one of, you know, I miss them, but I get to work in the mornings.
[12:27]Yeah, but it is good.
[12:29]I know, I wish I'm very much a morning person.
[12:31]So I feel like so much in culture is geared toward the night and I wish all the parties
[12:36]were in the morning.
[12:38]Like I've always, I'm always up for a luncheon, the duties are harder for me.
[12:43]I'm like, oh, no, in the night, I'm in my pajamas, like watching TV in a ride.
[12:47]Yeah.
[12:48]I'm like, I don't like, I don't like going out in the dark, but that doesn't seem to
[12:51]fly.
[12:52]So I guess I don't know.
[12:53]I think over time, it's much more acceptable to always stay home.
[12:57]What project are you working on now?
[12:59]I am finishing off actually my first draft of a book that's the story of psychology.
[13:04]Because it's meant to be, anybody interested in psychology, it's for them.
[13:08]It talks about everything from parenting to schizophrenia, to neurons, to the good life.
[13:14]And I just said about all of psychology, like the textbook, except it's not.
[13:18]I still have my textbook, like right back there, I should have got it over from freshman
[13:22]year.
[13:23]I should probably open it.
[13:24]I'd probably get a lot more benefit than from, you know, it may be outdated now.
[13:28]It may know that everything, well, still very true.
[13:32]What advice would you have for aspiring authors?
[13:34]I guess the usual thing is read a lot, read a lot in the genre that you want to write
[13:39]them.
[13:40]You know, if you want to write, you know, op-ed pieces in New York Times, read a lot of
[13:44]op-ed pieces, get a flavor for them to write magazine articles, self-help books, philosophical,
[13:49]but just you should really read the literature.
[13:52]And then I guess in some way, this is an amazing world for people who want to write because
[13:57]there's so many possibilities to write.
[13:59]There's countless magazines and countless online sources.
[14:03]So you should start small try to publish something, you know, try it, try it.
[14:07]Well, not, this is not first try, New York Times, Atlantic, Vox, whatever.
[14:11]But then if you don't hit those, there's a whole lot of places to publish.
[14:15]So, you know, the standard bit of advice I've heard from everybody else, which is if you
[14:18]want to write, right?
[14:19]Okay.
[14:20]Good.
[14:21]And try not to let it be too painful or, you know, the pain, like a little bit painful is
[14:25]just right.
[14:27]Okay.
[14:28]So I'm on the right track.
[14:30]Hopefully this has been too painful, but thank you for doing this interview.
[14:34]Thank you for talking to me.
[14:36]Okay.
[14:37]That was great.
[14:38]Thank you.
[14:39]Bye.
[14:40]Bye.
[14:41]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
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[14:48]Books.
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