Susain Cain’s 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, ignited a revolution in the world of social science. Arguing that our society is designed for extroverts, and that we’re losing out on all the untapped creative energy of the more socially reserved, she empowered a groundswell of introverts to embrace their true disposition. In the decade since its release, introversion has become trendy enough that it has spanned the cultural gamut, from a New York Times trend piece to a Buzzfeed List to a GEICO commercial.

Now she’s trying to make us embrace a tougher topic: death. “How should we live, knowing that we and everyone we love will die?” This is one of the central questions that animates her new book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. More specifically, she’s talking about how the inevitability of death imbues the world with a certain abstract feeling: bittersweetness, which she describes as “a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.” Of all those terms, longing may best sum up what Cain’s getting at. Longing is bittersweet in that it connects what we don’t have (bitter) with what we desire (sweet). Cain believes that it’s this longing that fosters both creativity—in longing for a more beautiful world, we create art—and gratitude—in longing for a less fragile, more permanent life, we come to more deeply appreciate the time we do have. But she worries it’s something we aren’t given permission to feel given our culture’s positivity mandate.

GQ recently spoke with Cain, via phone from her home. When asked how someone who identifies as a skeptic came to write a book about something so sincere, Cain laughs and says she guesses she's a “very earnest skeptic.” Then, contemplating it further, she turns, well, very earnest.  “Even for the most skeptical among us, the desire for a more perfect and beautiful world is at the heart of the human experience,” she says. “Whether people want to roll their eyes or not, it’s just how it is.”

GQ: In the second section of the book, while discussing the tyranny of positivity, you pose a question: “How did a nation founded on so much heartache turn into a culture of normative sunshine?” So how did we?

Susan Cain: It has to do with our creation of the country as a nation of business. Throughout the nineteenth century, we had booms and busts. We had an increasing reverence for the successful business person, and we needed to explain the reasons that so many people were failing in the wake of economic panics. A question arose: When a person fails at business, is it because of something that happened to them, or is it because of some quality “in the man,” something inside you responsible for this failure?

As the century wore on, the consensus became that the reasons for failure had to do with something inside you—and the more important it became to have the emotional affect of a successful person, somebody who is unfailingly cheerful and positive, and acted like a winner. We started to divide people into winners and losers. You can trace this through the use of the word loser. A loser used to be just somebody who had lost. Then it came to mean somebody who had the soul of a loser, somebody who was predisposed to loss. Once you believe that, you’re going to try your hardest not to act like someone who has experienced loss, because that’s seen as a failure of character.

That’s the heritage that we’re living with today. You start to realize how impossible this is because life is lived with loss. The concept of bittersweetness is that life is inherently light and dark. It’s sorrow and joy. It’s love and loss. So when we talk today about a tyranny of positivity, or toxic positivity, what we don’t realize is that we’re carrying this historical imperative that no matter what you do, you should never act like a loser.

One of the things that made Quiet feel urgent was the idea that a society designed for extroversion misses out on a lot of talent, energy, creativity, and happiness that might come from introverts. What is the urgency here? What are some of the downsides of the edict for happiness?

The urgency is that we’re losing one of the greatest senses of connection, to each other and to ourselves. If we live in a culture where we're not allowed to express sorrow, we're cutting ourselves off from each other. [Psychologist] Dacher Keltner has done all this groundbreaking work, showing the power of sorrow to unite us. He looks at the vagus nerve, the biggest bundle of nerves in our bodies. It's connected to our ability to breathe and to digest food. Our vagus nerve also reacts when we see another being in distress. We experience vicarious distress. This is deep in our bodies. The same part of our body that helps us breathe also helps us respond to other beings with compassion. We tend to think of compassion as a Sunday school attribute, and maybe a bit phony in some way. It's actually fundamental.

I’m vaguely familiar with Dacher Keltner, but I had always associated him with awe.

He does do a lot of work on awe, and they are connected in a certain way. This whole suite of experiences that you can associate with awe—or spirituality, whatever you want to call it—seems to be associated with bittersweetness. Bittersweetness is really the state of longing that all human beings are in: longing for a different, a more perfect, a more beautiful world. For some people, that's expressed in overtly religious terms. For others, it's completely secular. It's an impulse that is reaching for a higher state. There's a sense of an asymptote. If you look at the etymology of the word “longing,” it means to grow longer, to reach for something. That is the heart of the creative impulse. It's reaching to create something that's more beautiful, or more interesting, than what existed before.

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What are some ways in which the research and the writing of the book have changed your everyday experience? Did it give you new rituals, or new practices?

In the book, I talk about a video created by Cleveland Clinic Hospital to train its caregivers in empathy. They showed this video of random people walking through the hospital corridors, people who you’d normally walk past without thinking twice. They had little captions underneath each person, so that we knew what they were experiencing. Sometimes they were joyful things: “Just found out he was going to be a dad for the first time.” More often, they were sad things: “Going to say goodbye to her father for the last time”; “Just found out they had a malignant tumor.” I now walk through the world wondering what people's captions are. That practice can be very transformative in everyday interactions.

One of the biggest takeaways that I have from all these years of examining all these wisdom traditions, and artistic and literary traditions, is that the best thing that humans can do is transform pain into beauty. Pain is inevitable. You can either ignore it or suppress it, and then invariably, you're going to end up taking it out on someone else; or you could acknowledge it, and seek to transform it somehow, whether it's into some form of art or healing of yourself or healing of other people going through the same sort of pain. Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering. That's something anyone can do. In our culture, we think that means you need to go write the next Ninth Symphony. I don't mean that at all. It could be a very small creative act. The act of writing, painting, cooking a meal, whatever it is, is very transformative.

Our emotions are often cultural. We react to things based on how we're taught to react to them. Are there other societies that "do" sadness better than we do? What can we learn from them?

Americans smile more than most other societies do. There's a cultural imperative to smile. I had a boyfriend from Eastern Europe who showed me his high school photo album. I was absolutely shocked to see this photo album full of teenagers, staring unsmilingly at the camera. You would never do that in an American [yearbook] album. I go back and look at mine, and everybody was smiling, it didn't matter what they were going through at the time. It's not inevitable that it would be this way. Americans need to lose our sense of shame that loss is part of life. That's really what we're ashamed of. It traces back to the question you asked me at the beginning. We're ashamed of it because we think that loss marks us as losers, which we have decided is the worst thing you can possibly be.

There's a point in the book where someone asks you two questions: “How great a sense of possibility do you have?” and “How aware are you that you'll die one day?” I hate to use this term given that this book is against toxic positivity, but that almost seems like a formula for happiness: do you have a broad sense of possibility, and yet enough awareness of mortality to be grateful for everything that you already have?

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Those two questions come from the work of Laura Carstensen [a psychologist at the Stanford Center for Longevity]. She's done all this fascinating research and found that older people are happier. To the extent we're not surprised by that conclusion, it’s because we think older people are wiser. She found that's not really the answer. Older people tend to be happier because they're more aware of life's fragility. Younger people who, because of their life circumstances, are also more aware of life's fragility have that same tendency to be happier and experience more gratitude—and less prone to anger, more interested in pursuing deep relationships.

There's this stoic practice of memento mori, which basically means to always remember that you're going to die. Even as I'm saying it, I feel a twinge of embarrassment because it's seen as so morbid in our culture. I started practicing that, and it was transformative. While I was writing the book, I was still doing bedtime with my young kids. I was so busy that I had a problem not bringing my cell phone into the bedtime ritual. I was furtively, surreptitiously checking it, until I started practicing memento mori. It stopped completely because I was like, "Oh my gosh, I may not be here tomorrow, they may not be here tomorrow, what the heck are you doing on your cell phone?" It throws the preciousness of life into stark relief. Again, talking about life's fragility is considered morbid. But it's the opposite. It's life-affirming.

You identify yourself as a skeptic in the book. What you're describing is very earnest and on the opposite end of skepticism. I'm wondering what advice you might have about getting people past the initial skepticism to practice some of these more earnest things?

I guess I'm a very earnest skeptic. I really did go through a transformation in that regard, through writing this book. I started writing it to answer what seemed at the time like this small question: Why the heck is sad music so incredibly uplifting? What I came to realize is that the experience I have when I hear that music is the same thing that religious people talk about when they talk about God. It's an experience of communion and of longing for that other world. I believe that even for the most skeptical among us—and I really am [in that group]—the desire for a more perfect and beautiful world is at the heart of the human experience. Whether people want to roll their eyes or not, it's just how it is.

I'm curious what you took away from your time at RAADfest, the “Woodstock for Radical Life Extension,” where people are trying to solve mortality.

I'm really taken by the philosophical question it presents. There was one guy I interviewed who said that all these stories we tell each other about the fragility of life giving it meaning, are pretty stories that we invent to help us come to terms with a situation we can't control. And if we could control it—if we truly could defy death—we would no longer tell ourselves those stories about what life's fragility does for us. I found that really interesting. I wonder all the time about whether that's true. At the end of the day, I'm not sure that it matters. If we lived in a world of endless health and immortality, maybe we would like that world, but I'm not sure that takes away from the fact that this is the world we actually do live in. Our task is to come to terms with the world we do live in and to see its endless gifts. That fact that life's fragility induces in us these states of higher being and gratitude, that's a reality,

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You share in the book about losing both your father and brother both to COVID. How did experiencing that impact the book?

It’s more that writing the book helped me with those experiences. I write about the Kabbalah, the mystical teaching of Judaism, the idea that all creation was once a united divine vessel, but then that vessel shattered. The world we're living in now is the world after that breakage. The shards of that broken vessel are strewn everywhere around us in the mud. The task now is to pick up those divine shards wherever we might find them.

I found it to be such a comforting metaphor. It helped me make sense of my father's life, in particular. He was always doing beautiful things just for the sheer sake of it. He built a greenhouse in our basement and grew orchids. Nobody saw them except for us. He learned to speak French because he thought French was beautiful, even though he really never had occasion to speak it. There were a thousand things he did like that.

My father's life had been an expression of that idea in the Kabbalah. All of our lives can be that. Our love relationships are all aspects of these divine shards. They're all manifestations of the same love and of the same beauty. I think that's what I keep coming back to from this book. Everything is beautiful. Everything's broken. What do we do with that reality? You keep on picking up the divine shards.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Clay Skipper is a Staff Writer at GQ.XInstagramRelated Stories for GQBooks