Susan Cain's Bittersweet: Book Overview & Key Takeaways

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Bittersweet" by Susan Cain. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What is Susan Cain’s Bittersweet about? Do you have a bittersweet personality? How can we embrace the bittersweetness of life?

In her book Bittersweet, Susan Cain explores the bittersweet temperament, which involves experiencing joy, sadness, and yearning simultaneously. Cain argues that we can embrace bittersweetness to find greater meaning and wisdom in life, even if we don’t have a naturally bittersweet disposition.

Read on for a brief overview of Susan Cain’s book Bittersweet.

Bittersweet by Susan Cain

Do you prefer to listen to sad songs? Do you seek out beauty in everyday life? If so, you may have a bittersweet disposition. In Susan Cain’s Bittersweet, she defines the bittersweet disposition as frequently experiencing intense joy, sadness, and yearning simultaneously. People with this temperament are deeply conscious that their time in the world is finite, and they accept that pain, beauty, struggle, and hope are always intertwined.

(Shortform note: Cain’s terminology here—bittersweetness—is arguably the most accurate word to describe things that are pleasant but also marked by suffering, and it has been for centuries. The first recorded use of the word bittersweet as a noun was in the 14th century, describing pleasure mixed with suffering or regret. It was first used as an adjective in the 16th century.)

Cain examines the bittersweet aspects of the human experience, including the connections between love and longing, joy and sadness, and life and death. In doing so, she argues that all of us can glean greater meaning and wisdom from life when we embrace bittersweetness, even if we don’t naturally have a bittersweet disposition.

(Shortform note: Embracing bittersweetness is powerful because it involves acknowledging that happiness can’t exist without sadness. Happiness is a comparative emotion, so when we don’t allow ourselves to feel sad sometimes, we also limit how happy we can be.)

Cain is an award-winning author and speaker. She’s been recognized by LinkedIn as one of the world’s top 10 influencers and by Fast Company as one of their Most Creative People in Business. Cain is best known for her international bestseller Quiet, which underscores the importance of introverts’ unique skills and qualities in a world built for extroverts.

Longing for Something More

According to Susan Cain’s Bittersweet, one major characteristic of people with a bittersweet disposition is a feeling of longing for something.

(Shortform note: Longing is a partly melancholic state because we feel sorrowful about our separation from the thing we yearn for. However, it’s also sweet because there’s at least a small possibility that we’ll achieve our dream. These joyful possibilities live in our memories and imaginations, making the experience of longing inherently bittersweet.)

What we yearn for varies from person to person—many of us long for a sense of belonging or a feeling that we’re finally home. Others long to visit faraway places. Ultimately, Cain argues that we’re all searching for a glimpse of a better world, one that is idyllic and sublime, and it’s from this longing that bittersweetness arises.

Religious Perspectives on Longing

Some religious belief systems agree that our romantic relationships with others will never entirely fulfill our feelings of yearning, but their reasoning differs from that of the above research. According to Cain, these traditions believe that our feeling of longing comes from our innate desire to return to our proper place with the divine. Only when we die and return to our creator will we regain our sense of belonging.

For example, Sufism (a type of Islamic mysticism) teaches that we’re separated from God when we come into this world, and we spend our entire lives yearning to get back to him. The feeling of longing itself is proof of God’s existence because it’s the result of that original separation.

Cain argues that no matter what you believe or how your longing manifests—whether it’s for God, nature, music, other people, and so on—it all comes from the same place. Everyone yearns for perfection, beauty, understanding, and love.

The Misunderstood Power of Sadness

Now that we’ve touched on the bittersweet nature of longing, let’s take a look at one of the other primary emotions of bittersweet existence: sadness. In Bittersweet, Susan Cain presents sadness as a powerful emotion capable of inspiring much more than just pain—sadness can lead to positive experiences, too.

The Compassionate Power of Sadness

According to the author, though we often shy away from the pain of sadness, it’s actually one of our most important emotions. This is because sadness is a prosocial emotion, meaning it engenders compassion and empathy for other people. When we see someone who’s sad, we feel sad too, and we want to make it better. Since sadness inspires us to care for others and drives us to help others in response, it deepens our bonds.

Cain notes that sadness activates the same parts of our nervous systems regardless of whether we’re hurt or we witness the pain of someone else. Specifically, it activates the following parts of the brain:

Susan Cain’s Bittersweet: Book Overview & Key Takeaways