The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

Product Description
“This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It’s an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife
From the author of Against Empathy comes a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives
Why do we so often seek out physical pain and emotional turmoil? We go to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag. We poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse ourselves in hot baths, run marathons. Some of us even seek out pain and humiliation in sexual role-play. Where do these seemingly perverse appetites come from?
Drawing on groundbreaking findings from psychology and brain science, The Sweet Spot shows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals; it can display how tough we are or, conversely, can function as a cry for help. Feelings of fear and sadness are part of the pleasure of immersing ourselves in play and fantasy and can provide certain moral satisfactions. And effort, struggle, and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow.
But suffering plays a deeper role as well. We are not natural hedonists—a good life involves more than pleasure. People seek lives of meaning and significance; we aspire to rich relationships and satisfying pursuits, and this requires some amount of struggle, anxiety, and loss. Brilliantly argued, witty, and humane, Paul Bloom shows how a life without chosen suffering would be empty—and worse than that, boring.
Review
“Bloom writes as if speaking, which brings a welcome immediacy to his explorations. . . . The effect, simultaneously authoritative and chummy, is engaging.” -- Harper's Magazine
“Paul Bloom will change the way you think. Perhaps suffering isn’t a bad thing? He explains why the experience of pain enhances subsequent pleasure and that a life without it would actually be boring.” -- Good Morning America.com
“[
The Sweet Spot] is lucid and elegantly written throughout so that there’s little suffering involved in reading it—in this, it’s reminiscent of Michael Sandel and Martha Nussbaum. A bracing, convincing argument that toil, torment, and tribulation can be good things.” --
Kirkus Reviews
“This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It’s an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity.” --
Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife
“Paul Bloom can always be counted on to take your confident assumptions about humanity and turn them upside down. With
The Sweet Spot, he’s done it again! But this time, his investigations into pain and suffering, pleasure and meaning ask—and answer—the perennial question of what makes life worth living. You won’t want to miss this eloquent and erudite book.”
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Susan Cain, author of Quiet
“Paul Bloom has a gift for spotting paradoxes in human nature and resolving them with deep, satisfying explanations, and this lucid and fascinating book does it again with our puzzling masochisms.” --
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of How the Mind Works and Rationality
“Provocative, fascinating, and insightful—in other words, just what you’d expect from Paul Bloom, one of the world’s best writers and deepest thinkers about human behavior. His argument about why we sometimes seek sorrow, fear, and pain is, paradoxically, a pleasure to read. So get out your highlighter and clear your ca