The hidden power of sad songs and rainy days | Susan Cain and Min Kym

You're listening to Ted Talk's Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. When you're really still, what are you long for? What kind of joy does your heart reach for so badly that it almost hurts? Here's one place a lot of us feel it, even if we've never quite put words to it. Sad music. The songs that ache a little. But we still play again. And again. Other Susan came thinks that quiet little habit is telling us something we've mostly stopped listening to. People play the happy songs on their playlists about 175 times on average, but they play the sad songs 800 times. Susan has spent years fascinated by that pull toward sorrow. Philosophers have a name for it. The paradox of tragedy. Why would we welcome sadness when the rest of the time will do just about anything to avoid it? When her talk from 2019, Susan shares that for her, what we're feeling in those moments, isn't really sadness at all. It's longing, a joy that's laced with sorrow. And she thinks we live in a culture that's forgotten how to sit with it. Right now, our culture is afraid of the dark. And that all this normative sunshine can distract you from your rightful heritage. Cultural scripts may tell us to be upbeat, but Susan argues the opposite that listening to our broken hearts can actually be the source of our deepest creativity, connection, and love. And she's not making that case alone. She's joined on stage by the violinist, Min Kim, whose play they'll hear throughout. That's coming up right after her short break. And now our TED talk of the day. When I was in my early 30s, I was an associate at a Wall Street law firm. And I had been working 16 hour days for seven years straight. And even though ever since I was four years old, I'd had this beautiful and impossible dream of becoming a writer. I was also pretty ambitious and on the verge of making partner. Or so I thought. Because one day a senior partner named Steve Schalen knocked on my office door. Steve was tall and distinguished and very decent. And he sat down and he reached for the squishy stress ball on my desk. And he said that I wasn't going to be making partner after all. And I remember very badly wishing that I had a stress ball too, but Steve Schalen was using mine. And I remember feeling sorry that it had fallen to Steve to be the one to tell me this news, because he really was a good guy. And I remember bursting into tears right in front of him, such a non-partnerish thing to do. But that very afternoon I up and left my law firm for good. And a few weeks after that ended a seven year relationship that had always felt wrong. And so now I was in my early 30s and suddenly I had no career, no love, no place to live. And immediately I fell into a relationship with a handsome musician who liked to compose lyrics by day and stand around a piano with friends singing at night. And he was the wrong guy for various reasons, but my feelings for him developed into this crazy obsession, the likes of which I have never experienced before or since, thankfully. No matter what I did, I couldn't escape it. Until one day a friend said to me, you are this hooked because he represents something you're longing for. What are you longing for? And the answer came to me with a sudden clarity, it was like, of course, he was the writing life that I had longed for since I was four years old. He was an emissary from the beautiful world. And just like that, the obsession fell away and I started writing for real. Today I want to talk with you about a state of mind that's ancient and universal and enormously powerful and strangely these days overlooked. The author, C.S. Lewis, called this state of mind the inconsolable longing for we know not what. And he was mesmerized by it all his life, as am I. When I was 22 years old and I was still in law school, some friends came by my dorm room to pick me up on the way to class and I had been sitting and listening to better sweet music which is something I have been doing all my life. Okay, so the music's a little bit gloomy. It's full of longing, right? Maybe for lost love that never existed in the first place. But the curious thing is, when I hear music like this, I don't really feel sad or not very sad. But I actually feel something that's much closer to joy and I could never understand why this was. But meanwhile I noticed that my law school classmates were feeling very little joy. One of them asked me why I was listening to funeral music and I laughed and we went off to class, end of story, except that I thought about that comment of his for literally the next 25 years. Why do I find sad music so uplifting and what is it in our culture that makes it feel a fitting subject for a joke and why even write this minute do I feel an intense desire to assure you that I love dance music too? I really do. At first these were just interesting questions but as I looked for the answers over the years, I started to realize that really they were the questions. They were the big ones, I just hadn't known it yet. So here's what I found out. Lots of people feel the way I do about sad music, especially sensitive types. People play the happy songs on their playlists about 175 times on average but they play the sad songs 800 times. And they tell researchers that they associate sad music with beauty and wonder and transcendence the so-called sublime emotions. And just think of how many musical genres tap into sorrow. There's Spanish flamenco and Portuguese photo and the Irish lament and American country music and the blues and then even lullabies which all over the world we often use our most heartbreaking melodies to sing our newborns to sleep. Why on earth do we do that? And then it's not just music, right? We like rainy days and tragic drama and cherry blossoms which we celebrate over equally lovely flowers partly because they die young. Philosophers call that the paradox of tragedy. Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow when the rest of the time we will quite naturally do anything we can to avoid it? There's actually a scholarly debate raging over this question but I have come to believe that really what we are craving at bottom is that state of longing, that joy that's laced with sorrow which is often triggered when we experience something so exquisite that it seems to come to us from some other world. And this is why we give painters and rock stars such exalted status because they're the ones who bring us the breath of magic from that other place. It's only last to moment and we really want to live there for good because we know that we live in a deeply flawed world and we have this stubborn conviction that we come from a perfect and beautiful one that remains forever out of reach. And maybe that sounds depressing to you but this state of mind, this longing is actually the deep source of all our moonshots and our loves. It's because of longing that we play Moonlight Sonatas and build rockets to Mars and it's because we're all in the same strange state of exile that we have the capacity to emphasize with each other in the first place. Our broken hearts taught in 18th century rabbi named Nochman of Brezloff, they connect us to each other and to that other world where the music comes from. But modern culture is telling us a really different story. It's telling us to smile and get over it and move on. And of course it's true positivity is very powerful as well and it's possible to get stuck in your longing and to never come out. So I do want to be really clear, this is not an argument for depression and if that's what you think you're experiencing, please do go seek help. I'm talking about a different state of mind that we all live in where the light and the dark move together and I am saying that right now our culture is afraid of the dark and that all this normative sunshine can distract you from your rightful heritage. In Homer's Odyssey it was homesickness, it was the longing for home that caused Odysseus to take that epic journey in the first place. The poem starts with him weeping on a beach. And in most of your children's book you've ever loved, the hero is an orphan first, think of Harry Potter, broken before the story even starts. Longing is also the beating heart of course, of most of the world's religions. We long for Eden and Zion, and we long for the beloved, which is the beautiful word the Sufis have for God. So sometime after I left my law firm and the musician, I met Ken who would become my husband. Ken is a writer too, and he had spent the past decade doing UN peacekeeping negotiations in Rwanda, and Liberia, and Somalia. And he had done that work because underneath his very exuberant personality, he was filled with his own longing for another world. He'd grown up haunted by the Holocaust. He used to lie awake at night when he was 10 years old, wondering would he have had the guts to hide and frank in his attic. And it turned out that he did have the courage even if his dreams of peace never did come true. To this day he keeps on his desk a photo of a pile of bones from the Rwanda and genocide. When we met, Ken was getting ready to publish a book on his experiences, and it was getting option for TV, and in contrast I had this failed legal career and some poems that I had written. At the time I was working on a memoir in Sonnet form because why not? But I brought the Sonnets to our second date, and I showed them to Ken, and later that night, this is the email that he sent me. It reads, "Holy shit, holy shit." My favorite line was, "I'm Penelope's descendant, "Ares to a Life Transcendant. "Keep writing, drop everything, write, "women write." (audience applauding) So Ken's exuberant faith helped to make my longing a reality. But those dreams of peace he had had, we're all still waiting for those, right? Which is the way it often goes, the beautiful world just out of reach. But while we're waiting, our broken hearts can also help to connect us. (dramatic music) (dramatic music) In 1992, the city of Sarajevo was under siege. For centuries, Muslims, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox had lived together in this very vibrant city. And now the streets were dead quiet, except for the crackling sounds of the sniper's gunshots. Until one day, when a bombed out bakery filled with a strains of Albiononi's Adagio and G minor, which is what you've just been listening to, thanks to the otherworldly talents of my dear friend, Minkim. (audience applauding) The Albiononi that day was played by veteran Smilevich, the lead cellist of the Sarajevo opera, in honor of 22 people who had been killed the morning before as they lined up for bread. Dressed in a formal white shirt and black tails as if for a night at the opera. He sat down on a white plastic chair on a mound of rubble and he played his cello. And he did that every day for 22 days under sniper fire that never stopped him. You asked me, am I crazy to play my cello in the middle of a war zone, he said, why don't you ask them if they're crazy for shelling Sarajevo? A few months after that, the BBC foreign correspondent, Ellen Little writes that he watched as a procession of 40,000 people emerged from a nearby forest. They'd been walking for 48 hours to flee a military attack and among them was an old man. He was dazed and exhausted. And he asked, Ellen Little, have you seen my wife? We got separated in the forest. I don't know whether she's made it. And Little said to him, do you mind if I ask you, are you a Muslim or a crow-out? And the old man's answer, he says, shames him even now as he recalls it across the decades. I am, said the old man, a musician. (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (soft music) - In Hebrew, the word for longing, Lehistokek, it comes from the same word, from the same root as the word for passion. The place you suffer is the same exact place where you care desperately. It's the same place that inspires you to ease someone's pain, however you can. And it's the place that you vibrate with the insane beauty of this world. So remember, there's light and there's dark. And when the dark times come, and they will come, don't be surprised, but ask yourself, what are you longing for? And follow your longing where it's telling you to go. It's pointing you in the direction of the sacred. If you don't like that word sacred, I get it. Call it the wondrous instead. You don't, you absolutely don't have to believe in the deities of the ancient books to know that spiritual longing is real and that humanity is steeped in the sublime. Once you look, you will see it everywhere around you. It's in the art of your best friend's eyebrow when she makes a joke. It's in the smallpoxed sex scenes and the golden-gay bridges that human somehow managed to invent against all odds. It's in the surge of love you feel for a cellist who did a brave and miraculous thing during a Miss Begotten War in 1992. And it's right here in this room. Follow your longing where it's telling you to go and may it carry you straight to the beating heart of the perfect and beautiful world. Thank you so much. (audience applauding) (gentle music) That was Susan Cain, accompanied by Min Kim at the TED Summit in 2019. This talk was originally published in May of 2022. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit TED.com/curationguidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Topner and Tonsika Sunglaar Nival. Additional support from Daniella Ballerizo, Christopher Faisy-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Ben Ben Chang, Brian Green and Lanyl Lot. Learn more at podcast.ted.com. I am Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. (gentle music)