From the Publisher
Bloom writes as if speaking, which brings a welcome immediacy to his explorations. . . . The effect, simultaneously authoritative and chummy, is engaging.” — Harper's Magazine
"An intriguing scientific investigation into why suffering, from mountaineering to BDSM, so often leads to satisfaction. . . . Bloom has a cheerful writing style that’s impossible to dislike." — The Guardian
“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.”
— 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 calendar, because once you open this book, you won’t be able to put it down.”
— Daniel Gilbert, Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of New York Times bestseller Stumbling on Happiness
“A laugh-out-loud-funny and totally thought-provoking tour of the most curious parts of human pleasure! With tantalizing examples you can’t wait to tell your friends, Bloom provides a fun and theoretically insightful journey into our species’ strangest forms of enjoyment. It’s a book that will definitely hit your sweet spot!” — Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast
“Paul Bloom, one of the best writers we have about the human condition, has done it again. What a fascinating book! The Sweet Spot is a profound meditation on happiness, family, and meaning. This book provides enough challenging ideas to give you just a bit of beautiful discomfort, but it is, above all, a joy to read.” — A. J. Jacobs, author of It’s All Relative
“Paul Bloom is a phenomenal psychologist. His research is always thought-provoking, and his writing clear and eloquent. I eagerly look forward to seeing what he tackles next.” — Maria Konnikova, author of The Biggest Bluff
Harper's Magazine
Bloom writes as if speaking, which brings a welcome immediacy to his explorations. . . . The effect, simultaneously authoritative and chummy, is engaging.
Daniel Gilbert
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 calendar, because once you open this book, you won’t be able to put it down.”
Steven Pinker
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.
A. J. Jacobs
Paul Bloom, one of the best writers we have about the human condition, has done it again. What a fascinating book! The Sweet Spot is a profound meditation on happiness, family, and meaning. This book provides enough challenging ideas to give you just a bit of beautiful discomfort, but it is, above all, a joy to read.
Susan Cain
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.”
Laurie Santos
A laugh-out-loud-funny and totally thought-provoking tour of the most curious parts of human pleasure! With tantalizing examples you can’t wait to tell your friends, Bloom provides a fun and theoretically insightful journey into our species’ strangest forms of enjoyment. It’s a book that will definitely hit your sweet spot!
Good Morning America.com
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.
Adam Grant
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.
Maria Konnikova
Paul Bloom is a phenomenal psychologist. His research is always thought-provoking, and his writing clear and eloquent. I eagerly look forward to seeing what he tackles next.
The Economist
"Provocative . . . In a time of post-truth politics, his book offers a much-needed call for facts."
Wall Street Journal
"Mr. Bloom is undoubtedly right that empathy alone makes for bad policy: While it can motivate us to care, we need reason to help us design and implement policies aimed at reducing suffering."
Nature Lib
"A nuanced foray into some fraught grey areas."
Scott Barry Kaufman
"Forget your favorite motivational speaker for a moment and read this book. Paul Bloom gives you the real scoop on what it takes to live a good life, and it’s not what you may think. Beyond pleasure, beyond joy, and even beyond happiness lies something deeper, more meaningful, and more transcendent. Chosen wisely, suffering can get you there. Paul Bloom shows you how.
New York Times
"An invigorating, relevant and often very funny re-evaluation of empathy, one of our culture’s most ubiquitous sacred cows, which in Mr. Bloom’s view should be gently led to the abattoir."
Michael Shermer
In 1982 I rode my bicycle 3,000 miles in 10 days in the Race Across America, resulting in crushing fatigue and almost unimaginable suffering. Until I read Paul Bloom’s book on the pleasures of suffering, I never fully grasped why it was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. Now I understand how struggles emboldened one to take on new challenges and better deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that most of us encounter in our lives, and to find meaning therein."
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Praise for Against Empathy
Greg Lukianoff
This delightful and wonderfully written book manages to ask one of the most important questions in modern thought: What is happiness, really? Paul Bloom gets to the heart of the matter, taking on a truly important mission: to illustrate how complex and rich human happiness really is. It turns out that, like all things human, happiness can be confusing, paradoxical, embarrassing, and sometimes just bizarre.”
New York magazine
"Like a tough-to-crack case against an idea that most of us have long known is key to repairing the world . . . will legitimately change how you think about the world and your own sense of morality."
Wall Street Journal
"Mr. Bloom is undoubtedly right that empathy alone makes for bad policy: While it can motivate us to care, we need reason to help us design and implement policies aimed at reducing suffering."
Nature
"A nuanced foray into some fraught grey areas."
Kirkus Reviews
2021-08-31
We are formed by experience, and the worse the experience, the more fully we are shaped.
“We get pleasure through contrast, by creating situations where the release from unpleasantness is its own source of pleasure,” writes Yale psychology professor Bloom, offering as examples the sensation of sinking gingerly into a hot bath and then enjoying the warmth or cutting the pain of a searing curry with a cold beer. Suffering, he argues, is important in our experience in that it lends meaning to life. Recognizing that there are degrees of suffering—he’s not talking about the suffering attendant in genocide, for example—Bloom adds that the contrast makes moments of happiness all the happier. As for the “unchosen,” horrific suffering of the Holocaust, Viktor Frankl observed that “those who had the best chance of survival were those whose lives had broader purpose.” In a book that is diffuse but coherent all the same, Bloom looks at numerous issues: the transitory nature of happiness, the self-inflicted pain of BDSM adepts, the hard work of writing a book or completing a degree. That author adds that not all “chosen” pain is educational or even healthy. BDSM may appeal to our “normal appetites,” but it’s on a spectrum that psychiatrists call “non-suicidal self-injury,” the kind of thing that can land a person in a psychiatric ward. Bloom is careful to define terms as he goes along, and he allows that one person’s meaning may not be another’s. He further notes that while suffering can lead to a positive outcome, that’s not always so: “Sometimes we overvalue it; sometimes we indulge too much.” The book 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.
