The Sweet Spot Quotes

“Boredom is a cue that needs aren’t being met. It’s a signal that your environment lacks interest, variety, and newness. Just as the pain of a burn tells us where the damage is and motivates us to respond appropriately, boredom motivates us to seek out intellectual stimulation and social contact, to learn and engage and act. To be without boredom would be a curse.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“effort becomes enjoyable when it’s seen as play, or as a game.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“If you suffer for something that gives delight, soon the suffering itself can give joy.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Like most analyses, my conception of a meaningful activity is centered around significance and impact.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Absent a supernatural creator, though, we have to give up on the question “What’s the meaning of life?” This position is nicely expressed by Viktor Frankl: To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“A meaningful life, at least to some extent, has to do with what one does and how one affects people.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“has long been known that effort can be the secret sauce that makes things better. One of the classic findings in psychology is that the more effort you put into something, the more you value it. This is the logic of Benjamin Franklin’s classic advice on how to turn a rival into a friend—ask him or her to do you a favor. Having worked to help you, they’ll like you more.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“pain can relieve anxiety by distracting you from your consciousness.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“The circumstances in which you get pleasure from pain are going to be rare. And this makes sense. As both Bentham and Darwin knew well, the hurt of pain is there to get us to stop doing certain things.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“As usual in psychology, the negative is more powerful than the positive.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Zadie Smith: “It hurts just as much as it is worth.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“How does one get into such a state? These are Goldilocks experiences: not too cold, not too hot. There is a sweet spot here: you have to be challenged to just the right extent, threading the needle between too easy (which leads to boredom) and too difficult (which causes stress and anxiety). Flow experiences typically involve clear goals with immediate feedback about your experiences. And so the first three criteria I listed immediately above—goal, sub-goals, and mastery—fit nicely into this analysis.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Mastery. The right game establishes an optimal level of difficulty.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Sub-goals, some indication of progress. Part of the pleasure of a crossword puzzle is the feeling of progress as you get closer to completion, bit by bit, through the meeting of small goals. This is what much of gamification is about: using points or currency or badges or progress bars to indicate that you’re getting closer to the end;”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“In a lovely paper called “Suspense in the Absence of Uncertainty,” Richard Gerrig points out that suspense can be created even if one knows the outcome—the election of George Washington as president, say, or the successful creation of the atomic bomb by the United States in World War II—so long as there is uncertainty about how the obstacles are dealt with. It is this surmounting of obstacles that can pull us in; they’re what give the opportunity of pleasure.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“In an online class (part of the MasterClass series) on the topic, the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin says that the most foundational and basic advice for story construction is to present a formidable obstacle.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Of all dead psychological theories, catharsis is the deadest.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“[Boredom] is a canary in the coal mine of everyday existence, signaling whether we want and are able to cognitively engage with our current activity—and impelling us to action when we do not or cannot. How we respond to boredom matters: blindly stifling every flicker of boredom with enjoyable but empty distractions precludes deeper engagement with the messages boredom sends us about meaning, values, and goals.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“And so one of the joys of immersing yourself in certain activities, such as hard exercise or a difficult puzzle or being whipped, is that you lose the feeling of being conscious of yourself. You just are.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Another force that can make pain valuable is its power to focus the mind. Whatever the negatives of physical pain—or of emotions such as horror and disgust—they sure are attention grabbers.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“These two sorts of chosen pain and suffering—for pleasure and for meaning—differ in many ways. The discomfort of hot baths and BDSM and spicy curries is actively pursued; we look forward to it—the activity wouldn’t be complete without it. The other form of suffering isn’t quite like that. When training for a marathon, nobody courts injury and disappointment. And yet the possibility of failure has to exist. When you start a game, you don’t want to lose, but if you know you will win every time, you’re never going to have any fun. So, too, with life more generally.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“the world has been getting better: Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“We are happier when we are healthy”: Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“survivorship bias: Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“children provoke a couple’s most frequent arguments: Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Greater Effort Increases Perceived Value in an Invertebrate,” Journal of Comparative Psychology”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“There is no contradiction here. Money does make you happy; it’s the trying to make money that makes you sad. The trick is to get money in the course of other, meaningful, pursuits—or, if you can manage it, to be born into wealth.)”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones,” writes Richard Dawkins. After all, we’re the ones who got to exist in the first place.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

“Consider the findings of a recent meta-analysis called “Does Growth Require Suffering? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on Genuine Posttraumatic and Postecstatic Growth.” There are three main conclusions from this review of the literature: There is some evidence from prospective studies—studies that collect data before and after the traumatic event—that there is some improvement, after a traumatic event, in self-esteem, positive relationships, and mastery. There is no growth in the categories of meaning and spirituality. But these effects are just as powerful after major positive life events as after major negative events. And they probably have nothing to do with the events themselves. Many studies don’t have control groups; they don’t compare what happens after the positive or negative experience with what happens if there is no event at all. When the authors of the review looked at the studies that had control groups, they found that most show no effect. That is, people tend to say that they got better in some regard after a major life experience, but they also say that they got better during the same time period if there was no experience at all.”
― Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning