#476 — The Bittersweet Age

Summary

Podcast Summary: Making Sense with Sam Harris

Episode #476 — The Bittersweet Age

Guest: Susan Cain
Date: May 20, 2026

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Overview

This episode features Sam Harris in conversation with Susan Cain, celebrated author of Quiet and Bittersweet, to explore the evolving meaning of "bittersweetness" in our personal and cultural lives. Their discussion wanders through the challenges of reading in a digital age, the rise of online communities, the existential and creative impact of AI, and the enduring importance of the humanities and authentic human expression. This summary captures the depth, warmth, and philosophical nuance of their exchange.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Susan Cain’s Work and Evolution (00:25–03:27)

• Susan reflects on her writing journey:

  • Quiet became a touchstone for introverts and led to her highly popular TED talk.
  • Her subsequent book, Bittersweet, examines melancholy, beauty, and longing.
  • Announcement of a forthcoming children's book collaboratively written by three generations of her family, based on the theme of saying goodbye.
    • Susan Cain (01:22):
      “We have a children’s book coming out that we wrote—three generations of Cains. My in-laws, Ken and me, and our two boys... It was based on an experience the boys had where we went on this childhood vacation and they befriended two adorable donkeys and then had to say goodbye... so it’s about bittersweetness and how to say goodbye.”

• Community on Substack:

  • Susan’s “The Quiet Life” focuses on "kindred letters," art, ideas, and consolations.
  • Monthly candlelight Zoom chats foster global connection among like-minded readers.

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2. The Future of Books & Reading Culture (03:27–06:48)

• Declining Time and Attention for Books:

  • Both Sam and Susan express nostalgia and guilt over diminished book-reading due to digital distractions.

    • Sam Harris (04:00):
      “The feeling of sitting down to read for an hour... almost feels like a heroic and anachronistic plunge into the past for which we’re all nostalgic... There’s just so much... an endless amount of material online that one feels a professional or personal responsibility to read.”

  • Susan notes travel as a rare occasion where deep, immersive reading returns.

• Substack vs. Books—Community vs. Creative Energy:

  • Susan enjoys the ongoing, interactive nature of Substack but recognizes it diverts energy from book projects.
    • Susan Cain (06:48):
      “With Substack... writing is the central thing that I do there, but I don’t feel like writing is the primary impetus. I think of it much more as tending to a community. I feel a kind of love for my readers, so I wanted to have a way to be more closely connected with them.”

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3. The Rise of AI and Its Implications for Creativity (08:35–12:40)

• AI’s Increasing Presence:

  • Susan experiences immediate disinterest when realizing an article or story was AI-generated.

    • Susan Cain (08:49):
      “It keeps happening to me... I’ll start reading some kind of story that sounds really interesting, and then I quickly realize... it was just generated by AI. And the moment that I know... I have zero interest and I stop reading.”

  • Discussion of subtle “tells” of AI writing, like overused em-dashes or phrases in threes—ironically borrowed from great human writers.

  • Susan is concerned about the decline of the humanities, but wonders if AI may provoke a renewed interest in them.

    • Susan Cain (10:47):
      “I’ve been really worried about the death of the humanities in our culture... But I’m actually wondering if the advent of AI is going to help cause us to turn towards the humanities. That’s all that’s left.”

  • Sam coins the concept of the “revenge of the humanities,” predicting more value placed on art where human origin truly matters.

    • Sam Harris (11:15):
      “I’ve been thinking of it in terms of the revenge of the humanities... There will be those things... where we still care that a human is in the loop.”

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4. The Human Touch: Art, Music, and Meaning (12:40–19:48)

• What Makes Art Matter? The Human Story:

  • Susan and Sam debate whether knowing a work is AI-generated diminishes its emotional impact.

  • Sam muses that with instrumental music, he personally may not care if it’s AI, as his reaction is visceral and unmediated by knowledge of the creator.

    • Sam Harris (13:12):
      “If you play me some tune of any genre that just sounds great, I don’t know that I care... if you then pull back the curtain and tell me that this is pure AI confection.”

  • Susan counters that knowledge of a human composer is essential to her emotional experience:

    • Susan Cain (16:01):
      “I think part of what makes the reaction that I have, and many people have this same reaction so ecstatic, is because I’m aware that music was produced by a human who has experienced all these things and was talented enough, gifted enough, and generous enough to turn it into something that beautiful... If you told me that the music was created by a machine, the wash of love wouldn’t feel the same way.”

  • They explore a hypothetical “Pepsi Challenge” with AI vs. human music, with Susan maintaining that revealed authorship would shift her response.

  • Sam draws analogies with movie soundtracks—does human authorship matter as much when music is functional or background?

  • Susan distinguishes between “utility” and emotional-artistic contexts:

    • Susan Cain (18:15):
      “If we think of [movie soundtracks] as a continuum, it’s not quite in the realm of interior design, but it’s also not in the realm of just sitting quietly and listening to your favorite music... But when it’s purely a musical listening experience... it’s like the soul of the musician is transmitting to you.”

  • For explicitly personal, soulful art (like Leonard Cohen’s music) there’s no substitute for human creation.

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5. Deeper Reflections on Loss, Longing, and the Bittersweet (19:28–21:55)

• Authenticity and Mourning:

  • The pair agree that experiencing a work only to learn it’s artificial can lead to an unmooring, as with human relationships with hypothetical androids.

    • Sam Harris (20:07):
      “It’s not interesting once you know that it’s the product of AI. But... in the Pepsi challenge, I think we will be fooled... There’s something psychologically interesting about that... Imagine having to break off that reaction because now you know you’ve been tricked on some level.”

  • Susan likens this to the essential human need for authenticity in love and art.

    • Susan Cain (21:08):
      “What we’ll think if... the robots really can look like another person... and they tell you they love you and you seem to love them, but then you know that... it’s not real. I’m still in the camp of thinking that... unless we get to the point of thinking there’s something interesting and sympathetic about machine consciousness... it’s never gonna feel the same.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Reading Guilt:
  Sam Harris (04:00): "My groaning shelves with thousands of books are looming over me at all times, and I have an increasingly guilty relationship... this bittersweet relationship where—when am I going to find the time to make the progress I want?"

• On the Artist’s Soul:
  Susan Cain (19:31): “It’s like the soul of the musician is transmitting to you... That doesn’t work with AI.”

• On Longing and Mortality:
  Susan Cain (22:11): “All human beings are born into this world with the deep instinct that we belong in another, more presentation-perfect and more beautiful place than this one. We create religions in the name of that belief, that instinct. I mean, we are longing for the Garden of Eden... We feel every so often like it’s just around the corner. Maybe we’ve glimpsed it, but we can never fully get there.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:25 – Introduction of Susan Cain, her books, and new family project
• 02:16 – Substack community and the “Quiet Life”
• 03:27 – The decline of book reading in modern life
• 06:48 – Writing for Substack vs. writing books, creative trade-offs
• 08:35 – The emergence of AI-generated content and its impact
• 11:15 – “Revenge of the Humanities”: AI and the future of creative work
• 13:12 – Does authorship matter? The human dimension in music and art
• 16:01 – The necessity of human origins for emotional richness in art
• 18:15 – Distinguishing different contexts for valuing human creation
• 19:28 – The existential question of authenticity in an AI future
• 22:11 – Final reflection: longing for a more beautiful, unreachable world

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Conclusion

Sam Harris and Susan Cain traverse personal, philosophical, and cultural ground with characteristic depth and candor, asking what really matters in an age of technological acceleration and digital imitation. At the heart of their conversation is a persistent longing for meaning, connection, and authenticity—qualities that can’t be simulated, only lived.

Transcript

[Sam Harris]

You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can [e-mail] There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing.

[Susan Cain]

Today.

[Sam Harris]

I'm with Susan Cain. Susan, thanks for joining me.

[Susan Cain]

Absolutely. It's so great to be here.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, it's great to see you, and that doesn't happen enough for me, but I want to make the most of this occasion. So to remind people you are the all too famous author of the book Quiet, which became a bible for introverts everywhere and then led to a TED Talk that is, if not the most seen TED Talk in the history of the galaxy. It's among the most seen, so there's like tens of millions of views on various platforms. And then more recently. That was about 15 years ago, 14 years ago. You quite.

[Susan Cain]

2012, whatever that was. Yeah, yeah.

[Sam Harris]

And then you have written a book, Bittersweet, which came out more like four years ago. It was 2022 or.

[Susan Cain]

That's funny. I'm not even sure, but something like that. Three or four years ago. Yeah, yeah. And now my family and I actually have another book coming out. I don't know if I mentioned that to you.

[Sam Harris]

No, no. What's going on?

[Susan Cain]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a children's book coming out that we wrote Three Generations of Canes. So sweet. Yeah. My in laws, Ken and me and our two boys, we all rode it together. And it was based on really, really fun. Yeah. And based on an experience that the boys had where we went on this childhood vacation and they befriended two adorable donkeys and then had to say goodbye to them at the end of the vacation. And so it's about bittersweetness and how to say goodbye.

[Sam Harris]

Oh, nice. When does that come out?

[Susan Cain]

Any minute now. I think it's June 2nd. Correct.

[Sam Harris]

And most recently and continuously, you have a presence on Substack, where you can be found under the banner of the quiet life, which is, from the looks of it, is very focused on community. But as much as your actual writing, what are you doing over there on Substack?

[Susan Cain]

Well, I write usually two, I guess newsletters is what people call them generically, but I call them kindred letters because I'm writing to people who have the same orientation that I do towards quiet depth and beauty. And so I write two of those kindred letters every week and then really encourage people to comment because as you say, the comments and the, the dialogue back and forth I think is some of the best parts of the substack. So a lot of it is that and it's sharing, you know, I call it art ideas and consolations. So it's sharing all of those things. And then we also come together once a month and do candlelight chats where actually Annika was one of our guests.

[Sam Harris]

Oh, nice.

[Susan Cain]

One of everyone's favorites.

[Sam Harris]

Nice. I think I knew that at the time, but like everything else, it has been memory hold. So people join you on substack and go cameras on for that or is that a zoom call or how does that work?

[Susan Cain]

Yeah, we do that on zoom and it's live and so people can come on and talk to me, talk to our guest. But then we also send out a replay later for the people who couldn't make it. Especially because we have people from all over the world. But I like to do it live.

[Sam Harris]

How are you thinking about the future of books now, if you are thinking about the future of books as a writer?

[Susan Cain]

Oh my gosh, I think about it all the time. And in fact I just went to a meeting of this author's group that I've been part of called the Invisible Institute. We've been together over 20 years and that was the huge topic. So I don't know, I mean, I'm aware that I myself read many fewer books than I used to, but that when I do read them, I still really adore the experience and feel like there's nothing else. But in terms of.

[Sam Harris]

Well, talk to me about that for a second. Cause I think many people are feeling that it has somehow become more difficult to sustain their attention on anything really without getting interrupted by some self interrupting device that is their smartphone. But books in particular, it's just that the feeling of sitting down to read for an hour, it almost feels like a heroic and anachronistic just plunge into the past for which we're all nostalgic for. But it's just, it has gotten harder. I mean even. Honestly, even for those of us whose job it is to read books. I mean, I can't say that I've stopped reading books, but I do notice that reading for pleasure especially is something that is just in a zero sum contest with everything else that could be done for pleasure. Even when it's reading, there's just so much. There's an endless amount of material online that one feels a professional or personal responsibility to read. So it's lots of magazine articles and substack newsletters, but my groaning shelves with thousands of books are looming over me at all times. And I have an increasingly guilty relationship or even just greedy. And I'm concerned it's degrading into this bittersweet relationship where. When am I going to find the time to make the progress I want to make through my own library?

[Susan Cain]

I know exactly what you mean. And for me, the guilt of that relationship is embodied in the fact that I used to just know exactly where every single book sat on my bookshelf. Because I think I just spent so much time looking at the shelves. Just looking at them made me so happy. So I just memorized their placement. And now I have no idea where any book is. And I feel like that's really telling of how things have shifted. But I do still have these moments, and they usually happen for whatever reason when we're traveling or on vacation. It could be business travel, and it could be vacation. I can focus much more. There's something about removing the everydayness of life and the feeling of daily responsibilities where I can still get back into that state, which doesn't mean that I'm not still checking my phone more than I wish I were. But I'm still really loving books. And every time that happens, actually every time we're traveling, I vow to do the same thing as soon as we get home. And then it all flies away.

[Sam Harris]

So in writing on Substack, is this a decision to go where the people are, or is it just you just, like the demand you've placed on yourself to publish something without any friction on a regular schedule or how are you thinking about substack writing versus book writing?

[Susan Cain]

I actually, with substack, I don't. Although. Although writing is the central thing that I do there, I don't feel like writing is the primary impetus for why I do it. I think of it much more as tending to a community. All my life, I felt really inspired by my grandfather, who was a rabbi, who was serving his community till he was 94. Like, literally till, like, two weeks before he died, he was. He was there with them. And I. I feel a kind of love for my readers. So I just wanted to have a way to be kind of more closely connected with them. So I feel like that's what the substack is really about. And the tricky thing about it is to the extent I actually have three different books that I'm thinking about writing now and files that I Add stuff to all the time. But I spend a lot of time on the substack, and so a lot of my creative energy is going in that direction, and there's less available for what used to go into book writing. So that's something I'm trying to figure out. Do you feel this with all the different projects that you have going?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, well, you know, I just feel the poverty of 24 hours in the day, which afflicts everyone. But, I mean, I've always looked to do things that are synergistic or where you get two bites of the same apple on some level. So you could write the back in the day, you could write the op ed, which, you know, later would wind up in a talk or in a book. And I was hoping substack would be that for me, but it hasn't quite. I just have not been able to spend enough time writing there, so it really has just defaulted into becoming a publishing channel for the podcast.

[Susan Cain]

So are you working on another book right now? Am I allowed to ask that?

[Sam Harris]

No, I have something I'm working on which I'm not ready to publicly announce because I haven't fully admitted to myself that I'm working on it, but.

[Susan Cain]

Oh, wow, that's very intriguing.

[Sam Harris]

Okay, someday. But how is AI showing up for you as a benefit or concern with respect to your own writing or the writing of others or where our culture is headed? What are your thoughts on AI?

[Susan Cain]

So my thoughts are that I notice when I'm scrolling around on social media, it keeps happening to me that I'll start reading some kind of story that sounds really interesting, and then I quickly realize a paragraph in that it was just generated by AI And I noticed that the moment that I know that it was AI, I have zero interest and I stopped reading.

[Sam Harris]

So how are you noticing that? Because I think I've seen you write about this on your own substack, that some of the famous tells for AI are not there by accident because they're actually. They've been scraped from the habits of good writers. And for instance, the EM dash is something that. That I imagine I put into use basically as early as any member of our species. And I'm not giving it up. Right. So it's rumored that an EM dash is the signature of AI Slop now, but I'm not stopping. And. Yeah. So how. How are you. How do you think about that? And. And how do you think you're noticing that you're in the presence of the robots?

[Susan Cain]

I feel the same way. And by the Way I. I recently learned that apparently writing in phrases of three is also apparently an AI tell. And I feel like I learned that painstakingly from loving CS Lewis and reading his work and trying to figure out what it was that was so moving about it and then realizing that he used those threes. So I'm very bummed about that now, being a tell. But yeah, in the case of stories, I don't know, there's just something on social media when the stories are too packaged and you too much feel like every beat follows the next one, somehow you just know. There's just some note of artificiality about it. But I must say, like, as a writer, knowing that I have noticed now when I do my sub stacks that sometimes I'll like add an awkward parenthetical or something. And it used to be that I would have, as a writer, taken the time to get rid of the awkwardness of it, and now I sometimes leave it in just to show that I'm actually the one who was doing the writing of humanity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I don't know. Like, one big question I wonder about all the time is I've been really worried about, about the death of the humanities in our culture, like long before AI came around. I've been super worried about that. And there's a million reasons that it's happening. But I'm actually wondering if the advent of AI is actually going to help cause us to turn towards the humanities. I think this is something I've heard you talk about as well. It's like that's all that's left.

[Sam Harris]

I've been thinking of it in terms of the revenge of the humanities.

[Susan Cain]

Yeah.

[Sam Harris]

Because obviously learn to code is not a phrase that is tripping from the tongues of anyone over in the CS department anymore. And yeah, when you think of what will be left standing, should anything be left standing when the robots take over? It has to be those things where we still care that a human is in the loop. Right. It's not radiology, it's not even scientific discovery. Right. I think if we could automate all science, we will not be nostalgic for the time that the apes were the authors of those discoveries. I mean, we simply just want to know what's true. Right. So if we can get the real physics faster and the real medicine faster and everything in between, I think we want that from the robots, but I'm not sure we want to see robots writing all or any of our novels or poems or we're not going to show up in A Broadway theater to see robots perform. Arthur Miller. I guess maybe for novelty's sake, we might, but I just feel like there will be those things, and they'll be disproportionately on the humanity side of the quad, where we feel like we want the human connection both at the origination of the work or at least the curation of it. Right. We just want some. We want people with good taste. I think guiding culture once more and more of it gets produced by machines.

[Susan Cain]

Yeah. I think it's not only about wanting to know what's true. I think it's also about there's just a deep, insatiable curiosity about who humans really are. Like who we are. So I think the amazing thing about reading a novel is just the glimpse into the subjective inner life of another human. That's really what we're in it for. And I think that's why I stop when I come across these AI stories. I feel like, okay, it's not actually giving me a true insight because it was just put together by some code.

[Sam Harris]

Do you think you feel that way about all art equally? I'm not sure I feel that way about music. Maybe purely instrumental music. Leaving the singing and the lyrics aside, if you play me some tune of any genre that just sounds great, I don't know that I care. If you then pull back the curtain and tell me that this is pure AI confection, it's possible I'll still like it better than the human product because on some level, music is doing something different for me. It's a little bit like the difference between art and interior decorating. If you tell me that couch. The color of the couch is what it is, and I don't care how it got there. Right. It's either a couch I love the look of. Or not. It's either comfortable or I'm not. But if you tell me that we just found the perfect fabric and the perfect color and it's all made by robots, on some level, I just care about the object itself and not how it got there.

[Susan Cain]

So that's such a perfect analogy.

[Sam Harris]

It's a very philistine analogy. All the musicians are horrified that I went that far down the hierarchy of mattering, but, yeah, But I don't actually

[Susan Cain]

feel that way about it. So, okay, what you just said, I would feel if I were, you know, out at a restaurant and there's great background music playing. I don't care in that context who wrote the music or where it came from. But actually, like, the whole reason that I Wrote Bittersweet, my last book was because I have had all my life this incredibly intense, euphoric, slash ecstatic reaction to certain forms of minor key sad music. And I, like, I was just trying to figure out where on earth did that come from.

[Sam Harris]

Have you experimented with trying to produce AI minor key sad music?

[Susan Cain]

No, but I. I think I would have the same reaction to it that I have when I start reading the social media story and then realize it's AI and stop reading.

[Sam Harris]

It would be an interesting psychological experiment to get someone. I want to deputize someone. Maybe one of our listeners can do this, who's a musician. This is against the grain of what anyone wants, I'm sure, but if someone produced a test for you between the human made minor key music that has organized all of your intuitions around this paradoxical emotion of bittersweetness and some AI version where we could do the Pepsi Challenge here, it would be interesting because if you wound up not being able to tell which was which or which you liked better, that's. What do you think that does to you as a person who cares about all of this, this whole part of culture?

[Susan Cain]

Okay, but here's the thing. I think I might not be able to tell the difference if it's a blind taste test, but I think part of what makes the reaction that I have, and many people have this same reaction so ecstatic, is because I'm aware that music was produced by a human who has experienced all these things and was talented enough, gifted enough, and generous enough to turn it into something that beautiful and that transcendent. So I start feeling this wash of love for the musician and for the other people who are listening to it. And so if you told me that the music was created by a machine, the wash of love wouldn't feel the same way even. Even if my initial response did.

[Sam Harris]

But until these. These machines arose, it was just the safe assumption you could be 100% sure that the music you're listening to was created by a person and so you never had to think about it. So again, I'm not, as is probably already obvious, I'm not a deep student of music. But when I listen to the soundtrack to a film, say, and the music is perfectly calculated to produce in me some set of emotions. Take the bittersweet version. I guess I'm thinking maybe like the soundtrack for the. Is this Ennio Morricone, the soundtrack for the Mission that might hit a similar spot? You tell me, but I don't know that soundtrack.

[Susan Cain]

But I'm guessing Yeah, probably.

[Sam Harris]

But it's just very affecting music. I don't think I'm ever thinking about how it was produced again. Back in the day, you didn't have to think about it. Cause you knew there was an orchestra there and there were people behind all that. But I don't think I was. Ever think there's a much more fundamental, just purely kind of neurological and primal response to a stimulus? Right. This is almost like tasting a fruit you've never tasted before. And it's just you've got this sunburst of flavor in your mouth. And you're not thinking about the evolution of this plant that gave you the fruit. You're just having an experience. And I do think that the raw experience of bittersweetness or any other emotion to music can be fully uncoupled from any thought about how it got there in the first place.

[Susan Cain]

Well, okay, so the example of the soundtrack to a movie, that's a really interesting example. Cause I feel like if we think of it as a continuum, it's not quite in the realm of interior design, but it's also not in the realm of just sitting quietly and listening to your favorite music. It's somewhere in between.

[Sam Harris]

My philistine bona fides are well established at this point.

[Susan Cain]

No, no, no. But I might grant you that in the context of a movie, maybe it doesn't matter. And in fact, my family and I talk about this all the time. Because that shows succession. I don't know if you've watched that one.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Susan Cain]

And the music for Succession is perfect.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah.

[Susan Cain]

Oh, my gosh. It's so incredible. And so we've talked about. Okay, would it be as good if the music had been produced by a machine? And maybe it would in that context, but when it's purely a musical listening experience, actually gonna hold down a quote from my wall. So, as I like to say, ad nauseam, I love Leonard Cohen the musician. He's like my rabbi, my patron saint. And I literally have this quote hanging up on my wall that says, the only religion I've ever known is the Church of Leonard Cohen. All others pale in comparison. That's what someone said about his music. And I thought, yeah, I wasn't sure

[Sam Harris]

whether someone else wrote that or whether Leonard Cohen wrote that.

[Susan Cain]

No, no, no, no. This was like a random comment on a YouTube video of his music. And when I read it, I thought that that doesn't work with AI because it's like the. I know you don't like the. Probably the word soul, but it's like the soul of the musician is transmitting to you. Well, that's why when you're listening in

[Sam Harris]

that way, I held music with lyrics and voice to one side just because there. It's pretty obvious to me that I'm not so interested in the version of Hallelujah that is sung by a robot.

[Susan Cain]

But it's not the singing, it's the creation of it. It's the fact that a human actually created it.

[Sam Harris]

Right, right. Yeah. So written and sung by a robot, whatever. The simulacrum of the same vibe, however successful. I think it's not interesting. It's not interesting once you know that it's the product of AI. But again, not knowing in the Pepsi challenge, I think we will be fooled. We could be fooled already. And that there's something psychologically interesting about that. I mean, like, imagine what it's like to withdraw your sympathy for a piece of art once you know that a human didn't make it. Right. Like, imagine having the full effect of. If you can imagine or even remember what it was like to hear Leonard Cohen's version of Hallelujah for the first time and have it hit you exactly as it did. Imagine having that experience with something that you don't know is just, you know, robot slop and then having to kind of break off that reaction because now you know you've been tricked on some level.

[Susan Cain]

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know that it's any different than how. What we'll think if, you know, if we get to the point that the robots really can look like another person and embody another person in that uncanny valley way, and they tell you they love you and you seem to love them, but then you know that you could. That it's not real and you switch them off at any moment. I don't know. I'm. I'm still in the camp of thinking that unless we get to the point of thinking that there's something interesting and sympathetic about machine consciousness, that unless we get there, I think it's never gonna feel the same and we'll always know and that that will invalidate the experience to some degree, maybe not to the full degree. So, again, like, I think it'll still work in the context of a movie soundtrack or that kind of thing, but not for the real experience.

[Sam Harris]

My prediction is that I don't consider this a hopeful one, but it might be less weird than the certainty of AI consciousness.

But members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at Samharris Dot org subscribers, get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.

[Susan Cain]

All human beings are born into this world with the deep instinct that we belong in another, more presentation perfect and more beautiful place than this one. We create religions in the name of that belief, that instinct. I mean, we. We are longing for the Garden of Eden. And we feel every so often like it's just around the corner. Maybe we've glimpsed it, but we can never fully get there. I don't feel like I have the fear of death so much. I have the fear of mourning.