An engaging writer addresses happiness and misery and our relationships with these things. Nothing’s terribly deep or profound, but he points out a lot of things to think about when questioning other people’s deep profundities. All with a lot of humor and humanity. I’ve really enjoyed several of his books. Recommended. ( )

Towards the end of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World we read these lines:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

This is the perfect coda for Paul Bloom's book The Sweet Spot. It explores how it is that people so often pursue projects that involve suffering. In fact it comes down in part to the fact that humans don't just want comfort and happiness in the purely hedonistic, momentary sense of floating in a swimming pool. They also want a sense of meaning, and often this comes from caring for others for example. Bloom sides with John Stuart Mill where he writes in Utilitarianism:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.

If you have not watched 'Moralities of Everyday Life', Bloom's lecture series he recorded from Yale for Coursera, you should do so. It is excellent. In this book as in his lectures Bloom continues his highly approachable and good humoured style of philosophy. He like, Johnathan Haidt does a kind of philosophy that circles back to the evidence-based realities of human psychology, which makes it much more relevant and interesting than other more hand waving styles of philosophizing.

Not a must read book, but interesting nonetheless.

The Sweet Spot from Paul Bloom is an enlightening read that draws as many points from the reader's own mind as from any theory. I'll explain momentarily, but what Bloom excels at is explaining his ideas through analogy and anecdotes such that we gain quite a bit of knowledge without realizing it.

I'll start by admitting I like Bloom's work. I am not always in complete agreement but I can count on him to make me think about and reconsider many of my own ideas. In addition to several of his books I also took a couple of his online MOOCs, and his books are a lot like listening to his lectures. Before you think that is a negative, let me explain. His lectures are almost conversational in tone, so the book is also almost conversational in tone.

As humans we have an amazing ability to state unequivocally that we believe two things that are not only incompatible but contradictory. An area where we do this quite a bit is when we discuss the purpose of life or, another way, how we live our lives. Are we pleasure seeking animals, plain and simple? Are we selfish and only think of our own best interests? And so on. Bloom doesn't so much counter all of the ways we think about this as make us think about all of them with more nuance and less certitude.

Like so many things, how we define a term makes a big difference. Pain or suffering defined using a broad spectrum allows for more variation in how we will answer the question about whether suffering (sometimes and certain types) is good and even desirable.

This book entertains while it educates, and many of Bloom's points seem to be drawn from our own experiences. His examples of ways of thinking or acting will resonate with us and from these he illustrates the value, and necessity, of suffering. In particular when it serves to give our lives some meaning.

My convoluted commentary does not do the book justice, but hopefully it shows how Bloom engages his readers to consider old ideas with a bit more nuance.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )