Miserably delighted

Spent much of the day in the car, taking Granny home to the "High Forest" Swiss settlement she calls God's country. Plenty of time to think about whether miserable people can be happy. (I know they can be good, I've met and worked and ridden with lots of them.)

My tentative reply: some people who affect and project a state of misery are in fact delighted with themselves and the world they love to bemoan. Schopenhauer's the poster boy for this familiar human type. Bless his heart.

"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

“What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”  

But, "happy"? That's probably not the right word. They've found something that makes them think their lives worth living, something to get up out of bed for. They're pessimists, and they're very glad things could be better. They might even be at home in the universe, which is usually my own working notion of what happiness must minimally entail. But I'm not yet prepared to call them happy.

Gonna think some more about it. But this was cheap Growler day at Tailgate, so I'm first gonna think about some Saison and Bourbon Brown.