zodiac20 Mar 2006

No it's not. If I say "I'm happy right now" (and I am) then yes, I could be ignorant of bad things in the world or my own life. I could be going insane. Someone could have secretly filled my office with odorless laughing gas. I could be unreasonably happy on finding out that my microwave corndog got cooked all the way through. If I'm halfway self-aware, though, I AM in all of those cases irreducibly, unassailably happy.

Yes, if I say "I'm happy because of the corndog" or "I'm always going to be happy" or "all is well in the world" or "if the number of good things I know is greater than the number of bad things, I should be happy" or "happiness is the most important thing in the world," then I'm going to be talking crap. That's not what I'm talking about, though. I'm talking about feeling happy.