Happiness Quote by Doug Larson

The joke lands because it treats information like a drug with a dosage problem. Larson, a cartoonist by trade, reaches for the oldest comedic instrument in the drawer: the “happy medium,” a phrase that usually flatters moderation. Then he spikes it with two extremes that both sound weirdly desirable. “Totally informed” reads like virtue until you hear the implied cost: exhaustion, anxiety, the permanent posture of someone refreshing bad news. “Blissfully unaware” is obviously suspect, but Larson lets “blissfully” do its sneaky work, reminding you that ignorance isn’t just a moral failure; it’s also comfortable.

The intent isn’t to scold readers for not keeping up. It’s to puncture the modern fantasy that you can consume unlimited information and remain psychologically intact. “There must be” is the sly tell: it’s less a claim than a plea, the voice of someone who suspects the medium doesn’t exist but hopes it does anyway. That’s the subtext: we’re stuck choosing between civic responsibility and self-preservation, and we’re pretending it’s a simple calibration problem.

Contextually, Larson’s line fits a late-20th-century media landscape already swelling with 24/7 news and early information overload, but it plays even harder now, when “totally informed” is algorithmically impossible and “unaware” is a curated lifestyle. The humor is a pressure valve for a culture that equates awareness with goodness, even as awareness increasingly feels like punishment.