The Answer Is No

by Fredrik Backman

Lucas is happy. This is a very provoking thing to the world. Because people aren’t supposed to be happy, they’re only supposed to want to be happy, because how otherwise are you supposed to be able to sell things to them?

All he did was to remove the one thing that makes almost all people unhappy: other people.

He works well in groups as long as it’s groups of fewer than two people.

He doesn’t want enemies, but he also doesn’t want to risk making the only thing that’s worse than that: friends.

Being smart is the worst thing one can be in modern society. All it ever means is more work.

Because Lucas is making the mistake of thinking that the board wants to solve the problem. But people actually almost never want to do that.

Because his pad thai has no peanuts. Lucas is certainly not a dramatic person, but the peanuts really are a quite central ingredient in a pad thai, the rest of the dish is pretty much just a means of transportation for peanuts into Lucas’s mouth. Pad thai without peanuts is like buying a balloon and just getting the air.