"Life is serious, art is cheerful," wrote Friedrich Schiller. But what is cheerfulness, really? And how do we bring it back into our serious lives? In times when global crises make us feel intuitively different, Axel Hacke embarks on a quest for a nearly forgotten state of mind, for an attitude towards life that we have strangely become unpracticed in. Entertaining, insightful, and personal, he explores the origins of the term, explains what distinguishes cheerfulness from humor and joy, and why it cannot exist without the seriousness of life.

"To be a cheerful person does not mean to ignore the heavy, but to transform it into something light.".