peace-2

An eight-panel SMBC comic. A younger man with brown hair and a brown jacket talks with his white-haired, glasses-wearing old father in a pink shirt as they stand outdoors under a starry night sky. The son asks, "Dad, how have you become so peaceful in old age?" The dad explains, with growing manic glee, that the trick is to interpret his own cynicism as a source of knowledge: every bad, hurtful thing in life gets reframed as a measure of his wisdom -- "The darker life appears, the brighter my mind seems!" He boasts that he hasn't learned anything new in 20 years because he just consults his existing model of reality as perpetual desolation full of conspiracies, and how relaxing it is to dismiss all opposing beliefs as the work of "naive ninnies" -- "Everyone seems stupid to me, especially people who know what they're talking about!" Alarmed, the son says, "Nevermind. Please, please go back to being quietly condescending." The dad, doing finger guns, replies, "Right on, you generation of cuties." The joke is that the dad's serene wisdom is just self-flattering bitterness laid bare. Votey (a small extra panel): a close-up of an aged, balding face with a speech bubble reading "TOO MUCH."