Because smiling, happy Swedes are rare, and we also believe that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. However, current research show that optimism, instead of being a virtue, it is a brain malfunction. Another term could be folk-psychologically insane.

Our thesis supervisor have given us a small stack of Jerome Bruner books on narratives and story-making and with titles like Actual minds, possible worlds, we are enjoying every page of it. In Acts of Meaning he pretty much, in his own meta-academic manner, sums up a lot of our feeling-driven behaviour;

But we also know that desire may lead us to find meanings in contexts where others might not. /.../ This reciprocal relation between perceived states of the world and one's desires, each affecting the other, creates a subtle dramatism about human action which also informs the narrative structure of folk psychology. When anybody is seen to believe or desire or act in a way that fails to take the state of the world into account, to commit a truly gratuitous act, he is judged to be folk-psychologically insane unless he as an agent can be narratively reconstructed as being in the grip of mitigating quandary or of crushing circumstances. It may take a searching judicial trial in real life or a whole novel in fiction to effect such a reconstrual. But folk psychology has room for such reconstruals: "truth is stranger than fiction."