Couldn't

"You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' and he says, 'Oh fine, fine--I couldn't be better.'  And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much."
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,
"The Sirens Of Titan" (1959)