Daily Inspiration Quote by James Reston

Reston’s line lands like a raised eyebrow at the national mythos: we flatter ourselves as a people forged by hardship, then get strangely fragile the moment the refrigerator is full. The craft here is the reversal. Instead of treating prosperity as the reward that proves the story, he frames it as the spoiler that ruins the plot. It’s not anti-success; it’s a warning about what success does to civic muscles when they’re no longer used.

The intent is diagnostic. Austerity and adversity demand habits Americans like to claim as native virtues: improvisation, solidarity, thrift, a tolerance for discomfort in service of a larger goal. Prosperity, Reston suggests, erodes those habits by making private comfort feel like the highest public good. When you can buy your way around inconvenience, you stop building the institutions that distribute resilience. When life gets easier, expectations get sharper; politics turns from collective problem-solving into customer service. The subtext is moral but not pious: abundance doesn’t simply tempt us into laziness, it reorganizes our sense of entitlement.

Contextually, Reston wrote across decades when the U.S. increasingly measured national health in consumer terms: postwar affluence, suburban expansion, and the later shock of stagflation and energy crises that exposed how quickly comfort becomes dependency. The line reads as a critique of a country that can mobilize for war or depression, yet struggles to discipline itself in peacetime. Prosperity “doing us in” isn’t about money killing happiness; it’s about wealth thinning the connective tissue that makes democracies durable.