Time & Perspective Quote by Lydia Lunch

Lunch weaponizes the language of addiction to describe a system that doesn’t just distract you, it metabolizes you. “Eye candy” and “mind candy” aren’t neutral pleasures; they’re engineered treats, cheap hits that keep attention busy while the bigger extraction happens elsewhere. Pair that with “trying to pay the rent,” and the quote turns into a pincer move: sedated by spectacle on one side, exhausted by survival on the other. Between the scrolling and the shift work, there’s no oxygen left for sustained thought, much less collective action.

The line “all of this conspires” is doing heavy lifting. She’s not alleging a smoky backroom cabal so much as naming a functional conspiracy: separate incentives (media, landlords, employers) align into a single outcome - a population too depleted to resist. Lunch’s punk pedigree matters here. Coming out of New York’s late-70s/80s downtown scene, where art was both confrontation and alarm system, she speaks from a tradition that mistrusts comfort and suspects entertainment of being political technology.

“Our time is stolen” lands because it refuses the self-help frame. This isn’t about personal productivity or better habits; it’s about theft. Repeating “stolen” twice turns the complaint into an indictment, shifting blame from individual weakness to structural design. The subtext is angry and oddly tender: if time is what makes a self - the ability to reflect, to choose, to organize - then stealing it isn’t merely inconvenient. It’s a kind of slow erasure.