Time & Perspective Quote by Thomas Szasz

Szasz turns two bland moods into rival philosophies, and the knife twist is that the difference isn’t circumstance but interpretation. Boredom, in his framing, isn’t a shortage of stimulation; it’s a moral verdict on life. The bored person has already decided the world can’t deliver meaning, so time becomes an insult and every activity feels like complicity in a scam. Serenity flips that stance without changing the clock: nothing is “a waste” because the demand that time justify itself has been dropped. The line works because it recasts serenity as an active refusal to keep prosecuting existence.

The subtext carries Szasz’s larger project as a famously contrarian psychiatrist-turned-critic of institutional psychiatry. He distrusted diagnostic labels that smuggle in value judgments under medical authority. Here, he treats boredom less like a symptom to be medicated and more like a chosen lens: a narrative about reality that renders experience illegitimate. Serenity, likewise, isn’t a pill-induced calm or a clinically sanitized “wellness” state; it’s a stance toward agency and responsibility. If boredom is the claim that nothing matters, serenity is the claim that meaning isn’t a performance review.

Context matters: Szasz wrote through decades when psychiatry expanded its jurisdiction over ordinary suffering. This aphorism quietly pushes back against the era’s promise that the right intervention will make life feel worthwhile. He suggests a tougher, more liberating truth: the judgment “waste of time” is ours to make, and ours to retire.