Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Bukowski

Bukowski goes for the throat with a line that reads like a barstool curse and lands like a worldview. The profanity isn’t decoration; it’s a blunt instrument that flattens nuance on purpose. “Boring” is the real accusation. Not stupid, not evil, not even cruel. Just deadening. He’s naming a spiritual offense: the mass production of lives lived on autopilot, then replicated through “propagating” like a grim factory process. The repetition of “boring damned people” mimics the monotony he’s condemning, turning the sentence itself into a little treadmill.

The subtext is classic Bukowski: a misanthropy that’s half disgust, half panic. “What a horror show” casts ordinary social conformity as spectacle-horror, suggesting that the terror isn’t exceptional violence but the everyday, normalized kind: work, manners, ambition, small talk, suburban reproduction, the whole machine churning out more of the same. “Swarmed” strips people of individuality, recoding humanity as insects. It’s grotesque, but it’s also strategic; dehumanization here is a way to dramatize how dehumanizing modern life feels.

Context matters: Bukowski’s persona is the hungover prophet of Los Angeles lowlife, allergic to respectability and suspicious of institutions that smooth rough edges into “normal”. The line performs a defensive posture: if the world is a swarm, the outsider doesn’t have to join it. Under the sneer is a plea for intensity, for art and experience that puncture the dull consensus.