Life & Wisdom Quote by Aaron Hill

The line lands like a polite slap: if everything looks filthy, check your own lens before indicting reality. Hill, a poet writing in an era obsessed with “politeness,” moral refinement, and social display, aims his jab at the fashionable habit of turning personal sourness into a verdict on the world. It’s not a grand sermon about human nature; it’s a practical rebuke dressed as an everyday image. Glasses are intimate technology. They sit on your face. They’re easy to neglect. That’s the point: the distortion is small, domestic, avoidable, and yet it colors everything you see.

The subtext is an attack on moral projection. Calling the world “dirty” can be a way to advertise one’s own supposed cleanliness - a performance of disgust that doubles as status. Hill punctures that pose by suggesting the disgust may be self-inflicted: your cynicism, your resentment, your unexamined bias. The insult isn’t that you’re wrong; it’s that you’re careless and then self-righteous about the consequences.

It also reads like an Enlightenment miniature: the mind as an instrument that needs maintenance. Perception is not pure; it’s mediated. Hill’s metaphor stays sharp because it refuses melodrama. No apocalypse, no evil age, no decadent society - just smudged glass and a person too proud to admit it. The fix is implied: clean the lens, recalibrate the judgment, take responsibility for your own clarity before you start diagnosing everyone else’s grime.