Time & Perspective Quote by Joni Mitchell

Mitchell lands the punch with a performer’s timing: a casual overstatement ("Everyone I know") that isn’t meant as data, but as atmosphere. The line catches a cultural tic in motion - the way attention deficit, once framed as a struggle, gets recoded as a personality badge. "They say it with great pride" is the tell. Pride isn’t just confidence here; it’s insulation, a way to turn overwhelm into identity and dodge any implication that the problem might be structural, treatable, or worth resisting. If you can brand your scatter as a superpower, you don’t have to mourn what it’s costing you.

Then she flips the knife: "It’s a bad time to be right". That’s not self-congratulation. It’s the weariness of someone whose instincts - about distraction, speed, the thinning of attention - have become uncomfortably confirmed. Being "right" means the world has moved in the direction you warned about, and you’re stuck living inside the evidence.

Context matters: Mitchell is an artist from an era when craft demanded long concentration, when a song could unfurl slowly and still be heard. Her skepticism reads less like boomer scolding than an insider’s lament: the very capacities art depends on - patience, deep listening, sustained feeling - are being socially punished. The quote works because it refuses nostalgia and refuses diagnosis. It’s about status. In a culture that rewards constant stimulus, distraction becomes not a flaw but a credential, and clarity becomes the loneliest kind of correctness.