Daily Inspiration Quote by Kin Hubbard

“Fun” gets treated like a cheap, limitless commodity when you’re young: plentiful, improvised, almost incidental. Kin Hubbard flips that assumption with a metaphor that lands because it’s both practical and a little bleak. Life insurance is the most unglamorous purchase imaginable, the kind you buy not for yourself but to hedge against the future’s worst-case scenarios. Pairing it with fun is the joke and the accusation. It suggests that joy, too, becomes something you budget for, plan around, and feel faintly guilty buying.

The intent is pointed: Hubbard isn’t lamenting that older people are incapable of pleasure; he’s mocking the way adulthood turns pleasure into an administrative problem. Time becomes scarcer, bodies less forgiving, schedules more complicated, and risk tolerance drops. “Costs” isn’t only money (though fun often does get pricier: travel, tickets, childcare, nicer drinks because hangovers are brutal). It’s also opportunity cost: the hours you could be working, recovering, caregiving, maintaining the life you’ve built.

As a journalist and humorist working in an era of industrial routines and middle-class respectability, Hubbard is speaking to a culture that increasingly professionalized everything, including leisure. The line carries a quiet cynicism: the older you get, the more you understand what’s at stake, so you pay more to simulate the ease you once had for free. The sting is that “fun” starts to look like protection against time itself, a premium you keep raising because the payout window is shrinking.