"I don't know anyone who actually likes the dark or night-time. I don't care how much they say it doesn't bother them. That's why we used to huddle in caves and light fires when the sun went down"
About this Quote
Kane’s line isn’t really about darkness; it’s about the stories we tell to sound tougher than we feel. The first move is a deliberately provocative overreach: “I don’t know anyone who actually likes the dark.” That’s less a statistic than a social dare, a way of puncturing the modern pose of being unbothered. By dismissing the inevitable counterclaim (“I don’t care how much they say it doesn’t bother them”), he frames reassurance as performance - the kind of casual bravado people deploy to signal competence, independence, adulthood.
The kicker is the pivot to evolutionary memory: caves, huddling, fire. It’s a compact myth of human origins, doing what good cultural writing often does - collapsing millennia into a single image you can feel in your body. Firelight becomes not just warmth but community, technology, control. Night isn’t spooky because of ghosts; it’s scary because it removes options. You can’t see. You can’t read a threat. You can’t confirm you’re safe. Kane’s subtext is that fear of the dark isn’t childish; it’s a baseline feature, and civilization is basically an elaborate coping mechanism: lighting, locks, screens, constant noise.
There’s also a mild scolding embedded in the “used to.” We’re not in caves, but we still “huddle”: in group chats, with the TV on, under the glow of a phone. The quote works because it makes private unease feel ancient, communal, and therefore harder to ridicule.
The kicker is the pivot to evolutionary memory: caves, huddling, fire. It’s a compact myth of human origins, doing what good cultural writing often does - collapsing millennia into a single image you can feel in your body. Firelight becomes not just warmth but community, technology, control. Night isn’t spooky because of ghosts; it’s scary because it removes options. You can’t see. You can’t read a threat. You can’t confirm you’re safe. Kane’s subtext is that fear of the dark isn’t childish; it’s a baseline feature, and civilization is basically an elaborate coping mechanism: lighting, locks, screens, constant noise.
There’s also a mild scolding embedded in the “used to.” We’re not in caves, but we still “huddle”: in group chats, with the TV on, under the glow of a phone. The quote works because it makes private unease feel ancient, communal, and therefore harder to ridicule.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fear |
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