Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Sheckley

Refusing the tidy arc of self-improvement, Sheckley takes a swing at one of our favorite modern delusions: that the past is a draft and the present is the final cut. The line sounds casual, even shruggy, but it’s a hard-earned skepticism about narrative hygiene. “Doing it wrong then” and “doing it wrong now” are paired like mirror images, exposing how quickly hindsight turns into a prosecutor. If you allow yourself to retroactively brand earlier choices as “wrong,” you don’t just revise your biography; you downgrade your former self to an embarrassment you’re obliged to outgrow.

That’s a particularly Sheckley move. As a science fiction writer steeped in twist endings, bureaucratic absurdities, and the cosmic joke of human certainty, he’s suspicious of any system that claims clean diagnostics. Right and wrong are rarely stable categories in his worlds; they’re labels applied by whoever controls the test, the rulebook, or the alien tribunal. Read that way, the quote is less about nostalgia than self-defense against a culture of relentless correction.

The intent isn’t to deny mistakes. It’s to reject the moralizing posture we adopt toward our own timelines, the idea that we can stand outside our history and grade it with perfect information. The subtext: you don’t get to live a life if you keep treating it like an audit. There’s also a quiet grace here, an insistence that growth doesn’t require contempt for who you used to be.