Life & Wisdom Quote by Terry Prachett

Pratchett can make a throwaway complaint sound like a minor philosophical thesis. The line is funny because it’s absurdly specific: not “a computer,” not “technology,” but “a pen” - the oldest emblem of deliberate, human-scale writing - and not for ink, but for a macro, a little automation trick that belongs to word processors and power users. He compresses two eras of authorship into one deadpan sentence and lets the clash do the work.

The intent isn’t just “look how modern I am.” It’s a sly confession of dependence: once you’ve tasted convenience, you start demanding it from everything, even objects that never promised it. That’s the joke’s bite. It’s also Pratchett’s larger theme in miniature: progress is never purely additive; it rewires expectation. The macro represents a kind of outsourced thinking - a pre-packaged flourish you can summon with a gesture. Waiting for a pen to do it is the brain revealing its new default settings.

There’s subtext about craft, too. Pratchett wrote with astonishing speed and precision, and macros are a writer’s cheat code for repetitive labor. By staging the desire as a moment of mistaken muscle memory, he acknowledges the factory side of artistry: writing is inspiration, sure, but it’s also workflow.

Contextually, it lands as late-20th/early-21st-century authorial life: the romance of the pen coexisting with the pragmatics of digital tools. Pratchett doesn’t mourn that shift or celebrate it. He just nails the quiet cognitive distortion it creates, then laughs at himself before anyone else can.