Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Epstein

Epstein turns wasted time into a magic trick: not a tragedy, not a moral failing, just a clean little disappearance. "Poof, gone" is the line’s comic hinge, the sound effect that makes a mundane schedule (email, three calls, a two-hour lunch) feel like sleight of hand performed on the self. The joke carries a bite. He isn’t describing busyness; he’s describing the peculiar way modern work can simulate motion while producing no residue you’d recognize as life.

The specificity matters. Email is reactive labor, phone calls are other people’s urgencies, and the two-hour lunch is the classic alibi of a civilized day, a gesture toward pleasure that still reads like calendar management. Put together, they create a day that feels socially and professionally "full" yet privately empty. Epstein’s intent is less to confess than to indict the infrastructure of attention: the day can be consumed by maintenance tasks that keep one reachable, agreeable, and seemingly productive, while eroding the deeper work a writer supposedly exists to do.

"They are not infrequent" lands as dry self-rebuke, but it also universalizes the pattern without grandstanding. As a writer of a certain era, Epstein sits at the crossroads of older ideals of solitary concentration and a newer regime of perpetual accessibility. The subtext is anxious: if even a professional observer of life can lose days this easily, what chance does anyone else have? The line is funny because it’s true, and unsettling because it’s routine.