Time & Perspective Quote by Jules Shear

It lands like a punchline disguised as a confession: a musician watches J. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru guru of the 20th century, and walks away thinking, "I'm not going to live here". The brilliance is in the vagueness. "Here" could be the room, the city, the cultish orbit of a charismatic thinker. It could also be a state of mind: the ascetic, high-alert interior Krishnamurti invites you into, where every attachment is suspect and every comfort gets interrogated.

Shear’s line reads like an artist’s recoil from totalizing clarity. Krishnamurti’s whole project was refusing systems while still radiating the authority of someone who has seen through the game. That paradox can feel like liberation or like spiritual gentrification: a sleek mental minimalism where desire is clutter. For a songwriter, desire is the engine. You make work by staying inside the mess - longing, contradiction, the petty ache of wanting something you can’t justify. "I'm not going to live here" becomes a boundary-setting mantra: I can visit that realm of radical detachment, but I can’t take up residence without losing my voice.

There’s also a cultural snapshot embedded in the aside. Krishnamurti sits in that late-20th-century pipeline where artists and seekers sampled Eastern philosophy as both medicine and aesthetic. Shear’s joke quietly resists the era’s spiritual prestige economy. He’s not denying insight; he’s refusing to turn it into a zip code.