Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Staughton Lynd

Lynd’s line is a sociologist’s deadpan diagnosis of a society addicted to narrating itself into crisis. The sly provocation is in “half”: not denying real hardship, but insisting a huge portion of what we call “difficulties” are socially manufactured - inflamed by attention, repetition, and the status we gain from being seen to struggle. “Imaginary” here doesn’t mean fake; it means collectively imagined, the kind of problem that becomes solid only after enough people agree to keep pointing at it.

The second clause lands like a taboo: “if we kept quiet.” In modern culture, silence reads as denial, complicity, repression. Lynd flips that reflex. He’s naming the way complaint can function as a feedback loop, a kind of civic performativity where naming a difficulty gives it an audience, and an audience gives it endurance. The subtext is less self-help than social critique: institutions, media, and even reform movements can turn every friction into a “problem” because problems justify budgets, headlines, expertise, and moral urgency.

Placed against Lynd’s broader work on Middletown and the routines of American life, the quote feels like an argument about attention as a resource. Communities don’t just have issues; they organize around them, sometimes preferring the identity of besiegement to the uncertainty of quiet competence. Lynd isn’t preaching passivity. He’s warning that discourse itself can be a technology of escalation - and that some troubles, deprived of oxygen, really do shrink back to their proper size.