Time & Perspective Quote by Herb Caen

There’s a sly shrug baked into Herb Caen’s line, the kind of wisecrack that doubles as a confession. “I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there” is funny on its face - a tautological loop that sounds like a quip tossed off at deadline. The joke works because it’s structurally unarguable: of course your life is “there,” already lived. But Caen’s real move is to turn that inevitability into a chosen address, as if nostalgia were not just a condition of aging but a reasonable place to set up shop.

Coming from a journalist whose career was essentially the daily annotation of San Francisco’s mood, the subtext sharpens. Columnists are professional rememberers; their authority comes from accumulation, from having been there, from turning yesterday’s ephemera into today’s shared memory. Caen is winking at his own métier: his byline made him a curator of the city’s past even while pretending to merely report the present.

The line also carries a defensive tenderness. “Tend to” softens it, suggesting habit rather than pathology, while “most of my life” quietly admits what the punchline tries to outrun: time is front-loaded. As you age, the ratio of what you’ve lived to what you might still live tilts hard. Caen packages that existential arithmetic in newsroom cadence - brisk, self-deprecating, and just sentimental enough to sting. It’s nostalgia with a press pass: not mawkish, not triumphant, but precise about what gets lost when the present keeps moving without you.