Time & Perspective Quote by Tom Wilson

The joke lands because it weaponizes the soothing grammar of self-help against itself. "I try not to worry about the future" is the kind of tidy mantra you can picture on a pastel Instagram tile. Then Wilson snaps the frame shut with the punchline: "one anxiety attack at a time". It is a perfect inversion of "one day at a time", swapping resilience for rupture and admitting what those platitudes often politely ignore: for a lot of people, the problem is not an abstract Future, its the body in the present, misfiring right now.

As a cartoonist, Wilson is working in the register of the single-panel truth bomb. The intent is relief through recognition, not instruction. By treating an anxiety attack as a unit of time, he exaggerates to the edge of absurdity, but the exaggeration carries a real subtext: modern mental health advice can feel like a performance you fail at privately. The narrator is "trying" to be well-behaved, emotionally optimized, future-proofed - and still getting steamrolled by physiology.

Theres also a quiet critique of productivity culture baked in. "Take each day" sounds like a plan, a technique, something manageable. The punchline admits that management is sometimes the fantasy; coping is just enduring the next wave. The humor is cynical but not cruel: it offers community to anyone who has ever been told to "just breathe" while their brain sets off the fire alarm for no reason.