Time & Perspective Quote by Norman Ralph Augustine

Augustine’s line skewers a very American addiction: treating the future as a perpetual coupon code for disappointment. It’s built like a little logic puzzle, all halves and doubles, but the math is just a rig for what he’s really diagnosing: the way optimism curdles into a rhetorical habit. “Tomorrow is supposed to be” does the heavy lifting. Supposed by whom? By the same chorus that’s always selling the next upgrade, the next reform, the next quarter’s numbers, the next reinvention of the self. The sentence doesn’t attack hope; it attacks the requirement to perform hope.

The joke lands because it’s self-sealing. If today feels lacking, we can outsource the blame to an overpromised tomorrow. If yesterday looks worse in hindsight, that’s not reflection; it’s a convenient contrast effect that makes our current unease feel reasonable. Augustine turns time into a corporate slide deck: yesterday underperformed, today is “in progress,” tomorrow is the projection. The punchline is the quiet admission that projections are often the only thing keeping the story afloat.

Context matters here. Augustine is not a romantic aphorist; he’s an engineer-executive type, famous for “Augustine’s Laws,” a genre of pragmatic cynicism aimed at institutions that talk big while drifting toward entropy. This sentence belongs to that tradition: a wry warning that when tomorrow becomes a narrative crutch, we stop demanding anything concrete from today.