Time & Perspective Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland’s line lands like a friendly warning disguised as common sense: you don’t improvise meaning under pressure. It’s a critique of the modern habit of treating “spirituality” like an emergency service you can dial up when the diagnosis drops or the economy tanks. The sentence is built on a blunt if/then logic that feels almost managerial, which is part of the point. In a culture obsessed with optimization and quick fixes, he frames the soul as something that also requires maintenance, repetition, boring consistency.

The intent isn’t to scold faithless people so much as to puncture the fantasy of the instant epiphany. Crisis, he implies, doesn’t generate depth; it stress-tests whatever inner infrastructure you’ve already built. The subtext is that people who pride themselves on self-reliance often discover, too late, that resilience isn’t just attitude. It’s ritual, community, habits of attention - a practiced way of being with fear and uncertainty rather than outrunning them.

Context matters with Coupland: he’s long been the novelist of late-capitalist disorientation, of lives lived amid brands, screens, and ironic distance. This quote reads as an antidote to that drift. Spiritual practice here doesn’t have to mean religion; it can be meditation, service, prayer, journaling, the small repeated acts that teach you how to stay present. He’s arguing that transcendence isn’t a plot twist. It’s a routine - and the routine is what’s there when the story turns.