Life & Wisdom Quote by Gregg Easterbrook

Easterbrook is doing a very American bit of calendar math: not time management so much as time triage. The line sounds like a confession, but it’s really a boundary-setting performance. He’s telling you he works “seven days a week,” then immediately undercuts the bravado with “I couldn’t possibly keep that up,” a quick reminder that productivity flexing has a cost. The repetition of “only for the fall” isn’t redundancy; it’s insistence. Fall is an exception state.

The subtext sits in the punchline: “when there’s nothing going on with football.” For an author, that’s a sly inversion of cultural hierarchy. Writing is the “serious” work, yet it gets scheduled around football as if football were the immovable pillar and literature the thing you tuck into the quiet months. That’s not just personal preference; it’s an acknowledgment of how sports colonize attention, routine, even identity. In Easterbrook’s case, the context matters: he’s long been a prominent football columnist as well as a writer of more traditionally literary or policy-minded work. The season isn’t merely entertainment; it’s an ongoing, weekly content engine with its own deadlines and dopamine.

There’s also a professional honesty here that cuts against the romantic myth of the writer as someone who waits for inspiration. Easterbrook frames writing as seasonal labor, like harvest work, and “winter” as the only plausible space for depth because the cultural noise floor drops. Football isn’t portrayed as the enemy of art, just the loud roommate you can’t think over.