Success Quote by Jay Chiat

The line lands like a sigh from inside the machine that sells tomorrow for a living. Jay Chiat, an adman who helped define late-20th-century American cool, is pointing at a familiar scam: the future as a product demo. The 1920s weren’t just jazz and skyscrapers; they were a boom decade drunk on electricity, mass production, and glossy magazine prophecy. So of course someone was “telling us” we’d commute by private plane and holiday on the moon. The passive phrasing matters. It’s not “we believed” or “we imagined.” It’s “they were telling us” - a jab at the professional narrators of progress: marketers, futurists, boosters, the whole optimism industry.

Chiat’s intent isn’t to dunk on naïve ancestors; it’s to underline how technological fantasy gets used to launder present-day inequality and distraction. “Own” is the tell: private plane as a symbol of universal luxury, a promise that mass prosperity will arrive automatically if we just keep buying, keep working, keep waiting. The moon vacation is the punchline because it’s so cleanly absurd, the kind of dream that makes the real gains - sanitation, labor rights, public infrastructure - seem boring and therefore politically optional.

Coming from Chiat, this is also self-implicating. Advertising runs on the gap between what exists and what you’re told is imminent. He’s acknowledging that the future is often less a destination than a mood board - and that the mood board keeps getting updated, while most people are still stuck at the gate.