Time & Perspective Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland lands the line like a cold punchline: not “torture will return,” but it will return as leisure, as status entertainment, as something you buy a ticket to and call an experience. The phrase “once again” is the key barb. It smuggles in history - aristocratic spectacles, public executions, colonial cruelty - and suggests we never really outgrew them; we just rebranded them into cleaner, more legal-looking forms. He’s not forecasting a medieval dungeon. He’s pointing at a culture that keeps finding ways to aestheticize harm when it’s profitable and sufficiently distant from the people doing the consuming.

“Recreational sport” is deliberately grotesque corporate language, the kind you’d use for golf or heli-skiing. Coupland weaponizes that breezy phrasing to expose the moral anesthesia of wealth: if you can pay to outsource the mess, you can pay to outsource the guilt. The rich don’t just escape consequences; they curate them. The line also sits in a late-20th/early-21st century context obsessed with “extreme” experiences, reality TV humiliation, and violence packaged as content. Swap torture for degradation, predatory labor, private prisons, war-as-contracting, or algorithmic harassment, and the architecture is already familiar.

The intent isn’t prophecy so much as an x-ray of inequality’s endgame: when empathy becomes optional, cruelty becomes a luxury good. Coupland’s cynicism isn’t fashionable despair; it’s a warning about what happens when entertainment, power, and impunity share the same VIP lounge.