Time & Perspective Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

There is a quiet grief in Wheatley's pivot from "we could" to "I sincerely doubt". The line doesn’t rage against failure; it mourns the loss of a once-reliable civic fantasy: that competence plus camaraderie plus effort reliably produces change. By starting with "In the past", she frames efficacy as something that can erode over time, not because the self has suddenly weakened, but because the world has reorganized around it.

The sentence stacks classic reformer ingredients - hard work, good colleagues, good ideas - like a résumé of moral legitimacy. It’s a deliberately plain triad, almost Protestant in its faith in process. Then she breaks the spell with "But now", a blunt hinge that suggests a new operating system: institutions calcify, problems metastasize, feedback loops turn hostile, and the distance between action and outcome stretches until motivation collapses. The subtext is not "I’m tired"; it’s "the rules changed."

Wheatley’s intent reads like a warning to people who built their identities around being useful. She’s naming a cultural moment defined by burnout, bureaucratic inertia, and the sense that even well-designed interventions get swallowed by complexity, polarization, or the churn of crises. "Sincerely" matters: she anticipates the reader’s instinct to treat doubt as mood, and insists it’s evidence-based.

It works because it gives voice to a private taboo in professional do-gooder culture: that optimism can become a form of denial, and that believing in efficacy is itself a privilege of stable times.