Life & Wisdom Quote by Don Herold

Herold’s line lands because it borrows gravitas from the least “grave” authority figure imaginable: the waiter. The joke isn’t at the expense of service work so much as at the expense of our own self-importance. A waiter, professionally trained to treat every request as urgent, becomes a perfect stand-in for the way modern life trains us to perform seriousness on cue. Soup is late, the table is waiting, someone is waving a hand like a distress signal. Everything looks like an emergency when your job is to keep the room from noticing it isn’t.

The intent is slyly therapeutic. Herold isn’t arguing that life is trivial; he’s puncturing the inflation of “seriousness” that comes from constant appraisal, constant demands, constant little tests of competence. By comparing existence to a dining room, he reframes anxiety as a kind of customer-service posture: the frantic, hypervigilant state where you can’t afford to admit that most crises are merely inconveniences in costume.

The subtext is also about class and performance. The waiter’s seriousness is partly enforced by the people being served, who want their comfort to feel necessary. Herold flips that dynamic: the diner (the reader) is invited to stop acting like the customer who thinks the world runs on their timeline.

Context matters. Writing in early-to-mid 20th-century America, Herold watched a culture professionalize hustle and respectability. His wit offers a pressure valve: if life feels like a dining room rush, that doesn’t mean the universe is collapsing. It means you’ve been trained to carry plates like they’re commandments.