Time & Perspective Quote by Bell Hooks

Hooks is doing something sly here: she takes the dead-simple fact of adulthood (you will do things you’d rather not do) and flips it into a spiritual and political practice. The line refuses the glossy self-care version of liberation that equates freedom with preference. For hooks, freedom is closer to discipline: the capacity to act without centering your appetites, your comfort, your constant need to feel affirmed.

The specific intent is instructional, almost pedagogical. “Having to do” signals obligation, the terrain where ethics actually lives. Anyone can be generous when it’s convenient; the test is when it costs you time, status, or ease. Hooks treats that friction as curriculum. You “learn something” not by introspection alone, but through the embodied grind of showing up, listening, caretaking, taking critique, doing the unglamorous work that collective life demands.

The subtext is a critique of neoliberal individuality: the “self” and “ego” aren’t just personal quirks, they’re trained reflexes in a culture that markets identity as a brand and feelings as proof of virtue. Moving “past” them isn’t self-erasure; it’s a reorientation away from the sovereign “me” toward relation, responsibility, and solidarity.

Context matters: hooks wrote as a Black feminist critic suspicious of righteous performance and addicted-to-self narratives, even inside progressive spaces. Read against her broader work on love, community, and pedagogy, the quote is a reminder that transformation isn’t a mood. It’s practice under constraint, where the ego doesn’t get to be the boss.