Parenting & Family Quote by Stan Getz

Getz frames “distractions” as a modern problem, but the real punchline is the confession hiding in the nostalgia: dedication wasn’t some superior moral fiber, it was scarcity. The little Emerson radio isn’t just a period detail; it’s a whole economy of attention in one object. One channel, one speaker, a narrow pipeline to the world. If you wanted music, you sat still and listened. If you wanted to learn, you played the same records until the grooves wore thin. Constraint becomes discipline because there’s nowhere else for your mind to go.

That last line - “We didn’t have a choice” - undercuts the sermon. Getz isn’t wagging a finger at kids and their gadgets so much as admitting that his generation’s artistic focus was, partly, an accident of infrastructure. It’s a sly repositioning of the debate from character to environment: we love to mythologize the lone obsessive, but obsession is easier when the competing stimuli are limited.

Coming from a jazz musician, the remark also carries a quiet defense of depth. Jazz isn’t built for the distracted listener; its pleasures arrive through patience, repetition, and the willingness to follow a line as it unfolds. Getz is pointing at a cultural shift from immersion to sampling, from commitment to constant option. He’s not romanticizing the past as pure; he’s reminding us that attention is shaped by what the world makes available - and what it makes too easy to escape.