Life & Wisdom Quote by Milan Kundera

Kundera turns the daily news into a small act of self-harm performed with ritual efficiency: inhale, feel the hit, extinguish, repeat. The comparison isn’t just contempt for journalism; it’s a diagnosis of how modern attention is managed. A cigarette is engineered pleasure laced with damage, and the broadcast works similarly: it delivers a quick shot of urgency, a gritty intimacy with catastrophe, then leaves behind residue. The ashtray matters. News doesn’t vanish when the segment ends; it accumulates as gray powder in the psyche, a private landfill of alarms you can’t compost into action.

The intent is less moralistic than corrosively observant. Kundera, writing out of Central Europe’s long 20th-century hangover, knew what “information” looks like under regimes that weaponize narratives. In that light, the simile carries a double edge: even in freer societies, the broadcast can mimic propaganda’s emotional rhythm, training the listener to accept the world as a sequence of jolts rather than a terrain for meaning. Smoking also signals dependency. You don’t turn on the news because it nourishes you; you do it because not knowing creates its own itch.

Subtext: the modern citizen is kept “informed” in ways that discourage comprehension. A cigarette ends in a crushed butt; a broadcast ends in the same gesture of dismissal, the feeling that you’ve done your civic duty by consuming. It’s an image of agency reduced to ash: you participated, briefly, and nothing changed except your lungs.