Creativity Quote by Kristin Hersh

Hersh’s sentence has the blunt ache of someone who’s spent years watching adulthood arrive late, if it arrives at all. The repetition of "they didn't" works like a drum pattern: steady, unsentimental, escalating from confusion ("how the world works") to ethics ("how to treat other people") to the final indictment, the one that stings because it’s familiar ("how to stop thinking about themselves"). It’s not just a complaint about immaturity; it’s a portrait of a culture that keeps people suspended in permanent self-reference.

The specific intent feels corrective, even parental, but not smug. She’s drawing a line between being young and being trapped in a kind of narcissistic fog, where identity-building becomes an excuse to ignore impact. The subtext is that "finding your place" isn’t a vibe or a brand; it’s earned through accountability and attention to others. In her world - music scenes, touring life, the romantic myth of the tortured young artist - self-absorption is often treated as creative fuel. Hersh flips that: obsession with the self isn’t depth, it’s a failure of basic social literacy.

Context matters because Hersh came up in an era that both celebrated sensitivity and demanded competence. Her phrasing suggests she’s reacting to a newer, softer chaos: young people armed with language about feelings and identity, yet still untrained in the unglamorous skills of living with other humans. The sting of the line is that it doesn’t blame a single person; it hints at a system that teaches performance of self while starving people of models for responsibility.