Life & Wisdom Quote by Peggy Noonan

A whole sociology lesson, smuggled into a punchline. Noonan takes the grand spiritual dilemma of the late 20th century - God or nihilism - and deadpans that her cohort opted for weed. The joke lands because it’s not really about marijuana; it’s about substitution. When traditional belief loses its authority, the vacuum doesn’t stay empty. Something soothing, communal, and mildly transcendent rushes in, even if it comes wrapped in incense and dorm-room smoke rather than doctrine.

Then she swivels to “our Cabernet stage,” and the humor sharpens into a class-and-age tell. Cabernet isn’t just another intoxicant; it’s adulthood’s respectable vice, the thing you can pair with a dinner party and a mortgage. The arc she sketches is less “people mature” than “people domesticate their escapes.” Rebellion gets metabolized into lifestyle, and self-medication becomes taste. The subtext is a critique of a generation that kept the appetite for oblivion but upgraded the branding.

Context matters: Noonan is a conservative-leaning cultural commentator who often writes with a nostalgic ear for lost moral vocabulary. She isn’t merely teasing boomers for trading joints for wine; she’s implying that the spiritual question never went away, it was simply managed. “Existential despair” sits there, un-redeemed, while the coping mechanisms get more expensive and socially acceptable. It’s a wry, slightly prosecutorial observation: the problem was never intoxication, it was the quiet agreement to live without an answer, as long as the glass is good and the label sounds sophisticated.