Time & Perspective Quote by Luke Ford

There’s a self-diagnosis baked into this line, and it’s sharper than it first appears: Ford isn’t blaming “society” for shutting him out so much as confessing to a private aesthetic that quietly makes other people feel irrelevant. “Glorifying things far away in space and time” is the tell. Distance becomes a drug. The remote past, the exotic elsewhere, the imagined “real” life happening somewhere other than here functions like a permission slip to disengage from the messy, unglamorous demands of actual relationships.

The phrasing is almost bureaucratically calm, which is part of its bite. “My habit” frames the tendency as repetitive, even compulsive, not a one-off preference. “Also contributed” is understated, as if social isolation were the predictable side effect of an otherwise respectable intellectual posture. That restraint reads as defensive honesty: he knows how easy it would be to romanticize his solitude as the price of sensitivity or brilliance, so he makes it sound more like a behavioral pattern with consequences.

Subtextually, the quote takes a swipe at a certain kind of writerly self-mythology. There’s a long tradition of treating fixation on distant worlds (historical eras, far-flung cultures, online rabbit holes) as proof of depth. Ford flips it: longing isn’t automatically insight; sometimes it’s avoidance dressed up as taste. Context matters here because writers are professionally rewarded for obsession, for living in their heads. The line suggests a cost: the more you train yourself to worship the faraway, the less practice you get at valuing the person across the table.