Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Strand

Strand’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to the way we romanticize helplessness. “Destiny of everyone” sounds like the grand, consoling story we reach for when life feels arbitrary: the idea that there’s a single script running underneath all our private messes. Strand punctures it with a grammatical twist that’s also a philosophical one: nothing is fated for all of us. What we often call destiny is just pattern-recognition with better PR.

The sting is in the second clause: “our commonness made dumb.” Commonness isn’t merely shared experience; it’s the raw, repeatable material of being human - loss, boredom, desire, fear. “Made dumb” suggests what happens when we refuse to think clearly about that material. We turn it into a slogan. We flatten nuance into a soothing generalization (“it was meant to be,” “everything happens for a reason”), not because it’s true, but because it’s easier than admitting contingency. Dumb here isn’t an insult so much as a diagnosis: language failing under emotional pressure, choosing cliché over attention.

As a late-20th-century American poet, Strand is writing against both the self-help faith in personal “purpose” and the older, more theological notion of providence. His work often circles absence and the strangeness of consciousness; this line fits that orbit, insisting that meaning isn’t delivered from above or pre-assigned in bulk. If there’s anything “common” in his view, it’s not destiny but the human impulse to stop thinking and call it fate.