Creativity Quote by Ric Ocasek

Ric Ocasek compresses a whole late-20th-century mood into three blunt beats: alienation, complicity, distraction. "People are strange" lands like a shrug from someone who has watched intimacy turn into performance and decided not to romanticize it. Then he swerves: "We're all morticians". It is funny in the way a good new-wave lyric is funny - deadpan, grotesque, and just plausible enough to sting. A mortician doesn't cause death; they manage it, package it, make it presentable. Ocasek’s jab is that modern life trains us to do the same with our own losses and with other people: tidy up the mess, sanitize the grief, keep the show moving. We're not villains; we're service workers in the culture's funeral home.

The tag line is the masterpiece: "Hey, what's on TV?" Not a non sequitur - a diagnosis. The sentence mimics channel-surfing as a coping mechanism, the way a society that can’t bear sustained feeling flips to spectacle the moment the room goes quiet. Coming from a musician whose band aesthetic thrived on sleek surfaces, cool detachment, and pop hooks that smuggled in dread, the quote reads like self-implication as much as critique. It’s Ocasek admitting the trap: even our sharpest observations get converted into content, then quickly replaced by the next thing glowing in the corner.