Life & Wisdom Quote by Stanislaw Lec

Life, Lec suggests, isn’t hard so much as it’s bureaucratic: an endless form you’re forced to fill out in real time. The joke lands because it flips the expected complaint. People say life is short; Lec counters that it’s long in the most annoying way - not a generous expanse but a daily drain. “Time-consuming” is the language of chores, meetings, and errands, the phrase you use to dismiss an obligation as inefficient. Applying it to existence itself is comic heresy, a deadpan reduction of love, grief, ambition, and terror into something like customer service.

The intent is classic aphorist mischief: to puncture self-importance by treating the grandest thing we have as a scheduling problem. The subtext is darker. If life is “time-consuming,” then time is the real currency and life is the expenditure - not always wisely, not always willingly. It gestures at modernity’s treadmill where meaning gets evaluated through productivity, where even leisure becomes optimized, and where the self is managed like a project.

Lec wrote from a 20th century Polish-Jewish vantage shaped by war, totalitarianism, and the kind of historical pressure that makes lofty metaphysics feel suspect. Under those conditions, impatience with “life” isn’t adolescent ennui; it’s a sardonic survival tactic. The line’s brilliance is its calm cruelty: it doesn’t argue with despair, it invoices it.