Daily Inspiration Quote by Germaine Greer

Catastrophe isn’t framed here as an exception to normal life but as its default setting, and that provocation is the engine of Greer’s line. “Perhaps” softens the entry, a strategic feint that invites the reader in before the argument tightens its grip: if disaster is our “natural human environment,” then our usual self-image - civilized, progressing, stabilizing - starts to look like a fragile story we tell between emergencies.

Greer’s word choices do double duty. “Spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it” gestures at modernity’s endless avoidance projects: insurance, borders, policing, wellness regimes, self-help, the fantasy that the right purchase or policy can buy permanence. Yet “programmed” yanks the conversation away from moralism and toward systems: biology, habituation, social conditioning. It’s a sly demotion of individual willpower. You don’t heroically rise to the occasion; you default to what you’ve been built and trained to do.

As an activist with a long history of puncturing comforting narratives, Greer’s subtext is a critique of complacency and of institutions that promise safety while reproducing vulnerability. The line also carries a grim consolation: if catastrophe is baseline, then resilience isn’t inspirational branding; it’s ordinary human competence, often most visible in the lives of people forced to practice it daily.

Contextually, it reads like a rebuttal to late-20th-century triumphalism and a warning shot at any politics selling “normal” as a destination. If crisis is constant, the real question becomes who gets sheltered from it, who is left to absorb it, and who profits from calling it “unexpected.”