Marriage Quote by Thomas Friedman

The bleak comedy here is that Friedman frames a small act of self-imposed overwork as prudent time management, like he’s squeezing extra efficiency out of the day the way you’d squeeze toothpaste from the tube. The line lands because it’s delivered in the calm, reasonable tone of someone describing a harmless hack, not a symptom. Working in the car on the way to dinner with your spouse isn’t just multitasking; it’s the colonization of what used to be dead time, then intimate time, by the obligation to produce.

The intent is partly self-mythmaking: the hardworking global affairs guy so committed he can’t afford a commute. But the subtext is more revealing. The laptop isn’t merely a tool; it’s an alibi. Bringing it along signals seriousness, relevance, indispensability - a kind of professional virtue that, in modern knowledge work, often substitutes for actual boundaries. The phrase “take advantage” is doing a lot of ideological lifting: it treats every unmonetized minute as waste, turning rest into a moral failure.

Context matters because Friedman’s career is built on narrating a world accelerated by technology and competition. This anecdote unintentionally dramatizes that worldview at the personal scale: globalization as lifestyle, productivity as identity. The car becomes a tiny mobile office, and dinner becomes a scheduled interruption. It works as a quote because it’s so casually confessional; it lets you hear the era’s promise (flexibility!) and its price (you’re never off) in a single, unguarded sentence.