Daily Inspiration Quote by Max Frisch

A novelist’s complaint disguised as a definition, Frisch’s line lands like a clean slap: technology isn’t just tools, it’s choreography. “Knack” is doing heavy work here. It shrinks the grand promise of progress into a craft trick, a cleverness, even a con. The world gets “arranged” not to deepen contact but to manage it, soften it, pre-chew it. The payoff is the wicked punchline: so we don’t have to “experience it.” Not think about it, not grapple with it, not feel it on the skin.

The subtext is less anti-gadget than anti-avoidance. Frisch is pointing at a psychological bargain modernity keeps offering: trade immediacy for convenience, risk for control, presence for predictability. Technology becomes a buffer against weather, boredom, other people, and ultimately ourselves. You don’t get rained on; you get a forecast and a ride-share. You don’t get lost; you get GPS. You don’t face silence; you fill it. Each win is also a tiny evacuation.

Context matters: Frisch wrote from a 20th-century Europe that watched “arrangement” metastasize from comfort into systems - bureaucracy, mass media, industrial war - that made human consequence feel abstract. The line’s power is its reversal of the usual story. We think technology expands experience; Frisch suggests it domesticates reality until it’s no longer something we meet, only something we manage. That sting still holds in an age of feeds and filters: the world is always there, but increasingly optional.