Parenting & Family Quote by Joan Didion

Didion skewers a peculiarly modern form of self-abasement: the eagerness to imagine salvation arriving from the sky, packaged as superior intelligence with cleaner motives than ours. Her word choice is doing the heavy lifting. “Fancy” dismisses the belief as decorative, unserious, a wish dressed up as speculation. “By definition” mocks the lazy logic that turns “alien” into “advanced,” as if distance automatically confers virtue. And “soothes” is the tell: this isn’t curiosity about the universe, it’s emotional regulation.

The barb lands hardest in the pairing of “children” and “many writers.” Didion isn’t just calling some people naive; she’s accusing a whole class of cultural producers of indulging in the same bedtime story, then laundering it as insight. The subtext is about authority and escape. If extraterrestrials are assumed to be “higher,” then our institutions, conflicts, and moral compromises can be framed as merely provisional - temporary ugliness awaiting correction by something smarter, purer, elsewhere. It’s an abdication that flatters the believer: you’re worldly enough to distrust humanity, but open-minded enough to trust the unknown.

Contextually, Didion is working one of her signature seams: the American appetite for narratives that relieve responsibility. Whether the object is politics, celebrity, or cosmic visitors, the impulse is the same - outsource meaning, outsource rescue, and call it sophistication. Her cynicism isn’t anti-wonder; it’s anti-sedation.