Parenting & Family Quote by Art Linkletter

Linkletter’s line lands like a rimshot because it borrows the tidy, comforting cadence of a textbook and swaps in a word that belongs to machines. “Infancy, childhood, adolescence” sets you up for adulthood, dignity, maybe wisdom. Then “obsolescence” snaps the ladder in half. The joke is architectural: three familiar rungs, then a corporate memo.

The intent isn’t just to needle aging; it’s to mock how modern life treats people as products with a shelf life. “Obsolescence” is what happens to last year’s model, not a person. By stapling it onto “man,” Linkletter exposes a culture that measures human value in novelty, output, and market appeal. Even the implied missing stage - adulthood - feels like the point: in a productivity-obsessed society, you don’t get to simply be grown. You’re either becoming, or being replaced.

Coming from a mid-century media figure who made a career out of observing ordinary Americans, the quip reads like a lightly cruel diagnosis of postwar consumer culture. This was the era of planned obsolescence as an industrial strategy, television as a youth machine, and workplaces built on mandatory retirement. Linkletter’s humor is genial on the surface, but the subtext is anxious: if the culture is always upgrading, where does that leave the people who can’t?

The line also flatters the audience with recognition. We laugh because we’ve felt the downgrade: the moment your tastes are “dated,” your skills “legacy,” your face “before.” It’s a joke that doubles as a warning label.