"The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be"
About this Quote
A line like this works because it pretends to be a simple shrug, then quietly detonates. Valery takes a familiar nostalgia trope ("things aren’t what they used to be") and aims it at the one thing we assume can’t have a past: the future. The joke has teeth. It suggests that even our expectations have aged out, that tomorrow itself has become less reliable, less legible, maybe even less promising than the version we grew up imagining.
Valery was writing from inside Europe’s early-20th-century whiplash: industrial acceleration, World War I’s mechanized slaughter, the fragile interwar years, and the creeping sense that modernity wasn’t a staircase upward but a machine with no off switch. In that climate, optimism stops looking like a virtue and starts looking like poor risk assessment. The future "not what it used to be" implies a broken contract: progress was supposed to deliver coherence, prosperity, maybe moral improvement. Instead it delivers speed, noise, and new ways to die.
The subtext is less sentimental than suspicious. If the future has changed, then the stories we tell to justify the present have changed with it. Politics, art, and personal ambition all lean on forecasts, on imagined payoffs. Valery’s wit punctures that scaffolding. He’s not just mourning lost certainty; he’s exposing how much of "the future" is a cultural product - packaged hope - and how quickly the packaging can become obsolete when history turns brutal.
Valery was writing from inside Europe’s early-20th-century whiplash: industrial acceleration, World War I’s mechanized slaughter, the fragile interwar years, and the creeping sense that modernity wasn’t a staircase upward but a machine with no off switch. In that climate, optimism stops looking like a virtue and starts looking like poor risk assessment. The future "not what it used to be" implies a broken contract: progress was supposed to deliver coherence, prosperity, maybe moral improvement. Instead it delivers speed, noise, and new ways to die.
The subtext is less sentimental than suspicious. If the future has changed, then the stories we tell to justify the present have changed with it. Politics, art, and personal ambition all lean on forecasts, on imagined payoffs. Valery’s wit punctures that scaffolding. He’s not just mourning lost certainty; he’s exposing how much of "the future" is a cultural product - packaged hope - and how quickly the packaging can become obsolete when history turns brutal.
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