"The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him"
About this Quote
Leave it to a journalist-comic like Russell Baker to turn the low-grade annoyance of daily life into a grand theory of existence. By giving inanimate objects a "goal", he stages a mock-epic struggle: not man versus nature in the heroic sense, but man versus the stuck zipper, the jammed drawer, the parking meter that eats your last coin. The joke lands because it flatters our most irrational instinct in moments of friction: the conviction that the world is personally, deliberately, out to get us.
Baker's intent is less metaphysical than psychological. He’s naming the quiet humiliations modern life specializes in, the kind that don’t make headlines but do accumulate into a mood. Postwar American abundance promised convenience; what it often delivers is a complex obstacle course of products, mechanisms, and systems that require constant negotiation. When the object "resists", what’s really resisting is our fantasy of mastery: the belief that buying the thing, owning the tool, holding the key should translate into control.
The subtext is a gentle indictment of masculine, managerial confidence - the idea that rational problem-solving can tame everything. Baker punctures that with a cynical grin: you can be competent, punctual, prepared, and still get defeated by a shoelace that snaps at the curb. His exaggeration makes failure funny, which is its own kind of relief. If the objects are conspiring, then your frustration isn’t stupidity; it’s the natural order of an absurd, lightly hostile universe.
Baker's intent is less metaphysical than psychological. He’s naming the quiet humiliations modern life specializes in, the kind that don’t make headlines but do accumulate into a mood. Postwar American abundance promised convenience; what it often delivers is a complex obstacle course of products, mechanisms, and systems that require constant negotiation. When the object "resists", what’s really resisting is our fantasy of mastery: the belief that buying the thing, owning the tool, holding the key should translate into control.
The subtext is a gentle indictment of masculine, managerial confidence - the idea that rational problem-solving can tame everything. Baker punctures that with a cynical grin: you can be competent, punctual, prepared, and still get defeated by a shoelace that snaps at the curb. His exaggeration makes failure funny, which is its own kind of relief. If the objects are conspiring, then your frustration isn’t stupidity; it’s the natural order of an absurd, lightly hostile universe.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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