"The time I kill is killing me"
About this Quote
Aphorisms love to brag about control: we manage our schedules, we “spend” time, we “make” time. Cooley flips that whole ledger with one neat, grim reversal. “The time I kill is killing me” works because it turns a casual idiom into a murder mystery where the culprit is also the victim. The first clause carries a smug, modern confidence: time as disposable, something to waste in small, private acts of avoidance. The second clause snaps shut like a trap, revealing the cost that was hidden inside the joke all along.
Cooley’s intent is less moral scolding than surgical exposure. “Killing time” usually means we’re waiting for life to resume; Cooley suggests that’s precisely the problem. Waiting becomes a lifestyle, and the hours we dismiss as harmless are the same hours that subtract from us. The line’s tight symmetry makes it feel inevitable, as if the language itself has been waiting to betray us.
The subtext is existential but not grandiose. It’s the creeping sensation of aging in everyday disguise: procrastination, distraction, the numbing churn of routines we don’t choose so much as fall into. Cooley, a writer known for compressed, slightly venomous observations, is speaking from within a late-20th-century culture increasingly organized around leisure-as-escape and productivity-as-virtue. The aphorism refuses both. It doesn’t praise hustle; it just points out that the bargain we strike with boredom, avoidance, and “just passing time” is never neutral. Time isn’t something you kill without it taking a swing back.
Cooley’s intent is less moral scolding than surgical exposure. “Killing time” usually means we’re waiting for life to resume; Cooley suggests that’s precisely the problem. Waiting becomes a lifestyle, and the hours we dismiss as harmless are the same hours that subtract from us. The line’s tight symmetry makes it feel inevitable, as if the language itself has been waiting to betray us.
The subtext is existential but not grandiose. It’s the creeping sensation of aging in everyday disguise: procrastination, distraction, the numbing churn of routines we don’t choose so much as fall into. Cooley, a writer known for compressed, slightly venomous observations, is speaking from within a late-20th-century culture increasingly organized around leisure-as-escape and productivity-as-virtue. The aphorism refuses both. It doesn’t praise hustle; it just points out that the bargain we strike with boredom, avoidance, and “just passing time” is never neutral. Time isn’t something you kill without it taking a swing back.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
|---|---|
| Source | Aphorism: "The time I kill is killing me." — Mason Cooley. (Listed on Mason Cooley's Wikiquote page.) |
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