Time & Perspective Quote by Herbert Prochnow

Prochnow’s line has the chilly calm of a boardroom ultimatum dressed up as life advice: decide, or be decided for. The phrasing turns passivity into something almost physical, an “endless drift” that doesn’t merely happen around you but actively drafts you into its current. That’s the real trick here. He frames choice not as a romantic act of self-expression, but as a defensive move against inertia.

The intent is pragmatic and faintly admonishing. “Firmly choose” isn’t about exploring options; it’s about committing before external pressures calcify into fate. The sentence splits the world into two forces: deliberate agency and impersonal momentum. Prochnow, a midcentury American writer with a reputation for crisp, managerial aphorisms, is speaking in a cultural moment that prized planning, efficiency, and control - the postwar belief that the future could be engineered if you stayed ahead of it. You can hear the era’s anxiety in the word “endless”: the fear that modern life, with its deadlines, institutions, and accelerations, will keep moving whether you’re ready or not.

Subtextually, it’s also a critique of the comforting myth of “keeping your options open.” Drift masquerades as flexibility until it quietly becomes a commitment to whatever’s easiest, loudest, or most rewarded. Prochnow isn’t arguing that every decision is liberating; he’s arguing that refusal to decide is itself a decision, just one outsourced to circumstance. That’s why the line sticks: it flatters no one, offers no catharsis, and still feels bracingly true in an age where algorithms, schedules, and constant inputs are happy to choose for you.