"There's something magical about putting yourself into life. You've got to stand up and take responsibility for your own life and you cannot abandon that"
About this Quote
Kurtis’s line reads like a pep talk, but it’s doing more than motivational business-card wisdom. Coming from a journalist who built a career on narration, investigations, and the slow craft of turning chaos into a story, “magical” isn’t a retreat into mysticism. It’s a practical word for the moment when agency flips the script: life stops being a sequence of things that happen to you and becomes something you’re actively shaping, editing, and owning.
The verb choices carry the real pressure. “Putting yourself into life” implies effort, risk, and presence, not mere optimism. It’s the opposite of watching your days like a spectator scrolling a feed. “Stand up” is physical and moral at once, a posture of refusal: you don’t get to stay seated while your life is decided by inertia, institutions, or other people’s expectations. And “take responsibility” lands with the newsroom’s hard-earned skepticism. Kurtis isn’t romanticizing self-reliance as rugged individualism; he’s warning about what happens when you outsource your choices to circumstance. That’s where “cannot abandon that” bites. He treats responsibility as a contract you sign simply by being alive.
In a cultural moment that rewards distance, irony, and plausible deniability, Kurtis argues for the unfashionable stance: commit. The “magic” is not luck. It’s what you feel when you stop narrating your life and start authoring it.
The verb choices carry the real pressure. “Putting yourself into life” implies effort, risk, and presence, not mere optimism. It’s the opposite of watching your days like a spectator scrolling a feed. “Stand up” is physical and moral at once, a posture of refusal: you don’t get to stay seated while your life is decided by inertia, institutions, or other people’s expectations. And “take responsibility” lands with the newsroom’s hard-earned skepticism. Kurtis isn’t romanticizing self-reliance as rugged individualism; he’s warning about what happens when you outsource your choices to circumstance. That’s where “cannot abandon that” bites. He treats responsibility as a contract you sign simply by being alive.
In a cultural moment that rewards distance, irony, and plausible deniability, Kurtis argues for the unfashionable stance: commit. The “magic” is not luck. It’s what you feel when you stop narrating your life and start authoring it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
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