Wit & Attitude Quote by Ric Ocasek

Ocasek’s line lands like a shrug that’s secretly a diagnosis. He’s describing entrapment in two registers at once: the literal “no way out” and the darker “can’t see out,” where the exit might exist but perception, chemistry, or trauma has erased it. That second clause is the knife twist. It widens the frame from cages to cognition, from social conditions to the mind’s own faulty lighting.

The question “What are you going to do about it?” isn’t aimed at the listener so much as at the culture that keeps asking for neat solutions, inspirational arcs, tidy recovery narratives. Ocasek answers with refusal: “I don’t have the answer.” Coming from a musician - a role people often recruit as a public therapist, prophet, or confessor - it reads as an ethical boundary. Art can name the feeling; it can’t legislate a cure.

Then he detonates the closer: “If I did there would be no insane asylums.” The hyperbole is doing real work. It mocks the fantasy that suffering is solvable by one wise sentence, while also indicting the institutional history behind “asylums”: places built as answers to problems society didn’t want to understand, fund, or look at for too long. The subtext is bleakly compassionate: if you’re trapped, it’s not because you’re failing at willpower. It’s because the world is comfortable outsourcing complexity into locked rooms - and because some prisons don’t have doors, only fog.