Time & Perspective Quote by Robert M. Pirsig

Goal-chasing is the respectable addiction Pirsig is puncturing here: the idea that meaning lives at the summit, and everything before it is just a grim slog. He calls that posture "shallow" not as a moral scold, but as a diagnosis of a culture trained to treat life as a ledger of milestones. The sentence turns on a clean, outdoorsy metaphor that quietly rewires the usual heroic narrative. The peak is what gets the postcard; the slopes are where the water runs, the soil holds, the trees take root. In other words: the conditions for living are mostly unglamorous, repetitive, and ongoing. That is the point.

The subtext is Pirsig's broader argument in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Quality isn't a trophy you get at the end; it's a way of paying attention while you're doing the thing. The mountain image smuggles in a critique of instrumental thinking, the habit of treating the present as expendable fuel for a future payoff. When you live like that, you don't just miss your life; you outsource your satisfaction to a tomorrow that keeps receding.

It's also a warning about what happens when "the top" becomes identity. Summits are scarce by design; if you define yourself by arrival, you build a self that can only exist in brief spikes of achievement and long stretches of negation. Pirsig offers a more durable ethic: value the process not as self-help pablum, but as realism about where life actually happens.