Daily Inspiration Quote by Ann Landers

A line like this lands because it weaponizes a familiar kind of modern competence: being good at numbers, comparisons, and deals, while being weirdly untrained in judgment. Landers frames it as an epidemic of literacy in price tags paired with illiteracy in meaning. The jab isn’t at money itself; it’s at a culture that treats the measurable as the only thing worth respecting. “Too many people today” is doing quiet rhetorical work: it’s not a single villain, it’s a pattern, a social weather system.

The subtext is moral, but not preachy in a churchy way. It’s the practical morality of a columnist who spent decades reading mail about divorces, resentment, loneliness, and petty cruelties. The implication: a lot of misery starts when people turn relationships into transactions and identity into branding. Once everything has a price, everyone becomes an invoice. When value disappears, the things that keep a life from collapsing - loyalty, dignity, patience, delight - start looking like bad investments.

Context matters: Landers wrote for mass audiences in a postwar America that increasingly sold the good life as a shopping list. Her advice column sat right next to ads promising selfhood through purchase. This sentence reads like a small act of sabotage against that ecosystem: a reminder that what can be counted is rarely what counts.