"We are all in this together, by ourselves"
About this Quote
The line catches a central paradox of modern life: human beings are deeply interdependent, yet every experience is lived from the privacy of a single mind. It compresses solidarity and solitude into one wry pivot, turning a slogan of communal reassurance into something truer and more complicated. We share crises, economies, infrastructures, and narratives; we also shoulder grief, doubt, and decision-making alone. The joke lands because it exposes a gap between public rhetoric and private reality.
Lily Tomlin has long mined that gap. Her characters often speak from behind a desk, on a phone, or from an armchair, inhabiting small enclosures where the larger world intrudes. Humor becomes a scalpel for institutional platitudes, and this line punctures the cheery blanket phrase, We are all in this together. Add the clause by ourselves and the bromide frays, revealing how unevenly togetherness is distributed and how personal the labor of enduring still is.
The insight is not cynical; it is clarifying. Collective action remains necessary, but it cannot erase the fact that the ache of uncertainty, the late-night worry, the private resolve to act or persist, are unshareable. During global emergencies, remote work, and the scroll of social media, connectedness is constant while loneliness persists. The sentence names both without choosing between them.
There is also an ethical instruction tucked into the punchline. If the social fabric depends on countless solitary efforts, then compassion should make room for the limits and burdens of those efforts. Solidarity that respects boundaries is sturdier than enforced cheer. Likewise, individualism untethered from mutual care is brittle. The comma holds a balance: together demands responsibility; by ourselves demands humility.
Tomlin’s comedy often illuminates the way institutions speak in abstractions while people live in particulars. The cleverness here is that the abstraction survives, but it must now accommodate the solitary vantage point of each person. That adjustment is where honesty, and often real community, begins.
Lily Tomlin has long mined that gap. Her characters often speak from behind a desk, on a phone, or from an armchair, inhabiting small enclosures where the larger world intrudes. Humor becomes a scalpel for institutional platitudes, and this line punctures the cheery blanket phrase, We are all in this together. Add the clause by ourselves and the bromide frays, revealing how unevenly togetherness is distributed and how personal the labor of enduring still is.
The insight is not cynical; it is clarifying. Collective action remains necessary, but it cannot erase the fact that the ache of uncertainty, the late-night worry, the private resolve to act or persist, are unshareable. During global emergencies, remote work, and the scroll of social media, connectedness is constant while loneliness persists. The sentence names both without choosing between them.
There is also an ethical instruction tucked into the punchline. If the social fabric depends on countless solitary efforts, then compassion should make room for the limits and burdens of those efforts. Solidarity that respects boundaries is sturdier than enforced cheer. Likewise, individualism untethered from mutual care is brittle. The comma holds a balance: together demands responsibility; by ourselves demands humility.
Tomlin’s comedy often illuminates the way institutions speak in abstractions while people live in particulars. The cleverness here is that the abstraction survives, but it must now accommodate the solitary vantage point of each person. That adjustment is where honesty, and often real community, begins.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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