Time & Perspective Quote by Lewis Thomas

Lewis Thomas pegs humanity not as the “thinking animal” but as the anxious one, and the shift is surgical. “Perhaps” is doing quiet work: it’s a scientist’s hedge, a nod to humility, but also a rhetorical trapdoor that makes the claim feel earned rather than proclaimed. Once you accept the premise, the sentence tightens like a noose: worry isn’t an occasional glitch in the system; it’s the system, a habit so constant we “worry away our lives,” as if time itself is being sanded down by anticipation.

The subtext is less self-help than diagnosis. Thomas stacks clauses that ricochet across time - “fearing the future, discontent with the present” - to show worry as a temporal disorder, a mind perpetually evicted from now. Then he pivots to mortality: “unable to take in the idea of dying.” That phrasing matters. It isn’t that death is scary; it’s cognitively illegible. Worry becomes the consolation prize for a species aware enough to foresee its ending, but not wise enough to metabolize it.

Contextually, Thomas wrote in an era when biology and behavior were being braided together in public imagination. He leans on an ethological frame (“among the earth’s creatures”) to make anxiety feel evolutionary, not merely personal. The last jab - “unable to sit still” - lands like an indictment of modern restlessness, but it’s broader than lifestyle critique: motion, planning, fretting are our way of pretending the future is negotiable.