Life & Wisdom Quote by Marge Piercy

Piercy’s line has the compressed urgency of a warning label: stop pretending history is finished, because someone is still taking notes. “We are trying to live” frames the problem as collective and ongoing, not a private quirk. Then she slips the knife in with “as if,” exposing a self-conscious performance. It’s not that we’re living; it’s that we’re staging our lives for an imagined audience with better information and harsher standards.

The phrase “an experiment” is doing double duty. Experiments promise progress, but they also imply subjects, controls, and disposable outcomes. Piercy, a writer steeped in feminist and political critique, evokes a modernity where people submit to systems - technology, markets, institutions - that claim to be optimizing the human condition. If the future is the lab, the present becomes the test phase: messy, surveilled, and easy to justify sacrificing. That’s the subtext: we internalize the logic of “temporary pain for future gain,” and call it responsibility.

“Conducted by the future” flips agency in a way that feels both eerie and accurate. The future isn’t just coming; it’s managing us. We make decisions as though tomorrow’s people will validate them, as though our worth is retrospective. Piercy’s intent is less prophecy than indictment: a culture that delays living in the name of being legible to posterity ends up treating its own time as raw material. The line works because it captures a particularly modern anxiety - the sense that we’re auditioning for a world that hasn’t arrived, and may never thank us.