Time & Perspective Quote by Ed O'Brien

Ed O'Brien’s phrasing is almost aggressively unglamorous: not rage, not rebellion, just fatigue. In a culture that loves to narrate artist-versus-press as a blood feud, he refuses the myth. “We don’t hate the media” is a quiet act of image management, but it’s also a corrective to the way celebrity stories get flattened into simple antagonisms. Hatred is dramatic; boredom is human, and harder to monetize.

The subtext is about saturation. “When there’s too much of it we get bored” sounds casual, yet it carries an indictment of the attention economy: the problem isn’t scrutiny as such, it’s volume, repetition, and the sense that public life becomes an endless loop of the same questions and the same framing. O’Brien shifts the burden from moral outrage to sensory overload. That’s a musician’s critique, really: too much noise, not enough signal.

The line about “by the time that movie was made” points to the band’s documented era of being filmed, profiled, and interpreted to death. He’s hinting at how media narratives lag behind lived experience; by the time the “anti-media” storyline hits the screen, the emotional reality has already moved on. “We were just tired” lands as both confession and boundary. It’s a reminder that withdrawal isn’t always political theater. Sometimes it’s simply self-preservation dressed up, later, as a cultural statement.