Time & Perspective Quote by Eugene Kennedy

A neat trick of modern life is that we treat tomorrow like a crush, a commodity, and a punchline all at once. Eugene Kennedy’s line skewers that schizophrenia with a triad that keeps tightening the screws: the future isn’t just imagined, it’s monetized (“growth industry”), trivialized (“parlor game”), then sensationalized (“disaster movie”). Each phrase names a different cultural machine - consulting, forecasting, self-help; dinner-party predictions and pundit bracketology; apocalyptic entertainment and headline doom - and the sentence works because it refuses to let any one posture off the hook. Optimism and panic, earnest planning and idle speculation, are revealed as variations of the same obsession: outsourcing the present.

Kennedy’s intent is less to dunk on hope than to expose how hope gets engineered. “Romanticize” suggests intimacy and illusion; we fall in love with a projected version of our lives because it asks nothing of us right now beyond anticipation. Calling it a “growth industry” implies professionalized certainty: people selling models, narratives, and products that promise to domesticate uncertainty. Then “parlor game” punctures the seriousness. It’s not that predictions are wrong; it’s that the act of predicting becomes social recreation, a way to perform intelligence without risking action. “Disaster movie” completes the picture: fear becomes content, catastrophe becomes consumable, and dread is converted into a controlled thrill.

The subtext is a warning about time’s moral economy. When the future is entertainment, market, and fantasy, the present becomes merely a staging area - and responsibility gets deferred, indefinitely, to a tomorrow we keep rewriting.