Daily Inspiration Quote by Duane G. Carey

There is a quiet deflation baked into Carey’s line, the kind that punctures the tidy mythology we like to sell about astronauts. Pop culture prefers the childhood vow, the starry-eyed decision, the moment a person “chooses” space and fate salutes. Carey refuses that script. “It really wasn’t a case of deciding” frames astronauthood less as a heroic declaration than as the byproduct of accumulation: training, aptitude, timing, institutional pathways, and a temperament that keeps showing up.

That understatement matters because astronauts are usually deployed as symbols - of national ambition, individual exceptionalism, and frontier romance. Carey’s phrasing pulls the focus back to process. The “for me” is doing extra work: it suggests other narratives exist, but his is closer to how elite professions often function. You don’t wake up and pick “astronaut” the way you pick a major. You move through feeder systems (military aviation, engineering, test piloting), and at some point the label arrives almost as an administrative outcome of years of preparation.

The subtext is humility, but also realism about meritocracy. NASA selection is famously competitive; calling it a “decision” flatters the applicant’s agency and hides the gauntlet of gatekeeping, medical standards, mission needs, and luck. Carey’s line quietly honors the unglamorous infrastructure behind the glamour - the long runway of competence that makes the headline possible, and the idea that the most extraordinary jobs can be, from the inside, less destiny than momentum.