"What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?"
About this Quote
Boredom has rarely sounded so panicked. Fitzgerald’s question isn’t about killing an afternoon; it’s about confronting time as a blank, yawning inheritance. The line works because it escalates with ruthless speed: a trivial scheduling dilemma (“this afternoon”) detonates into an existential forecast (“the next thirty years”). In that jump is the whole Fitzgerald project: the glossy surfaces of leisure and romance thinning out to reveal dread, entropy, and the suspicion that pleasure, repeated, becomes its own kind of punishment.
The subtext is marital, classed, and quietly accusatory. “We” suggests intimacy, but it’s also a trap: two people bound together with no script beyond consumption. This is what idleness looks like when it’s not earned rest but endless, privileged suspension. Fitzgerald often writes characters who believe money can purchase permanence, only to discover it mainly buys more time to notice what’s missing. The real fear here isn’t that nothing is happening; it’s that nothing will ever happen that feels like meaning.
Placed against the backdrop of the Jazz Age - a culture of parties, speed, and curated glamour - the line reads like a hangover distilled into dialogue. It punctures the mythology that youth and wealth are self-justifying. The phrasing is conversational, almost cute, which makes the despair sharper: it’s the kind of sentence you toss off to be funny until you realize you mean it. Fitzgerald understood that the future can be terrifying precisely when it’s wide open. The question lands because it refuses the comfort of narrative; it’s the nightmare of infinite tomorrows with no new desire left to feed them.
The subtext is marital, classed, and quietly accusatory. “We” suggests intimacy, but it’s also a trap: two people bound together with no script beyond consumption. This is what idleness looks like when it’s not earned rest but endless, privileged suspension. Fitzgerald often writes characters who believe money can purchase permanence, only to discover it mainly buys more time to notice what’s missing. The real fear here isn’t that nothing is happening; it’s that nothing will ever happen that feels like meaning.
Placed against the backdrop of the Jazz Age - a culture of parties, speed, and curated glamour - the line reads like a hangover distilled into dialogue. It punctures the mythology that youth and wealth are self-justifying. The phrasing is conversational, almost cute, which makes the despair sharper: it’s the kind of sentence you toss off to be funny until you realize you mean it. Fitzgerald understood that the future can be terrifying precisely when it’s wide open. The question lands because it refuses the comfort of narrative; it’s the nightmare of infinite tomorrows with no new desire left to feed them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
|---|---|
| Source | The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). Line from the novel, commonly attributed to the character Daisy Buchanan in the published text. |
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