Daily Inspiration Quote by Matthew Ashford

There is a quiet sleight of hand in Ashford's line: it starts as a motivational scold and ends as a shrug at fate. "What's the point" frames negativity and fear not as moral failings, but as bad investments - emotions that cost you more than they pay out. It’s the language of someone who’s spent time in an industry built on auditions, cancellations, and other people’s decisions, where worry feels like work but rarely changes the outcome.

Then comes the pivot: "We can't control it". That "it" is strategically vague. It could mean the future, the world, the crisis at hand. It could also mean the emotions themselves. Either reading lets the quote do two jobs at once: it pressures you to stop indulging fear, while offering you an alibi for having it. If you can't control the external chaos, why feed it with internal dread? If you can't control the fear response, why punish yourself for feeling it? The subtext is self-protection: permission to drop the exhausting performance of composure.

As an actor, Ashford's appeal is less philosophical than practical. The line sounds like something said between takes, or in an interview where optimism is part of the brand - calm, relatable, clean enough to travel. Its intent isn’t to solve anxiety; it’s to reframe it as unproductive noise. The cultural context here is late-20th/21st-century coping talk: resilience packaged as common sense, control theory distilled into a sentence you can repeat when the news won't let you breathe.