"When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions"
About this Quote
The line lands like a gentle rebuke wrapped in a shrug: of course its absurd, once you actually notice it. Schwartz is aiming at the quiet moral logic we rarely interrogate - that a person becomes more of a person by drawing harder boundaries. The fence is doing double duty here. It is literal property, suburban geometry, the postwar dream of a yard you can defend. It is also psychological: the daily decision to treat the world as a set of competing claims rather than shared vulnerability.
His phrasing matters. "When you look at it that way" suggests a simple shift in angle, not a doctrinal conversion. Schwartz is an educator, so the move is pedagogical: change the frame, and what felt normal turns comically irrational. "Individualize ourselves" is especially pointed because it borrows the language of selfhood and autonomy - ideals we like to think of as liberating - and ties them to the most banal apparatus of exclusion. You are not building a self; you are building a perimeter.
The subtext is less anti-property than anti-substitution. Hoarding possessions becomes a stand-in for building meaning, community, even safety. The fence promises control in a life that refuses to be controlled, especially as aging and mortality press in. In the context of Schwartz's broader reputation (most popularly filtered through a late-life philosophy of connection), the sentence reads as a critique of American self-making: a culture that confuses privacy with identity and accumulation with worth, then wonders why it feels lonely inside all that carefully claimed space.
His phrasing matters. "When you look at it that way" suggests a simple shift in angle, not a doctrinal conversion. Schwartz is an educator, so the move is pedagogical: change the frame, and what felt normal turns comically irrational. "Individualize ourselves" is especially pointed because it borrows the language of selfhood and autonomy - ideals we like to think of as liberating - and ties them to the most banal apparatus of exclusion. You are not building a self; you are building a perimeter.
The subtext is less anti-property than anti-substitution. Hoarding possessions becomes a stand-in for building meaning, community, even safety. The fence promises control in a life that refuses to be controlled, especially as aging and mortality press in. In the context of Schwartz's broader reputation (most popularly filtered through a late-life philosophy of connection), the sentence reads as a critique of American self-making: a culture that confuses privacy with identity and accumulation with worth, then wonders why it feels lonely inside all that carefully claimed space.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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