Daily Inspiration Quote by Morrie Schwartz

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.