"Where there is life there is wishful thinking"
About this Quote
Optimism gets billed as virtue; Lieberman reframes it as biology. "Where there is life there is wishful thinking" lands like a dry, writerly shrug at the human tendency to keep bargaining with reality even when reality has stopped negotiating. The line borrows the familiar cadence of proverbial comfort ("where there is life...") and then swerves: not "hope", not "love", but the slightly embarrassing cousin, wishful thinking. That word choice matters. Hope can be disciplined, communal, even brave. Wishful thinking is private, self-soothing, and often strategically ignorant.
The intent feels less inspirational than diagnostic. Lieberman isn’t praising imagination; he’s pointing to an adaptive reflex. As long as you’re alive, your mind will draft alternate endings: the test score might be fine, the doctor might be wrong, the relationship might reset to the good version. It’s survival software, not moral achievement.
Subtext: rationality is fragile, and the ego will protect itself with narratives before it accepts the bluntness of facts. The line is compact because it assumes the reader recognizes the pattern: we don’t merely endure uncertainty; we decorate it. Wishful thinking becomes the psychic down payment we make on tomorrow, whether tomorrow deserves it or not.
Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century, post-Freud sensibility in which inner life is a tangle of defenses and stories. Coming from a writer, it also reads as a sly nod to the craft itself: storytelling begins where certainty ends, and living humans are relentless authors of the outcome they want.
The intent feels less inspirational than diagnostic. Lieberman isn’t praising imagination; he’s pointing to an adaptive reflex. As long as you’re alive, your mind will draft alternate endings: the test score might be fine, the doctor might be wrong, the relationship might reset to the good version. It’s survival software, not moral achievement.
Subtext: rationality is fragile, and the ego will protect itself with narratives before it accepts the bluntness of facts. The line is compact because it assumes the reader recognizes the pattern: we don’t merely endure uncertainty; we decorate it. Wishful thinking becomes the psychic down payment we make on tomorrow, whether tomorrow deserves it or not.
Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century, post-Freud sensibility in which inner life is a tangle of defenses and stories. Coming from a writer, it also reads as a sly nod to the craft itself: storytelling begins where certainty ends, and living humans are relentless authors of the outcome they want.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
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