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With big ideas about originality, postmodernism, and the dire state of the world wafting from the record and circling our conversation, I offer up a theory about how Being Funny fits into the 1975’s project at large. If “Love It If We Made It” was a last-ditch plea for hope, the ensuing four years, filled with ever-worsening climate catastrophes, war, and major democracies in decline, all lead to one conclusion: We will not make it. But Being Funny, with all of its comfortably familiar sounds, its relatable expressions of joy and sorrow, seems to say: Let’s try to cling onto what we can in the meantime. Healy nods slowly. “That’s exactly it,” he says. “The fertility that is required for new ideas is the future, and we don’t really have the future, so we don’t have that many new ideas. That’s maybe why our record sounds like it does.”

Hi. I need native speaker help. Can someone explain what ”The fertility that is required for new ideas is the future” means to me? Does it mean that it requires children in the future to consider good new ideas for solving a lot of the problems?

Thanks in advance.

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    You have trouble understanding it because it is basically gibberish. The meaning is that creativity requires hope for the future. Now that thought may be important, but the way it is expressed is inarticulate at best.
    – Jeff Morrow
    Commented Aug 14, 2022 at 20:29
  • Oh I didn’t know it was basically gibberish. So it’s hard to know what this sentence really means?
    – whitewater
    Commented Aug 14, 2022 at 20:40
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    It is dressing up the thought that "creativity requires hope" into something that is supposed to be subtle and profound. "The fertility is ... the future" is pure nonsense.
    – Jeff Morrow
    Commented Aug 14, 2022 at 21:21
  • I see. I think it’d have been really difficult to understand this sentence if I tried to understand it by myself. Thank you so much for the help.
    – whitewater
    Commented Aug 14, 2022 at 21:24

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the sentence from the text:

The fertility that is required for new ideas is the future.

is using a rather unclear metaphor. In speaking of "fertility" it seems to me to mean "creativity" or "flexibility of mind". It is, I think, comparing a mind to a garden or piece of land that may be literally fertile. In saying that this "is the future" the speaker is suggesting that such ideas will come in the future, or perhaps come from thinking about the future, but is not expressing this idea at all clearly. A state of mind cannot be the future. The speaker seems to be trying to express a rather ordinary idea in somewhat abstract language to make it sound more important and sophisticated. I would not worry about trying to analyze this sentence. It doesn't realy mean much of anything.

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  • That makes much more sense. Thank you so much for the explanation.
    – whitewater
    Commented Aug 16, 2022 at 16:56

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