is a familiar phrase
we like to flaunt
    especially
when we would like to utter a complaint
    about contemporary grievances
    god and the world & cetera

in doing so
we keep good company
from Socrates to Livius
    to Shakespeare, Goethe, Emerson,
    Whitman, Fitzgerald, Hurston, Vonnegut,
     Morrison, Angelou, Nabokov, etc.

I guess this is because
the times like these
are always those
in which we live