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| John Gray is a political philosopher and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism |
The title is the contrast and tension that has struck me most in my adulthood. That people are ever unhappy when they're working. Just as they're ever unhappy when they're out of work. I have come to the conclusion that it's all an illusion - there is only now. Life is a struggle. It is no utopia and there is no utopia but chasing that illusion is what gets us through. There is only labour and laborious occupations and there is not getting around them. George Bernard Shaw said in
Misalliance:
"The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired."
Or putting it another way:
"The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not."
