Time & Perspective Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Holmes is needling the American religion of efficiency with the cool authority of someone who helped define what “reasonable” even means. “Despise” is a deliberately outsized verb: a jurist known for hard-nosed realism suddenly sounds like a decadent, which is the point. The line flips the Protestant work ethic into a kind of heresy - not laziness, but a defense of squandered possibility as a real human good.

The subtext is that life is not a docket. “Making the most” implies a measurable optimum, as if existence were a case to be briefed and won. Holmes, who lived through the Civil War and spent decades watching society formalize itself into institutions, understands what that mindset costs: you start treating every hour as an instrument, and you end up with a life optimized but not inhabited. His twist is sly: neglected opportunities are pleasurable not because regret feels good, but because unchosen paths preserve a private frontier. The things you didn’t do remain weightless, untested by failure, unruined by routine. They let you keep imagining yourself as multiple people.

Context matters: Holmes’s legal philosophy distrusted moral absolutes and emphasized experience over tidy theory. This quip carries the same skepticism toward totalizing systems, just applied to self-management. It’s also a patrician jab at hustle culture avant la lettre: a reminder that freedom includes the right to leave some doors unopened, and to find, in that refusal, a quieter kind of abundance.