Wealth & Money Quote by Ogden Nash

Nash takes the great American fantasy - opting out - and flips it into a Möbius strip of obligation. The line is built like a joke but lands like a diagnosis: even your desire for leisure gets drafted into the labor economy. It works because it mimics the logic it mocks. The sentence marches forward with that brisk, common-sense cadence people use when they are being practical, then quietly reveals that “practicality” is a trap: the only way out is deeper in.

The intent is less anti-work than anti-pretension. Nash isn’t sanctifying toil; he’s puncturing the romantic pose of the idler. The subtext is that modern life turns every aspiration into a project with a price tag. Want freedom? Monetize it. Want autonomy? Budget it. The supposed opposite of work (not working) becomes a long-term financial strategy, which is its own kind of work - planning, saving, sacrificing, self-disciplining. Leisure, in other words, is not innocence; it’s a commodity you prepay with time.

Context matters: Nash wrote in a 20th-century America where middle-class security was increasingly defined by wages, pensions, and the promise of retirement. The quote catches the cultural pivot from aristocratic leisure (inherited) to democratic leisure (earned), and exposes the irony: “not working” becomes the reward system’s final product, sold back to you as a goal. Nash’s genius is that he doesn’t sermonize; he lets the loop close on itself, and you feel the click.