Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw is needling a favorite human vanity: the idea that we suffer because the world has singled us out, when in fact we often curate our own misery like a prized possession. The line flips the expected logic. Burdens are supposed to cling to us; Shaw suggests the clinginess runs the other way. That inversion is the joke and the jab. It exposes how quickly hardship can become identity, alibi, even status.

The intent is not to scold people for having problems, but to puncture the romance of being weighed down. In Shaw's theater, self-deception is rarely accidental. People keep their burdens because those burdens do social work: they justify inertia, win sympathy, ward off risk, and provide a ready-made narrative ("If only not for this..."). A burden can be a shield against change. If you lay it down, you lose the story that explains you, and you're suddenly responsible for what comes next.

Subtextually, Shaw is also pointing at institutions and habits - class expectations, moral dogmas, respectability - that look oppressive yet can be emotionally convenient. The burden might be an unfulfilling job, a grievance, a feud, a guilt. Each offers clarity: a fixed role, a stable complaint, a reason not to renegotiate your life.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in an age obsessed with duty, propriety, and moral seriousness, and he made a career of mocking those poses. The line reads like a compressed stage direction for modernity: watch how people perform their suffering, then ask what they get paid in meaning to keep it.