Life & Wisdom Quote by John Fowles

A century that can split the atom, map the genome, and stream any movie on demand still insists its defining tragedy is a calendar problem. Fowles skewers that self-pity with the word "supposed": not denying modern exhaustion, but challenging its status as an alibi. The line lands like a raised eyebrow at a culture that treats busyness as both wound and badge. If we are always out of time, we are conveniently off the hook - too rushed for moral deliberation, too swamped for intimacy, too booked to notice what we are consenting to.

Fowles, writing out of postwar Britain and into the late-20th-century consumer boom, saw how institutions monetize urgency. Industrial schedules became corporate targets, then personal branding: productivity as identity. The "lack" is less literal than engineered, a scarcity mindset applied to the one resource that can't be repossessed but can be fragmented. You don't have to steal people's hours if you can teach them to experience their own lives as backlog.

The subtext is existential, a signature Fowles move. Time pressure becomes a way to avoid freedom, which is heavier than fatigue. He is nudging the reader toward an uncomfortable suspicion: maybe the misery isn't that we have too little time, but that we don't want to face what we'd do with unclaimed stretches of it - the decisions, the solitude, the responsibility. By calling it the century's "great" misery, he exposes the distortion: we elevate a manageable problem into a grand tragedy because it keeps deeper questions safely postponed.