Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Young

Young skewers a surprisingly modern habit: treating desire as labor. "Wishing" sounds passive, even innocent, but he brands it an "employment" - a job you clock into, a routine that consumes time and produces nothing but more appetite. The line works because it flips the moral hierarchy of work. In a culture that prized industry, discipline, and spiritual accounting, calling idleness a form of work is a quiet insult: you can be busy and still be wasting your life.

The subtext is as sharp as it is puritanical. Wishing isn not merely daydreaming; it's procrastination with a halo, the self flattering itself that wanting counts as effort. Young, writing in the 18th-century devotional and moralizing tradition (and later best known for Night Thoughts), is allergic to that kind of self-deception. The phrase "of all employments" widens the indictment beyond personal weakness into a social critique: among the many ways people spend their days, the most corrosive is the one that mimics action while dodging responsibility.

Context matters. Young lived amid rising commercial life and a Protestant ethic that tied virtue to purposeful time use. His line reads like a compact sermon for an emerging modernity: ambition is fine, but fantasy-as-substitute is spiritually and socially bankrupt. The sting comes from its economy. He doesn't argue; he labels. Once wishing is framed as a career, you start hearing the paycheck you never earn, and the years you still spend.