People
That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
— Samuel Johnson
Behind the line May contain spoilers.
Our reading
An editorial interpretation.
This is a bleak observation about contentment. The speaker claims people are never truly happy in the moment, only relieved by brief forgetting. Life, in this view, moves from one desire to the next rather than from joy to joy.
Context reviewed