After a very enjoyable week of staycationing, I'm back at work. And it hurts. Which makes me wonder: is there an economic case for high house prices and university tuition fees?

To see my point, consider this paper by Alex Bryson and George MacKerron. They show that I'm not unusual. They asked people at random times of the day how happy they were and what they were doing. They found that people were much less happy when they were working. In fact, of the 40 activities considered, only being ill in bed made folk more miserable than work*.

But here's the thing. This isn't because they sampled people in rubbish jobs. People in this survey had a median income of over £40,000 a year - suggesting they had "good" jobs". And in fact, those in low-paid work reported less unhappiness at work than those on six-figure salaries.

What's going on here? Here's a theory, based on a paper by Katharine Guthrie and Jan Sokolowsky. It's to do with opportunity cost. If you're well off, the opportunity cost of work is high; you could be enjoying your nice home or playing golf. Whilst we're at work, we are aware of this cost and so feel unhappy.

This explains my current dissatisfaction; my staycation reminded me of the more enjoyable things I could be doing and so made opportunity cost especially salient. And it explains why the low-paid feel less unhappy at work; if work merely gets you out of a dingy flat on a sink estate and can't afford some leisure activities, the opportunity cost of work is lower than if you lived somewhere nice.

This misery of work could in principle encourage people to take early retirement**. Of course, we've not seen this recently - but that's because low investment returns have forced people to stay in work. However, a combination of returns reverting to something like normal, allied to an ageing workforce, could well drive people to quit work.

This is where high house prices and tuition fees enter the story. Those of us who got a free education and cheap(ish) houses in our youth have been able to save for our retirement - some have actually saved too much - and so could drop out soon; I reckon I would have done so already but for lower returns. However, the generation below me - burdened by high rent and student loans - will be less able to save for an early retirement. They will, in effect, be trapped into debt bondage.

In this sense, high house prices and university tuition fees have an (unintended) effect. They will help sustain the labour supply in 30 years time. And they will reduce the need for hierarchical capitalism to reform itself to improve job satisfaction in order to retain dissatisfied 50-somethings. It's surprising how many ways capitalism has of reproducing itself.

* This is consistent with the fact that the employed are happier than the unemployed. There's a difference between experienced happiness and remembered happiness. The enjoyment we get from work consists not in doing it but in having done it.

** Bryson and MacKerron find no relationship between age and the misery of work. I suspect this is because although older folk do more enjoyable work than young folk - remember the grunt work you did as a graduate trainee? - they are more aware of the opportunity cost of work, and the two effects cancel out.