dog's life

A life that is difficult, unpleasant, or boring. You whipper-snappers think you've got a bright future ahead of you, but it's a dog's life, I tell you!

Life is difficult, unpleasant, or boring. You whipper-snappers think you've got a bright future ahead of you, but it's a dog's life, I tell you!

A miserably unhappy existence, as in He's been leading a dog's life since his wife left him. This expression was first recorded in a 16th-century manuscript and alludes to the miserable subservient existence of dogs during this era. By the 1660s there was a proverb: "It's a dog's life, hunger and ease."

People say it's a dog's life to mean that life is difficult and unpleasant. It's a dog's life being a football manager.

Miserable circumstances. The term has been traced to Erasmus, who pointed out the wretched subservient existence of dogs in the mid-sixteenth century, as well as to the seventeenth-century proverb, “It’s a dog’s life, hunger and ease.” It was certainly a cliché by the time Rudyard Kipling (A Diversity of Creatures, 1899) wrote, “Politics are not my concern. . . . They impressed me as a dog’s life without a dog’s decencies.” See also die like a dog.