When I consider life, ’tis all a cheat;
Yet, fool’d with hope, men favor the deceit;
Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay.
Tomorrow’s falser than the former day.

The speaker voices a bleak, satiric skepticism about human expectations. Life is figured as a “cheat” not because it is wholly without value, but because it repeatedly lures people forward with promises of future satisfaction that never quite arrives. Hope becomes the mechanism of self-deception: even when experience shows that “tomorrow” fails to pay what it seems to owe, people continue to “favor the deceit” by trusting in the next day. The final line sharpens the thought into a moral warning about procrastination and wishful thinking—tomorrow is not merely unreliable, but more deceptive than yesterday, because it perpetuates the cycle of deferral.