The Art of Manliness - Ecclesiastes on Enjoying Our Weirdly Unsatisfying Lives

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00:01:07.560 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast, which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders

00:01:15.620 that glean their edifying, life-improving insights without the fluff and filler.

00:01:19.640 The AOM Podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word, and deed.

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00:01:38.200 Now on to the show.

00:01:39.340 Of all the books in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is arguably the most philosophical, dark, experiential, existential, and unsparingly honest about the human condition.

00:01:55.500 It wrestles with work, money, ambition, pleasure, time, and death.

00:02:00.280 And it does so in a way that feels uncannily modern.

00:02:02.480 Whether you approach it as sacred scripture or simply as ancient wisdom literature,

00:02:06.900 Ecclesiastes has something to say to anyone who's ever chased success, gotten what they wanted, and then wondered,

00:02:11.820 is this really it?

00:02:13.500 Here to unpack this ancient philosophy is Bobby Jameson, a pastor and the author of Everything is Never Enough,

00:02:18.700 Ecclesiastes' surprising path to resilient happiness.

00:02:21.820 We discuss why Ecclesiastes resonates so strongly in our age of acceleration and control,

00:02:25.760 why so much of life can feel absurd and unsatisfying,

00:02:28.260 and how the book ultimately shows us how to enjoy and even embrace what first appears to be vanity of vanities.

00:02:34.800 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash everythingisneverenough.

00:02:53.260 All right, Bobby Jameson, welcome to the show.

00:02:56.120 Thanks for having me.

00:02:56.720 So you wrote a book called Everything is Never Enough, Ecclesiastes' Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness.

00:03:03.680 Ecclesiastes is a book in the Bible that gets quoted a lot by religious and non-religious people alike.

00:03:09.900 I'm sure people have heard that bird's hit song, Turn, Turn, Turn, which riffs off Ecclesiastes.

00:03:16.120 What led you to take a deep dive into this book in the Hebrew Bible?

00:03:20.480 Yeah, so I am a pastor, and I preached through it at a church I used to pastor in Washington, D.C.,

00:03:26.700 and it really resonated with me.

00:03:28.300 It really resonated with our congregation.

00:03:30.380 When I got to the end of the preaching series, I just didn't want to be done with the book.

00:03:34.740 It was like the book had grabbed a hold of me and wouldn't let me go.

00:03:38.160 It's a weirdly personal, confrontational, challenging kind of book.

00:03:43.820 It's pretty dark, as we're going to see together in some of the themes we probably talk about, but I just didn't want to be done.

00:03:50.640 And for me, it really seemed to resonate with a lot of hopes, dreams, trajectories we chart for our lives that then wind up not working out.

00:04:00.580 And it's like Ecclesiastes saw it first, got there first.

00:04:03.320 And if you've had any experience of kind of frustrated expectations, dreams that didn't plan out, or even, frankly, that you actually got what you were looking for,

00:04:12.180 and then you were like, man, is this really what I wanted, or what's next, or is this all there is?

00:04:17.580 Kind of Ecclesiastes has been to all those places ahead of you.

00:04:21.400 Well, so let's do some background on Ecclesiastes.

00:04:23.740 Ecclesiastes is part of the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature, which includes Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job.

00:04:30.500 If anyone has ever read the Hebrew Bible, they may have noticed that these books, in particular, these three books,

00:04:36.660 they seem really different from the other books in the Bible, like the books of Moses or the books of the prophets.

00:04:42.620 What makes the wisdom literature different from the rest of the Hebrew Bible?

00:04:46.760 Yeah, one thing is it's in many ways more experiential.

00:04:50.580 It invites you to kind of wrestle with it personally.

00:04:53.300 You have to put work into making sense of it for yourself because it is kind of speaking about all of life from different perspectives.

00:05:01.460 You know, one way to summarize the relationship between Job and Ecclesiastes,

00:05:05.600 Job is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by losing it all.

00:05:10.720 The author of Ecclesiastes is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by getting it all and having it all.

00:05:15.840 And so wisdom literature kind of invites you to really reflect on your life as a whole, and you've got to kind of earn it.

00:05:22.840 You've got to work for it.

00:05:23.740 You know, Proverbs, the book of Proverbs puts contradictory statements side by side,

00:05:27.620 and you've got to figure out how to reconcile them.

00:05:30.820 And Ecclesiastes actually does something similar.

00:05:33.580 So, yeah, it's not – these books in the Bible are probably especially maybe familiar to or appealing to,

00:05:39.980 even a lot of people who don't necessarily, you know, believe in God or believe that the Bible is holy scripture

00:05:45.500 because they speak so directly to experience, to things like work, money, sex, power, pleasure, all that kind of stuff.

00:05:53.120 It also seems just more philosophical than the rest of the books in the Bible, existential like you were saying.

00:05:59.360 Yeah, that's true of wisdom literature in general, and I would say it's even especially true of Ecclesiastes in particular.

00:06:04.800 A lot of people would say Ecclesiastes is kind of the only maybe pure work of philosophy in the Bible in the sense that it's observational.

00:06:13.020 It's even in a way empirical.

00:06:14.560 The author is kind of testing out these different things by experience.

00:06:18.580 And so there's really sustained reflection on a lot of life's biggest questions.

00:06:23.960 Is there meaning?

00:06:24.940 How can you find satisfaction?

00:06:27.160 What's worth doing?

00:06:28.680 What is good?

00:06:29.560 There is a deep, relentless quest for answers in a lot of these realms that frankly resonates with different traditions of philosophy and even philosophy as it's practiced today.

00:06:39.700 And because it hits on all these big issues, work, money, love, success, failure.

00:06:46.700 When you read Ecclesiastes in the 21st century as a modern Westerner, like you're reading like, wow, I relate to this.

00:06:53.260 Like it feels really modern.

00:06:55.420 It does feel really modern.

00:06:56.720 That was certainly part of my experience, you know, pastoring a lot of like young professionals in D.C., kind of preaching through the book or even just how it spoke to my own challenges and struggles.

00:07:06.540 But even thinking about a bit more kind of connecting it to maybe some of the challenges and structures in the modern world, thinking about money, thinking about the economy, thinking about issues of justice.

00:07:16.060 Ecclesiastes has something to say about all of those.

00:07:18.540 And I think part of the way it does that is that the author is speaking from the experience of living a whole bunch of different lives in one lifetime.

00:07:27.680 It's almost a little bit like Winston Churchill or something where you read a biography of Churchill and you go, how did he live so many different lives before he got to like the age of 30?

00:07:36.320 You know, you could do a biography of Churchill that would fill massive volumes from like any two years of his life.

00:07:41.120 The author of Ecclesiastes is a little bit like that.

00:07:43.580 There's this full exploration of the potential, the possibilities of work, money, pleasure, power.

00:07:49.840 And so I think in the modern world is in some ways defined by a lot of options.

00:07:53.500 There's a lot of freedom.

00:07:54.560 There's a lot of options.

00:07:55.360 There's a lot of different paths you can follow.

00:07:57.180 And I think one of the main reasons Ecclesiastes resonates so much is basically he's like, look, I chased this path all the way to the end.

00:08:04.880 Let me tell you where it got me.

00:08:06.080 So who wrote Ecclesiastes?

00:08:08.020 Do we know that?

00:08:09.420 Well, I don't think we have a kind of confident or certain knowledge.

00:08:13.940 Historically, lots of Christian and Jewish interpreters have held it to be written by King Solomon, David's son, and to be about his own experiences.

00:08:21.880 I think that's possible.

00:08:23.460 I'm not convinced that's wrong, but I'm also not convinced it's right.

00:08:27.140 The book is technically anonymous.

00:08:29.080 The author just introduces himself as the teacher or the preacher.

00:08:32.660 The Hebrew word for that is Kohelet.

00:08:34.080 It's a title, like a job title.

00:08:37.060 And he just introduces himself as the preacher, the teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem.

00:08:40.740 So he could have been any number of other kings of Israel.

00:08:43.780 He's a little bit hard to place.

00:08:45.420 So I think there's a little bit of a deliberate mystery, a deliberate, you could even say ambiguity, where it partially lines up with Solomon.

00:08:52.880 There's ways you can map it onto Solomon.

00:08:54.580 But I think in some ways the author is making his experience even more accessible by that degree of anonymity.

00:09:01.660 What's the overall structure of the book?

00:09:03.220 Yeah, well, Ecclesiastes, you know, some books of the Bible have a pretty clear or transparent literary structure.

00:09:10.760 Ecclesiastes is a little bit harder to discern.

00:09:14.120 Roughly speaking, the first half is more his quest for the good life, his quest for the meaning of life, and some periodic reflections and kind of lookbacks on how it's all gone.

00:09:25.100 That's about the first six chapters.

00:09:26.360 Then once you get to chapter seven, especially the end of chapter seven, it's a little bit more collections of wisdom sayings, kind of like the book of Proverbs, grouped around different topics, and then kind of a poem about death at the very end to cap things off.

00:09:39.380 So there's kind of a loose literary structure.

00:09:41.180 As I understand the book, though, there's a little bit of a clearer conceptual structure where a whole lot of the book is his observation, his experience, his just saying what he's lived, what he's seen.

00:09:52.080 And frankly, you can agree with that just by experiencing the same things or kind of reflecting yourself.

00:09:56.600 But then there's these seven passages in the book where it's almost like his perspective takes a big step up, as if he's moving from kind of ground floor observation to then going up to a second story where you can see farther.

00:10:09.420 And he talks about life as being a gift.

00:10:12.180 He counsels enjoyment.

00:10:13.600 He counsels rejoicing in your work, rejoicing in your marriage, even the toil of your work, taking pleasure in it.

00:10:19.380 And so there's kind of a tone shift from saying everything is vanity or fleeting or absurd.

00:10:24.360 That's kind of his dominant message in the first half of the book.

00:10:27.580 But there's these seven times when he ascends to this higher perspective and calls everything a gift and tells you to get busy enjoying all the stuff that he's just told you is meaningless, fleeting, absurd.

00:10:38.880 I mean, there's even some perspectives that poke through from an ultimate point of view of, you know, he believes that there's a God who created all things.

00:10:45.660 He believes that there's a God who's in charge of all things, even though it doesn't really look like it a lot of the time.

00:10:50.200 And that God will ultimately hold all people to account and even bring about a whole new world in the end.

00:10:55.640 And so that's a perspective that only comes through in a few places.

00:10:58.520 So I would say there's this kind of three-story building or view from a three-story building type of conceptual structure to Ecclesiastes, where he doesn't always give you signposts.

00:11:09.020 He doesn't always tell you any switching point of view.

00:11:10.980 But there's these different voices that emerge from the author throughout the book that I think show us that all of life is absurd on the ground floor, show us that all of life is a gift on the second floor, and show us that all of life has a kind of transcendent or even eternal significance that shines through in just a couple places.

00:11:27.840 Yeah, those first two floors where everything's absurd and then everything's a gift, that's kind of like the imminent frame.

00:11:33.140 It's like, well, this is the life now.

00:11:34.660 And then that third floor is like, that's the transcendent frame.

00:11:37.500 Yeah, that's right.

00:11:39.200 And there's a sense in which on the second floor to say that life is a gift, you know, does kind of puncture the imminent frame.

00:11:45.540 But on the one hand, it also relates then to just how we live day by day, moment by moment, the kind of stuff he's still focused on, enjoying pleasure, enjoying possessions, enjoying even wealth.

00:11:56.400 He says at one point, drink your wine with a merry heart.

00:11:58.820 God has already approved what you do.

00:12:00.400 So there's a sense in which it's a little bit more transcendent perspective to say life is a gift from God.

00:12:04.900 But on the other hand, it very much relates to all the stuff of daily life that we experience moment by moment, day by day.

00:12:12.500 All right, let's dig into what the preacher has to say to us or Kohelet.

00:12:16.580 Is that how you say his name?

00:12:17.780 Yeah, Kohelet.

00:12:18.620 Kohelet.

00:12:19.480 The book famously starts off with vanity of vanities, says the preacher.

00:12:24.620 Vanity of vanities.

00:12:25.660 All is vanity.

00:12:27.020 The Hebrew word that got translated into vanity is hevel.

00:12:32.220 What did the Hebrews mean by hevel?

00:12:33.840 Yeah, well, it's one of these words that has kind of a basic or literal meaning, which is breath.

00:12:39.840 Breath, wind, vapor.

00:12:41.640 So what are some of the characteristics of breath?

00:12:43.740 You know, it's here one second, gone the next.

00:12:46.080 You got to take another breath.

00:12:47.280 If you breathe out on a cold day, you can see a little cloud puff before your face, but then it's gone.

00:12:52.000 So then, as is often the case with a key word like this, there's all these metaphorical associations that grow up from that.

00:12:57.960 Okay, so hevel as breath, well, it's also fleeting.

00:13:01.520 It's here and then it disappears.

00:13:03.200 It doesn't last.

00:13:03.960 It doesn't stay.

00:13:04.680 But Kohelet uses this word as kind of his summary statement for everything.

00:13:09.780 So it becomes kind of a term of art.

00:13:11.480 It's like a one-word summary of his whole observation of all of life.

00:13:15.560 And some of the situations he applies it to are things where it's not just something like fleeting that's here one minute, gone the next, but actually something deeply dissatisfying.

00:13:25.900 Something that doesn't meet your expectations, even something that's deeply wrong, like a case of injustice.

00:13:31.840 You know, if you know somebody's innocent and they get declared guilty, it's hard to think of something that's kind of more wrong in the world than that.

00:13:40.100 And actually, Kohelet will use the word hevel to talk about a situation like that.

00:13:44.180 Why?

00:13:44.780 Because it doesn't fit.

00:13:46.200 It doesn't match.

00:13:47.780 I would actually say a good kind of modern translation of it is absurd.

00:13:51.080 Even inspired by kind of mid-century existentialist philosophy like Albert Camus, the way he uses the word, I think that's actually a pretty good fit for what Kohelet's talking about when he says hevel.

00:14:00.800 Because there's things that don't meet our desires.

00:14:03.380 There's things that don't meet our expectations.

00:14:05.280 There's a kind of condition of wrongness or of a misfit between what we want and even what we expect and even what we have a right to demand and then what the world actually pays back.

00:14:16.680 Yeah, I like how you used absurd because I think that's a better word to describe hevel. 0.96

00:14:21.080 That idea that we're in this world and things don't go according to how we think they should go.

00:14:27.360 And it's just like, this is absurd.

00:14:28.480 Like, this is absolutely absurd that this is happening to me.

00:14:31.220 And you often have that experience, right?

00:14:32.960 It might be slightly comical.

00:14:34.640 I mean, we have a minivan for lugging our kids around and it had to be in the shop for like three weeks.

00:14:40.780 It's a long story.

00:14:41.820 They were trying to fix a door handle.

00:14:43.920 They wound up having to put a whole new door in because there's not the spare parts to actually just replace the handle on its own.

00:14:49.080 And, you know, the thing barely works better than it did before.

00:14:52.560 After like three weeks in the shop, we had to have a rental car and all this stuff.

00:14:55.800 I mean, it feels absurd, right?

00:14:58.380 And that's a pretty minor instance.

00:15:00.280 That's a pretty everyday, not that big of a deal, even though now the door is a different color and it looks funny and all this stuff.

00:15:05.920 But then at a much more serious level, too, I think to describe even some more of those shocks of life or things that we suffer, there is an absurdity.

00:15:14.400 It doesn't make sense.

00:15:15.400 Why did this happen?

00:15:16.620 There's not really an answer.

00:15:18.380 You know, there's no obvious answer.

00:15:19.940 It's not written into your life.

00:15:21.000 It doesn't show up in the mail and say, here's why this happened.

00:15:22.940 So I think that idea of absurdity actually names kind of an experience, particularly of things we suffer, that's hard to get at otherwise.

00:15:31.000 Yeah, and it's not even just unexpectedly negative things that can feel absurd.

00:15:34.880 Like, you know, your life's going great and then you get a shock medical diagnosis that turns your life upside down.

00:15:39.440 But as you said, getting what you want and then feeling depressed and not satisfied, that can also feel absurd.

00:15:46.120 You feel just like, why not?

00:15:47.460 Why don't I feel good?

00:15:48.280 I got the thing.

00:15:49.160 I summoned the mountain.

00:15:50.860 Why don't I feel like I think I should feel?

00:15:53.020 Yeah, absolutely.

00:15:54.000 And that's maybe like the single most relevant insight in the whole book.

00:15:59.200 And it comes from really the biggest kind of extended narrative early in the book.

00:16:03.380 Kohelet kind of announces his quest for wisdom.

00:16:05.200 And then he talks about this huge project he went on of testing out every conceivable source of enjoyment under the sun.

00:16:12.160 And he gets to the end and he says in chapter 2, verse 11,

00:16:14.900 Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it.

00:16:19.280 And behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.

00:16:23.680 In some ways, that feels like the ultimate absurdity.

00:16:25.600 When you've worked hard, you've gotten to the end of it, you've attained that summit, and it just doesn't satisfy.

00:16:30.600 It leaves you going, well, why?

00:16:32.320 Why doesn't this satisfy?

00:16:34.360 And oftentimes, we don't really experience a clear answer to that.

00:16:37.540 Yeah, everything is never enough.

00:16:39.240 That's the key lesson of the whole book.

00:16:41.060 You know, some people experience that after winning a Super Bowl, right?

00:16:44.140 Or a major, you know, golf tournament.

00:16:46.500 Or I mean, you hear this again and again, people at the absolute pinnacle.

00:16:49.560 They're literally the world's best person at this.

00:16:52.540 Their team, their accomplishments, whatever it is.

00:16:55.320 And you often even hear this like in an interview right after the fact, right?

00:16:58.200 Like, okay, well, what now?

00:17:00.040 So yeah, you also bring the thinking of sociologist Harmot Rosa into your exploration of Ecclesiastes.

00:17:07.660 For those who aren't familiar with his work, what's his big idea?

00:17:11.380 Yeah, he's got a few really insightful big ideas.

00:17:14.940 One that's really relevant for my book is that modernity is a project of control.

00:17:21.820 And so he's got this great, slim little book, The Uncontrollability of the World, that's very accessible and really insightful.

00:17:27.820 And he talks about how essentially the modern world is defined by a kind of relentless ambition to control more and more, to control all that we can.

00:17:35.880 You know, I'm in a room right now that has been set to 67 degrees.

00:17:39.420 And if it dips below 67 degrees, the heater will kick back on and keep me at exactly the controlled temperature I want.

00:17:46.600 You know, you can think about increasing control over our bodies, over medical conditions, technology, you know, transportation, communication, being able to fly places, artificial light.

00:17:57.180 So you can be, you know, working and awake whenever you want.

00:17:59.920 All those kind of things have kind of created a world in which we live, the world that we experience.

00:18:06.400 We have a lot higher expectation of being able to control things than probably any society that's ever lived, any people that's ever lived, whether it's more hunter-gatherer or agrarian or even more of a hardscrabble.

00:18:18.180 You've got this job and you work in an older city and you're at the mercy of all these different forces.

00:18:22.640 We expect to be able to control a whole lot of stuff.

00:18:25.040 And we're surprised when we can't.

00:18:26.740 We're kind of shocked when we can't.

00:18:29.060 And yeah, Rosa does a really good job kind of opening up the disconnect that we experience when control runs out. 0.68

00:18:35.320 He also has this fascinating insight that I think is really brilliant where actually a lot of the most meaningful experiences in our lives are things you can't control.

00:18:45.560 Think about falling in love, you know, getting this woman that you're incredibly into to actually go out on a date with you.

00:18:50.880 And how does it go or you're at the championship game and your team wins by a kind of last minute, you know, three pointer or you're at the concert that's your favorite band and they play, you know, your favorite song from your favorite album and it's just as good as you thought it would be.

00:19:03.780 All those type of peak experiences are things you can't control.

00:19:07.760 You can't control the date.

00:19:09.460 You can't control the game.

00:19:10.920 You can't control the concert.

00:19:12.760 And in a way, the more you try to control it, the more the meaning drains out of it, the color drains out of it.

00:19:17.920 And so Rosa also identifies this paradox where the more we try to control, the less we actually kind of enjoy our lives.

00:19:24.440 And his thick concept he's developed for that kind of enjoyment is what he calls resonance.

00:19:30.420 And resonance is basically any experience in which kind of the invisible wire that connects you to the world is humming.

00:19:38.900 It could be a really engaging conversation.

00:19:40.640 It could be being deeply engaged in a craft, kind of a flow state of being challenged by the materials you're working with and applying skill to it and kind of experiencing, you know, those challenges giving way as you figure out how to how to get this joint to fit into this part or how you get the right tool to work on this part of wood or whatever it might be.

00:19:59.400 Rosa talks about resonance as basically anything in which you kind of light up with a connection to the world.

00:20:05.740 And resonance is only an in the moment reality.

00:20:08.560 It's not something you can kind of file away and stockpile.

00:20:11.660 It's not something you could just pull out of the fridge.

00:20:13.840 You know, you might have a great time making this meal or eating those leftovers, but resonance itself is not something you can just do at your beck and call.

00:20:22.620 It depends upon your own kind of internal condition.

00:20:25.500 It depends upon the conditions of the world out there.

00:20:27.300 And so the tension between control and resonance, I think, I think Rosa is really insightful in showing there's like an inverse relationship.

00:20:35.060 The more you control, the less resonance there is, but we keep trying to control more.

00:20:38.560 One last really helpful kind of paradigm from Rosa is what he calls social acceleration, which is basically if you zoom out and you think about life as a whole, society as a whole, think about the ways we make our living.

00:20:51.180 Think about the kind of circumstances of the tools or technology we use on a daily basis.

00:20:56.120 Think about even kind of basics of like morality or expected kind of patterns of life.

00:21:00.820 He kind of identifies three phases.

00:21:03.400 In traditional societies, those things are pretty stable.

00:21:06.580 They change a little bit over time, but it's pretty much like things have kind of gone on the way they always have.

00:21:11.880 Once you get into the modern world, particularly in Europe and kind of the early modern era, you might have generational change.

00:21:18.100 You might have change that takes place over 30, 40, 50 years, and your kids or grandkids live in a pretty significantly different world than you lived in.

00:21:25.740 But Rosa's point about our present moment, kind of late modernity, is what he calls social acceleration, which is basically all those fundamental conditions, how you make a living, how technology influences your life, even kind of what's agreed upon, you know, morality or ways of being in the world.

00:21:41.400 Those things change quicker and quicker, even within the span of a single lifetime, which means all sorts of stuff that you took for granted or a job you were trained in or a tool you used to use becomes obsolete quicker and quicker.

00:21:53.540 And so there's this sense of the world kind of disappearing from underneath your feet as you're trying to live it, which I think is a pretty compelling description of a lot of the challenges that we experience in different ways just in the modern world.

00:22:06.120 I don't know, defined roughly by the last, you know, couple of generations.

00:22:08.880 So I want to take that idea of resonance, we'll table that, I'm going to come back to that, because I think the preacher kind of agrees with Rosa there, that the antidote for all this heavile, this absurdness, can be resonance or something like resonance.

00:22:21.980 But these ideas of we feel like in the modern world, like we want to control everything, and it causes frustration and this idea of social acceleration.

00:22:30.620 I think this really goes to what the preacher has to say about why life is absurd.

00:22:35.460 And it sounds like, too, that modernity, this idea of social acceleration, and we can control things, it sounds like it just makes that sense of absurdity of life more acute.

00:22:46.820 I think so.

00:22:47.800 I mean, that's one of the things that really kind of settled in more deeply for me as I was doing the research of this book, is that I think what Ecclesiastes is describing simply is the human condition.

00:22:57.740 You could live at any time, you could live in any place in the world, and this book would really resonate with you.

00:23:04.040 At the same time, because Ecclesiastes is so much about ambition and aspiration, it's so much about the things that kind of become magnets for our hearts that draw out, like huge amounts of effort, huge amounts of planning and strategy and the kind of things we sort of build our lives around.

00:23:20.400 I do think Ecclesiastes, while it's describing the human condition, those kind of things that Rose is identifying as hallmarks of modernity are actually intensifications.

00:23:31.040 They're kind of deepenings or they're making even more vivid a lot of the exact things that Ecclesiastes identifies.

00:23:37.240 So I do think that's another way of getting at why Ecclesiastes feels like such a modern book, partly because Ecclesiastes is not just analyzing individual experience, but there's a whole lot of insightful commentary and judgments about how the world as a whole works.

00:23:53.520 So even though he's in an agrarian, early urban, who knows, kind of society in ancient Israel, I think he's diagnosing problems that would sort of flower and blossom in the modern world.

00:24:04.140 Yeah. I mean, this idea of controlling how intense it is in the modern world, like just look at our health.

00:24:10.540 We have all this technology, these tools to look at what's going on inside of our body.

00:24:15.040 We can measure our blood. We have all these supplements we can take. We can measure our heart rate variability.

00:24:20.500 And then we end up getting some sort of debilitating disease. You're like, how could this happen?

00:24:25.400 Like I'm doing all the things. I'm tracking everything. What's going on?

00:24:28.620 So I think the frustration is just more intense compared to, you know, you go back to, you know, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago.

00:24:35.120 You know, if you got a cold, like there's a chance you might die. That's not great. And it's sort of heavile. It's absurd, but it was sort of a given.

00:24:41.880 Like that's a possibility. Now, these days, when something happens, like that should not happen because we've got the technology to prevent it from happening.

00:24:47.480 So you just feel even more frustrated.

00:24:49.860 Yeah, that's a great way to put it. You know, it's our modern world with the greater degree of control, greater degree of kind of technological sovereignty over our basic like bodily conditions.

00:25:00.360 It makes it even harder for us to be reconciled to the realities of accident, injury, illness, ultimately death.

00:25:08.580 Like if you're in any kind of pre-modern society, you are just so much more surrounded by death.

00:25:12.720 It's so much more of a kind of a fact of life. It's a part of the daily fabric of life. That's sad. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it also kind of reconciles you to that reality.

00:25:21.860 Whereas we can sort of put death behind this kind of sealed off door. You know, people mostly tend to die in hospitals.

00:25:29.400 We tend to keep it out of you or you're not around. If a loved one is dying, typically they're not in their own bedroom, in your own home.

00:25:36.920 You're not the one sitting by them.

00:25:38.480 And so, yeah, I think it also makes it easier to persist in the illusion that somehow we'll be around forever.

00:25:44.700 Or even if we don't consciously think that, you can just sort of more effectively keep death at bay as a thought, the kind of illusion of your own deathlessness, because it's just not part of your daily experience.

00:25:57.120 And Ecclesiastes has a lot to say about death.

00:25:59.700 Yeah, we'll talk about that.

00:26:01.020 And then this idea of social acceleration, I think everyone's experienced that feeling of they feel like they have to work harder and harder, run faster and faster, but they're just kind of staying in place.

00:26:11.780 And you're like, what's going on?

00:26:13.100 Like, I'm doing all this work and I'm not making any progress.

00:26:16.660 This is absurd.

00:26:17.560 This is absolutely absurd.

00:26:18.740 And I have that experience of social acceleration with my own kids.

00:26:22.400 You know, I have a son who's 15 and he's trying to figure out what he's going to do with his future.

00:26:26.180 And he's like, Dad, what should I do for work?

00:26:29.600 AI is going to take all of our jobs, maybe. 0.79

00:26:31.280 And I'm like, man, I don't know.

00:26:32.920 Did you have any?

00:26:34.320 And honestly, that's the example that was coming to mind, because I've got so many friends who work in tech sectors and it just looks like AI is coming to gobble up their jobs.

00:26:41.020 I'm just curious, did you have any advice for your son in the moment?

00:26:44.260 No, I'm like, I don't know, man.

00:26:46.860 Because when I was trying to figure out my career trajectory, I was able to look at my parents, because they did the same thing.

00:26:53.440 You're like, well, you go to college and then you apply for a job, then you kind of work your way up your career.

00:26:57.840 And you're kind of in the same career for most of your life.

00:26:59.880 My dad was a game warden his entire career for 35 plus years.

00:27:04.100 Me, it's been a little bit different because the economy's changed.

00:27:06.860 I've had to adapt with my career.

00:27:09.580 With my kids, I'm like, I don't know what advice to give you, because what worked for me and my parents might not work for you.

00:27:17.100 And it's tough.

00:27:18.140 That's an example of social acceleration.

00:27:20.140 You're like, this is absurd.

00:27:21.120 It should work.

00:27:21.660 It worked before.

00:27:22.500 It should work now.

00:27:23.180 Why doesn't it work?

00:27:25.140 I agree.

00:27:25.820 I think that's a good example.

00:27:27.080 And even though this wasn't even really on the radar, I mean, I kind of finished writing the book in 2023.

00:27:30.900 It came out in 2025.

00:27:33.400 I do think AI is the 800-pound gorilla of social acceleration right now of just, yeah, there could be a career you sort of trained for years in and have put in 10 years of working.

00:27:44.680 And, you know, an AI computer coding thing can come over and do in 10 minutes what it used to take you a month to do.

00:27:50.540 And, yeah, I think we're in the early stages of seeing, you know, some pretty profound disruptions due to that.

00:27:56.920 And I'm not sure there's a lot of people out there with great answers.

00:27:59.540 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

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00:30:23.520 And now back to the show.

00:30:25.740 Okay, so Ecclesiastes really speaks to this modern phenomenon of social acceleration where you're trying to do more and more, but we don't feel any more satisfied.

00:30:36.340 So let's actually dig into what Ecclesiastes has to say about our relationship to time and feelings of progress and permanence.

00:30:45.360 Let's read some verses from the book.

00:30:47.180 Some of the most famous verses are in chapter 1, verses 4 through 9.

00:30:52.280 Could you read that and then let's talk about it.

00:30:54.380 Sure.

00:30:55.140 A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

00:31:00.220 The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises.

00:31:04.660 The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north.

00:31:08.540 Around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.

00:31:12.820 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full.

00:31:16.480 To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.

00:31:20.200 All things are full of weariness.

00:31:21.720 A man cannot utter it. 0.99

00:31:23.320 The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

00:31:27.520 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there's nothing new under the sun.

00:31:32.840 How do you think these verses flesh out what the preacher means by Hevel?

00:31:37.220 Yeah, I mean, I think one of the key points is that we try to live our lives as if there can just be this linear series of quests.

00:31:46.120 I want this.

00:31:46.960 I plan for it.

00:31:47.900 I strive for it.

00:31:48.960 I attain it.

00:31:49.880 And it will make me happy.

00:31:51.120 But this is kind of a poem of reflecting on nature's cycles.

00:31:55.760 A generation goes and a generation comes.

00:31:57.920 Everybody who's alive today is going to die.

00:32:00.340 They're going to be replaced by their kind of successors in the next generation.

00:32:04.500 You know, the wind blows around from the south, but then when the weather system blows itself out and things return to normal, it's going to come back around from the other direction.

00:32:10.920 So it's all these images of repeating, of returning, of something that you had kind of on one setting, but then it gets flipped to the other setting.

00:32:20.400 And so what happens is that there's finally no gain.

00:32:24.220 It's not like the whole system moves forward.

00:32:26.500 The whole system just kind of returns to its original setting.

00:32:29.380 And Ecclesiastes is observing these different patterns in nature to basically preach to humanity the message that's going to happen to you.

00:32:38.660 Your plans, your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, they're all going to get reset.

00:32:42.860 You know, whatever mark you make on the earth, those footprints are going to get filled in.

00:32:46.980 Time's going to wear them down.

00:32:48.380 Sand is going to blow over them.

00:32:50.140 Water's going to wash them away.

00:32:52.060 And so we like to think there's this linear progression toward a goal, toward satisfaction, but there isn't.

00:32:57.980 What's happened is what's going to happen again, and it's going to wipe out your goals, your gains, your satisfaction.

00:33:04.200 And in some ways, the key to understanding, like, why are we wired like this?

00:33:08.600 And again, the idea of the absurd, there's a misfit.

00:33:11.340 Why is there a misfit between our hearts and the world?

00:33:14.540 It's there in verse 8.

00:33:16.060 The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

00:33:19.920 We always want more.

00:33:21.540 We always want something more.

00:33:22.880 We always want something better.

00:33:24.040 Our senses are hungry for stimulation, for fulfillment, for something good to come to them.

00:33:31.380 And I think Ecclesiastes would say that's kind of a window into our deeper condition, that there's something we're hungry for.

00:33:36.900 There's something we're striving for.

00:33:38.560 But the point is, there's this misfit.

00:33:41.220 The world's not built like that, but our hearts are.

00:33:43.840 Yeah, Kierkegaard, he said we're a combination of the finite and the infinite, and that the way those elements contrast can jar with each other, and that gives us a feeling of anxiety.

00:33:55.260 And then I also think we feel that contrast between the cyclical nature of the world and the fact that we're very oriented to clock time.

00:34:03.340 I mean, we live by the clock.

00:34:04.940 Like, okay, I got to be here at this time.

00:34:07.200 This thing's got to start at this time.

00:34:08.660 And if it doesn't start at this time, then things have gone wrong.

00:34:11.060 Yeah, you know, and clock time obviously enables all kinds of stuff to happen.

00:34:16.680 Like, time only got standardized in terms of, like, everybody being on the same hour, minute, et cetera, ready, set, go.

00:34:22.800 I think as a kind of international congress meant to facilitate train travel, because it has to be this incredible precision.

00:34:30.340 And everybody's got to be synced up if you're going to have trains moving at, you know, dozens of miles an hour down a track to get to a certain city at a certain time, et cetera.

00:34:36.740 So there are things that it enables, this kind of regime of the clock.

00:34:41.700 But it also creates a constant pressure.

00:34:44.140 It creates a kind of constant sort of, like, external accountability.

00:34:48.600 And it can tempt us.

00:34:49.780 Rose is really insightful on this.

00:34:51.660 It can tempt us to think that we actually have more control over our time.

00:34:54.820 Like, time is a resource that you can sort of save, spend, invest, reclaim, recoup, not waste.

00:35:03.740 Like, time is this kind of commodity that we can do all these different things with.

00:35:07.320 And in some ways, that's kind of metaphorically valid, right?

00:35:09.560 But it also tempts you to think, oh, I'm in charge of my time.

00:35:12.760 Time is my thing.

00:35:13.960 I get to spend my way.

00:35:15.920 Whereas, actually, we're much more kind of subject to time's cycles.

00:35:20.060 We're much more sort of stuck in time.

00:35:22.840 You know, it only goes in one direction, right?

00:35:25.360 Like, if you really want to be in charge of time, try to make it run backwards.

00:35:28.880 You know, try to get a do-over for that mistake you just made.

00:35:32.300 Or try to hit pause.

00:35:33.780 Like, when your kid is just having some incredibly sweet, fun, cute thing you just want to savor,

00:35:39.080 well, it's going to end.

00:35:39.860 You wish you could pause it, but you can't.

00:35:41.540 So I think clock time tempts you.

00:35:43.740 Again, it's that you have control.

00:35:45.380 To think you have more control over time than you actually do.

00:35:47.820 Yeah, you quote this Jerry Seinfeld bit where he talks about saving time.

00:35:52.600 It's like, oh, I'm saving time.

00:35:53.540 It's like, where does that time go that I saved?

00:35:55.280 Does it go to the end?

00:35:56.600 He's like, no, you're dead.

00:35:58.360 You don't need to build up that save time. 0.86

00:36:00.380 Like, you're going to die.

00:36:01.480 It's a very Ecclesiastes message there.

00:36:04.700 Totally.

00:36:05.260 And Seinfeld, as the kind of prototype observational comic, he resonates so much with Ecclesiastes.

00:36:10.440 I think Kohelet is kind of like a stand-up comic in the way that he kind of squints at the world,

00:36:15.620 looks at it from a certain angle.

00:36:16.800 You know, draws kind of a caricature that then makes you go, oh, wow.

00:36:20.800 Like, that actually is my life.

00:36:23.500 So work and making money make up a lot of human life.

00:36:27.020 And you talked about that.

00:36:28.220 The preacher talks a lot about work and money.

00:36:31.080 What did he say about work?

00:36:32.820 And why did he think it was hevel or absurd?

00:36:35.520 Yeah, you know, one of the most revealing statements he makes is in chapter 4, verses 7 and 8.

00:36:42.160 Again, I saw vanity under the sun.

00:36:44.380 One person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil.

00:36:50.660 And his eyes are never satisfied with riches.

00:36:52.940 So that he never asks, for whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?

00:36:58.480 This also is vanity and an unhappy business.

00:37:01.440 He's basically diagnosing the workaholic, you know, 2,500 years or 3,000 years before somebody coined that term as a psychologist to describe a typical modern struggle.

00:37:12.280 So yeah, he says that's motivated by envy.

00:37:15.120 You want to have more than the person next to you.

00:37:16.960 But I think it's also, our hearts are kind of these bottomless desire factories that work is a way, not just to sort of earn your basic necessities, but if you can get more money, and if more work can get you more money, and if there's always more stuff that your money can get you, then you never really have an incentive to quit working.

00:37:36.640 And I think in some ways, even more subtle than money can be the promise of status.

00:37:40.800 You know, we don't often talk about status or admit it, but status is basically the legitimacy that some institution or group or person confers on you as being worthwhile, having standing.

00:37:52.340 And in our society, the only universal currency of status is work.

00:37:57.300 What you do in your work is the most definitive aspect of kind of where you stand before other people.

00:38:02.460 And so Ecclesiastes diagnoses envy as the big motive that would keep you kind of running on that hamster wheel, that treadmill of always working.

00:38:11.320 And I think envy in some ways, not just of money or of possessions, but frankly, even more so of status, is a huge motivator.

00:38:18.420 And then this idea of money, like the preacher, he makes a lot of money, and he's like, it's absurd.

00:38:23.000 Like, I didn't feel good after making all that money.

00:38:25.200 He even talked about all this money I made, it's going to go to someone after I'm dead, and they're going to waste it away.

00:38:32.080 They're going to spend it, and it's just all going to go away because I'm going to have this spendthrift son or grandson.

00:38:36.560 And it's just, it was all absurd.

00:38:37.620 All that work I did was for nothing.

00:38:39.000 Yeah, you know, there's all kinds of reasons Ecclesiastes finds money dissatisfying.

00:38:44.280 Like you said, one is you've got to give it all away, and who knows what they're going to do with it.

00:38:47.840 Another is, you know, just you can't take it with you personally.

00:38:51.060 You leave this life naked as you came into it.

00:38:53.660 Another kind of famous line from Ecclesiastes that gets reused all the time.

00:38:57.240 Another reason is that the more money you have, it frankly brings more problems.

00:39:02.500 There's people who want to mooch off you.

00:39:04.140 There's cares that keep you up at night.

00:39:05.840 There's more things you've got to pay for now that you have this money and this property.

00:39:10.340 And of course, the kind of most basic one, the deepest problem, is that you can always want more money.

00:39:16.980 The problem is ultimately your love of money, that if you start being motivated by money, it becomes your ultimate good.

00:39:24.140 And so Ecclesiastes, in a couple of places, warns about, yeah, being sort of driven or controlled by the love of money.

00:39:31.100 And so I think that's hugely relevant.

00:39:32.900 I mean, in our society, more than ever, money can get you virtually anything.

00:39:36.660 And you can sort of monetize anything.

00:39:40.120 I mean, I think it's great, you know, Brett, that you have this podcast and all this stuff associated with Art of Manliness, where you get to build a living doing this stuff that's helpful for other people.

00:39:48.800 But there's also kind of a flip side to the sort of, you know, ethic of entrepreneurship.

00:39:53.440 You can always have a side hustle.

00:39:55.580 You can always turn this into a gig.

00:39:57.500 You can always be at the back of your mind thinking, like, is it okay for me to just be enjoying or having a good time or relaxing when, oh, maybe there's a way to monetize this.

00:40:07.560 You know what I mean?

00:40:08.260 So there's, in our society more than ever, there's infinitely more ways you could be kind of enslaving yourself more to money.

00:40:16.640 Yeah, that's something I, throughout my career, have had to be aware of and sort of do calculus in my head.

00:40:23.560 It's like, am I taking this too far?

00:40:25.380 Because we monetize, we have advertisements, we've sold some things, but there's other ways I could monetize that I'm not.

00:40:31.160 Like, I could become this walking sandwich board on Instagram, pitching products all the time, using myself as a brand to hawk products.

00:40:41.380 And I'm like, no, that doesn't feel good.

00:40:44.140 I'm not going to do that.

00:40:45.760 Yeah, that's over the line.

00:40:47.140 Yeah.

00:40:47.680 Okay, so the preacher, he says, okay, money, work, it's not going to make you happy.

00:40:52.520 So I'm going to, he says, well, instead of doing that, I'm going to pursue wisdom.

00:40:55.880 So he tries to get really wise.

00:40:57.740 How did that work out for the preacher?

00:41:00.660 Yeah, his ultimate problem with wisdom, well, there's a couple of them.

00:41:04.960 One is that basically, you see this in chapter two, verse 16, of the wise, as of the fool, there's no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come, all will have been long forgotten. 0.98

00:41:17.000 And then he says, how the wise dies, just like the fool.

00:41:22.260 And so if you're looking for wisdom to give you control, if you're looking for knowledge as a source of kind of mastery over life, sovereignty over the world, if I can get the right answers, if I can get the right philosophy, if I can get the right outlook, this will give me kind of the crowbar to pry open my desired goods I want to get from the world. 0.57

00:41:41.940 He says, it's not going to happen.

00:41:44.020 There's no control.

00:41:45.540 There's no guarantees.

00:41:47.080 There's no sort of this worldly knowledge that will give you power over death or freedom from death.

00:41:52.340 So in a way, he really puts wisdom and wisdom in the sense of what you can sort of accumulate, humanly speaking, what you can learn, what you can discover.

00:41:59.900 He really puts wisdom to the ultimate test and finds it wanting.

00:42:04.880 And then also, I think, too, the more wisdom or knowledge you gain, it gives you, again, that false sense of control.

00:42:11.880 And then things don't work the way you think they should work.

00:42:14.660 You're like, I'm really smart.

00:42:15.700 I've studied the books and it should go like this.

00:42:17.760 And it doesn't.

00:42:18.340 You're like, I'm actually more unhappy now because I had this idea of how it should have worked based on my study and my knowledge.

00:42:24.880 And it's not working like that.

00:42:26.260 And like now I'm actually more unhappy.

00:42:28.280 You know what I'm saying?

00:42:30.040 And, you know, it's this funny thing where Ecclesiastes sort of is a wisdom book, is a quest for wisdom.

00:42:35.840 But frankly, you know, OK, part of wisdom and even an ancient philosopher like Socrates, right?

00:42:40.020 What does he know?

00:42:40.840 Well, he knows that he doesn't know.

00:42:42.340 And there's a sense in which Kohel is kind of similar.

00:42:45.100 Part of wisdom is learning the limits of wisdom, not just the limits of your own wisdom, but the limits of what wisdom can do for you in this world.

00:42:53.340 And frankly, the wisdom of learning.

00:42:55.060 Yeah, you know, sometimes our kind of quest for wisdom is really motivated by a quest for control.

00:42:59.960 It's motivated by trying to kind of have this position of being in charge, being dominant, being sovereign over my circumstances that actually there's no wisdom that's going to do that for you.

00:43:10.200 You're just a subject to death.

00:43:11.600 You're just a subject to accident, cancer, you name it, as someone who's, you know, never read a single page of a single book.

00:43:19.120 All right.

00:43:19.340 So the preacher, he tries to find happiness in work, in money, in wisdom, but he finds that they're all vanity, that they don't ultimately satisfy.

00:43:27.200 He also tries general pleasure, like wine, food, laughter, but he doesn't find lasting meaning there either.

00:43:35.540 You mentioned earlier that he also talks about death a lot.

00:43:39.140 What did Kohelet say about death?

00:43:41.420 Yeah, boy, he said a lot about death.

00:43:43.820 Oh, I mean, one thing he says about death is basically you don't know when it's coming and it happens in an evil time, which is dark, but it's also bracing and can help you really appreciate the sort of limited and fragile gift that life is.

00:44:01.280 Chapter nine, verse 12 is a good passage on that.

00:44:03.820 Yeah.

00:44:03.980 One thing he says about death is you can't bring anything with you through it.

00:44:08.400 That's chapter five, verse 15.

00:44:11.320 Man, he says so much about death.

00:44:12.780 I mean, one thing he says about death is that death is the end.

00:44:15.640 Like you were pointing out, you know, you could amass this fortune.

00:44:18.300 This is basically the end of chapter two.

00:44:20.040 You can amass this fortune, but then you got to give it over to somebody and you have no further say about what they do with it.

00:44:25.820 So death is the hard and total limit of every pursuit, every project, every pleasure, all the things that we kind of give our hearts to that we think is the stuff that makes life worth living.

00:44:39.080 Death is just an absolute end to all of it.

00:44:42.240 And especially, you know, death doesn't discriminate.

00:44:46.160 Kohelet would agree to that extent with, what is it, Aaron Burr's song in Hamilton.

00:44:50.080 So death doesn't discriminate, meaning you cannot guarantee that you will have a long life or a peaceful death by how you live in this world.

00:44:58.620 And Ecclesiastes, Kohelet experiences that as a kind of insult.

00:45:02.140 Like what?

00:45:02.680 Like, you know, death chops us all down to size and it doesn't do so according to any particular kind of merit or rhyme or reason.

00:45:11.080 All right.

00:45:11.280 So, yeah, death makes things absurd, basically.

00:45:14.220 Death is the ultimate absurdity.

00:45:15.820 Okay, so Kohelet, he spends the first part of Ecclesiastes saying, you know, you can work, you can make a lot of money, you can get really smart, become really powerful, indulge in lots of pleasures, but you're still going to die and it's all just chasing after the wind.

00:45:31.300 It's Hevel.

00:45:31.680 And that's kind of depressing.

00:45:34.600 But then he seems to totally change course.

00:45:37.480 Can you read verses 7 through 10 in chapter 9?

00:45:41.160 Sure.

00:45:41.560 Go, eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.

00:45:48.580 Let your garments be always white.

00:45:50.960 Let not oil be lacking on your head.

00:45:53.060 Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun.

00:45:58.120 Because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.

00:46:03.020 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom and shield to which you are going.

00:46:09.820 So, it seems like he's saying do the things that earlier he said won't bring you happiness.

00:46:15.300 I mean, what's going on there?

00:46:16.100 How can these things that he said were Hevel actually bring us lasting happiness?

00:46:20.880 Like, what's the shift?

00:46:22.000 Yeah, what is the switch?

00:46:23.560 I think the fundamental one is he is seeing all these things as gifts of God.

00:46:29.300 And he means that literally.

00:46:30.640 Like, God is the creator.

00:46:31.740 God is giving life.

00:46:32.680 God is the one providing this to you.

00:46:34.420 You know, a lot of people will speak about life as a gift or kind of some peak moment as a gift.

00:46:38.640 And I think there's a real insight there.

00:46:40.420 I think actually Ecclesiastes would say, yeah, kind of trace that insight all the way down.

00:46:44.740 There's a real reality there that it's not from you.

00:46:47.360 It's not ultimately even from this world.

00:46:49.300 It's from God.

00:46:50.460 So, recognizing that life is a gift means I didn't ultimately create this.

00:46:56.060 I didn't ultimately deserve this.

00:46:57.740 My work, my skill may have contributed, may have helped to kind of bring this about.

00:47:02.780 But there's so many things beyond me and apart from me that had to take place.

00:47:07.580 You know, if I'm a farmer, I know this intimately because it depends upon soil and sunlight and the weather and rain and all sorts of factors that are just clear beyond my control.

00:47:19.660 And I think Ecclesiastes would say, yeah, actually, every good thing in your life is like that.

00:47:24.980 So, recognizing the limits of your influence, recognizing the limits of your control, even frankly, realistically recognizing the limits of the good thing itself.

00:47:33.960 It is going to end in death.

00:47:35.340 It isn't going to last forever.

00:47:36.560 You're not going to have total control over it and be able to make it perfect.

00:47:39.480 When you recognize that, there's kind of a shift in your stance, your attitude, your grip on the thing.

00:47:46.760 You're not trying to grip it so tight that you kind of choke it.

00:47:50.080 You're receiving it with open hands.

00:47:52.240 And so, I do think Ecclesiastes commends to us, you could say, an ethic of gift, an ethic of gratitude,

00:47:58.220 an ethic of recognizing that life is something much more fundamentally that you receive rather than something that you sort of control or conquer.

00:48:08.580 And so, once you stop trying to fill your heart to the brim as if this one thing is going to kind of fully and finally satisfy you, you're free.

00:48:18.480 You're free to experience all of these things as small good things, small good gifts.

00:48:24.400 So, I do think there's a freedom that comes from trading control for thankful receiving.

00:48:31.760 That's maybe my kind of summary way of trying to get at what's happening in these seven passages where Ecclesiastes tells us to get busy enjoying all these things.

00:48:41.400 So, what does that gift stance look like towards work, for example?

00:48:46.160 What does that look like for you?

00:48:47.360 Oh, that's a good question.

00:48:50.000 I think it looks like learning to treat whatever work I'm getting to engage in, even moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, to try to be thankful for it, to try to give myself to it fully, to try to be alert to the opportunities of maybe ways it might challenge me or help me grow, and to try to recognize and be thankful for if this work in any way benefits somebody else.

00:49:15.280 And I kind of get any glimpse of that, to be thankful for that, and to not make my stance toward my work depend upon some farther off payoff that may or may not happen.

00:49:29.300 And the payoff could even be some hoped for kind of fruit of the work itself.

00:49:33.000 You know, if I persevere in this for X number of years, and I get it to this level, and it develops in this way, well, you literally don't know what's going to happen.

00:49:40.500 You literally have no idea, you know, what's going to happen tomorrow.

00:49:43.880 And so I think that we can often, of course, we're planning creatures, we're hoping creatures, you have to have some hope for the future to do any work at all.

00:49:53.360 But I think often we can sort of load up our sense of value or worth or expectations, really on the kind of compounding future interest that we hope is going to happen.

00:50:03.840 And I don't just mean financially.

00:50:04.900 I mean, in terms of the work, its growth, its influence, its development, whatever it is.

00:50:10.280 So I think for me, trying to learn to be present in the moment to whatever challenges there are, whatever opportunities there are, even difficulties and snags and snares as an opportunity to grow in some way personally.

00:50:23.800 One kind of one word summary for it would be trying to have an ethic of craft as much as I can.

00:50:28.960 One, I'm influenced here by Matthew Crawford, his book, Shop Classes, Soul Craft, or the sociologist Richard Sennett has a wonderful book on craftsmanship, where craft, any job that you can both start and finish, any job at all that you can do the whole of yourself and have some responsibility for the finished product, there can be an element of craftsmanship.

00:50:50.360 You can control the process.

00:50:51.720 You can control the tools you're working with.

00:50:53.260 You can respond to difficulties and challenges as a way to actually grow in your skills.

00:50:58.280 So just for me, very personally, you know, I write a lot.

00:51:02.520 I preach and teach a lot to try to apply kind of an ethic of craftsmanship to anything at all that I can.

00:51:09.440 When you do that, you actually find that, yeah, the difficulties you run into are ways to get better at working with whatever the materials you are that you've been given.

00:51:18.740 Yeah, so focus on the process, not the outcome.

00:51:21.720 Exactly.

00:51:22.120 Try to invest as much as you can and learn to enjoy the process, even the more frustrating parts of it.

00:51:28.280 Yeah, learn how to become absorbed in process and care less about outcome.

00:51:32.740 Well, what does that gift stance look like towards wealth?

00:51:34.920 Because, you know, the preacher says, yeah, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your money.

00:51:38.200 But a lot of scripture can seem kind of down on money or gives a lot of warnings about money.

00:51:43.040 So what does a gift stance towards money and wealth look like?

00:51:46.200 Yeah, I do think Ecclesiastes allows you to enjoy the good things of this life, including things that could come with wealth or possessions, with a clear conscience, with a true heart.

00:51:57.380 You know, most of the things the Bible says about money are against love of money, against excess, against being sort of taken captive by wealth.

00:52:04.800 But there's even passages in the New Testament, like where the Apostle Paul talks about God giving us all things, you know, richly to enjoy.

00:52:11.240 And that really resonates with Ecclesiastes.

00:52:13.080 So I think there are ways to wisely, responsibly enjoy good things in this world.

00:52:18.860 I think there's also ways to kind of set disciplines, limits, boundaries.

00:52:22.760 You know, can you use those things in a way that's generous and open-handed and really freely letting others partake of them?

00:52:28.360 Well, you set limits to kind of your own maybe standards of consumption or keeping up with the Joneses or not letting your sense of aspirational lifestyle expand to fill your whole paycheck or go beyond it.

00:52:39.880 So I do think there's practical and spiritual disciplines you can put in place to, frankly, guard against the dangers of wealth.

00:52:46.060 At the same time, Ecclesiastes says, yeah, enjoy it.

00:52:50.740 Yeah, and he says you can enjoy other pleasures of this world too.

00:52:53.380 Like even though he said before that pleasures can be hevel, he says that there is a way you can truly enjoy them.

00:52:59.520 Yeah.

00:53:00.220 Yeah, that's right.

00:53:01.460 So like in chapter 6, verse 9, he says,

00:53:04.940 Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite.

00:53:09.240 This also is vanity and a striving after wind.

00:53:11.480 Which basically says any good thing in front of you from a meal to a conversation to time with your spouse to whatever it is, any good thing in front of you can be the source of enjoyment.

00:53:24.500 But you have to kind of discipline your mind and heart to actually be present, to actually, as it were, consume the meal that's in front of you.

00:53:31.680 You know, there is this thing in front of you if only you'll look at it.

00:53:34.740 It's right before you.

00:53:36.540 But what do we so often do?

00:53:38.760 You kind of look away from the thing that's right in front of you and your appetite wanders off into all these directions.

00:53:44.080 So yeah, the modern world, your appetite can wander off infinitely, indefinitely.

00:53:47.940 You can get whatever you want.

00:53:49.340 There's actually a discipline of enjoyment that can kind of serve as a bridge from like, you know, his more dark sayings to the actual ones about enjoyment.

00:53:57.360 Enjoyment actually takes discipline.

00:53:58.880 You somehow have to tie your appetite to this thing that's right there in front of you rather than being like, oh, what if it was this?

00:54:06.840 Or, oh, this could be better.

00:54:08.220 Or, oh, this happened last time.

00:54:10.100 Or, oh, I wish I was here.

00:54:11.520 Yeah.

00:54:11.760 And I think this all ties in nicely with Rosa, this idea of taking a gift stance towards life.

00:54:16.740 You can't control gifts.

00:54:18.240 And if you stop grasping for control, it counterintuitively makes the thing more enjoyable.

00:54:23.980 Yeah, 100%.

00:54:25.480 And Rosa even talks about resonance having the character of a gift.

00:54:29.780 And that's one way to understand the experience of resonance.

00:54:32.880 So I think that's, I think Rosa's really insightful.

00:54:35.800 And I think there's something about even, you know, whatever parts of your work life or your various responsibilities might seem to have the most element of toil.

00:54:45.200 You know, if you've got little kids, it might be cleaning up their messes, taking care of their bodily needs. 0.95

00:54:50.400 You know, there's aspects of taking care of little kids that are a grind.

00:54:53.180 It's donkey work.

00:54:54.520 But how can you learn to enjoy even that, both with your kids and the time you get to spend with them, and frankly, enjoying that donkey work for the sake of your kids?

00:55:03.440 It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

00:55:05.300 And the fact that you're, you know, getting to do this and having to do this because of these gifts of human beings that are in your life, even that could allow for a little bit of resonance, a little bit of enjoyment to come through in the toil that might come with, say, you know, the care of young children.

00:55:20.920 Yeah, I do that a lot.

00:55:23.040 Something my kids do, it's really annoying, but I've had to reframe it in my mind, is that they'll get printer paper out of the printer, and then they leave it open.

00:55:31.680 And so when I print something, it's like, and I'm like, and I want to yell at them, close the printer drawer.

00:55:37.920 But then I think, you know, I have kids.

00:55:41.680 This wouldn't happen if I didn't have kids.

00:55:44.020 They come with frustrations, but I'm so glad I have kids.

00:55:47.720 They're making creations, man.

00:55:49.200 You know, for me, it's like when they leave that stack, like there's like three pages they've drawn on, but then they leave like 45 spread out over the couch.

00:55:56.520 Right.

00:55:57.660 So you have kids.

00:55:58.860 This wouldn't happen if I didn't have kids, so enjoy it.

00:56:00.720 I mean, how has Ecclesiastes helped you remember that life is for a living?

00:56:05.680 Because I think that's the message that the preacher ends with.

00:56:07.780 It's like, this life is for living.

00:56:09.040 It's not for scheming and gain and all that stuff.

00:56:12.060 It's just for living.

00:56:13.220 Yeah, I think in some ways, that kind of stuff we've been circling around for the last few minutes, like learning to be present for life's present goods.

00:56:22.100 Both that that's a gift to be enjoyed, and frankly, that it takes a certain discipline.

00:56:27.180 Like you're at the pool with your kid in the summer.

00:56:30.380 It's three o'clock on a Saturday.

00:56:32.200 Just be there.

00:56:33.560 That is the only place you can be, and boy, is it a great place to be.

00:56:39.580 So whether it's 3 p.m. on a Saturday in the summer, whether it's having a bonfire in the fall and just roasting a hot dog in your backyard, whatever it might be, that's the only moment you have.

00:56:50.100 That's what Martin Luther was commenting on something in chapter 5, where he basically said, this is the key statement of the whole book, that the present moment is the only moment you have.

00:57:00.160 It's the only one that belongs to you.

00:57:02.980 And there really is a choice of receiving it as a gift, enjoying it, and that takes a kind of self-limiting.

00:57:09.300 It takes kind of shrinking yourself down to fit yourself in.

00:57:12.620 Here's where I am.

00:57:14.120 You know, as a Christian, I believe here's where God has put me.

00:57:16.940 Here's the moment he has for me right now.

00:57:19.020 Well, maybe for a lot of people, you know, they get to a certain age, maybe 35, 40, or maybe if they're raising a family, their kids get to a certain age.

00:57:25.800 Some of these lessons start to kind of dawn on you.

00:57:28.400 But I think that Ecclesiastes, that learning how to be present in the present, and that's the only way to enjoy it, I think has maybe been the biggest sort of deepening of that for me personally in all the years I've spent kind of wrestling with the book.

00:57:42.820 Well, Bobby, this has been a great conversation.

00:57:44.880 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:57:47.740 Sure, yeah.

00:57:48.580 I'm on Twitter, Bobby underscore Jameson.

00:57:51.600 The book has a little website with Penguin Random House.

00:57:54.180 Those would be two ways to connect.

00:57:55.860 Fantastic.

00:57:56.240 Well, Bobby Jameson, thanks for your time.

00:57:57.160 It's been a pleasure.

00:57:58.380 Thank you so much.

00:58:00.520 My guest today was Bobby Jameson.

00:58:01.820 He's the author of the book, Everything is Never Enough.

00:58:03.940 It's available on Amazon.com.

00:58:05.700 Check out our show notes at awim.is slash everythingisnevereenough.

00:58:07.820 Everything is Never Enough.

00:58:08.740 We find links to resources, and we delve deeper into this topic.

00:58:18.860 Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 Podcast.

00:58:21.300 If you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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00:58:26.280 And if you've done that already, thank you.

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00:58:31.600 Word of mouth is the primary way we grow.

00:58:34.020 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:58:35.680 Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to the A1 Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - February 10, 2026

Ecclesiastes on Enjoying Our Weirdly Unsatisfying Lives

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