Ecclesiastes is arguably the most philosophical, dark, experiential, existential, and unsparingly honest about the human condition. It wrestles with work, money, ambition, pleasure, time, and death, and it does so in a way that feels uncannily modern. Here to unpack this ancient philosophy is Bobby Jameson, a pastor and the author of Everything is Never Enough: A Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness.
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00:01:07.560Brett 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
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00:01:39.340Of all the books in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is arguably the most philosophical, dark, experiential, existential, and unsparingly honest about the human condition.
00:01:55.500It wrestles with work, money, ambition, pleasure, time, and death.
00:02:00.280And it does so in a way that feels uncannily modern.
00:02:02.480Whether you approach it as sacred scripture or simply as ancient wisdom literature,
00:02:06.900Ecclesiastes has something to say to anyone who's ever chased success, gotten what they wanted, and then wondered,
00:03:28.300It really resonated with our congregation.
00:03:30.380When I got to the end of the preaching series, I just didn't want to be done with the book.
00:03:34.740It was like the book had grabbed a hold of me and wouldn't let me go.
00:03:38.160It's a weirdly personal, confrontational, challenging kind of book.
00:03:43.820It'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.
00:03:50.640And 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.
00:04:00.580And it's like Ecclesiastes saw it first, got there first.
00:04:03.320And 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,
00:04:12.180and then you were like, man, is this really what I wanted, or what's next, or is this all there is?
00:04:17.580Kind of Ecclesiastes has been to all those places ahead of you.
00:04:21.400Well, so let's do some background on Ecclesiastes.
00:04:23.740Ecclesiastes is part of the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature, which includes Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job.
00:04:30.500If anyone has ever read the Hebrew Bible, they may have noticed that these books, in particular, these three books,
00:04:36.660they seem really different from the other books in the Bible, like the books of Moses or the books of the prophets.
00:04:42.620What makes the wisdom literature different from the rest of the Hebrew Bible?
00:04:46.760Yeah, one thing is it's in many ways more experiential.
00:04:50.580It invites you to kind of wrestle with it personally.
00:04:53.300You have to put work into making sense of it for yourself because it is kind of speaking about all of life from different perspectives.
00:05:01.460You know, one way to summarize the relationship between Job and Ecclesiastes,
00:05:05.600Job is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by losing it all.
00:05:10.720The author of Ecclesiastes is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by getting it all and having it all.
00:05:15.840And 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.
00:05:23.740You know, Proverbs, the book of Proverbs puts contradictory statements side by side,
00:05:27.620and you've got to figure out how to reconcile them.
00:05:30.820And Ecclesiastes actually does something similar.
00:05:33.580So, yeah, it's not – these books in the Bible are probably especially maybe familiar to or appealing to,
00:05:39.980even a lot of people who don't necessarily, you know, believe in God or believe that the Bible is holy scripture
00:05:45.500because they speak so directly to experience, to things like work, money, sex, power, pleasure, all that kind of stuff.
00:05:53.120It also seems just more philosophical than the rest of the books in the Bible, existential like you were saying.
00:05:59.360Yeah, that's true of wisdom literature in general, and I would say it's even especially true of Ecclesiastes in particular.
00:06:04.800A 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.
00:06:29.560There 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.
00:06:39.700And because it hits on all these big issues, work, money, love, success, failure.
00:06:46.700When you read Ecclesiastes in the 21st century as a modern Westerner, like you're reading like, wow, I relate to this.
00:06:56.720That 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.
00:07:06.540But 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.
00:07:16.060Ecclesiastes has something to say about all of those.
00:07:18.540And 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.
00:07:27.680It'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?
00:07:36.320You know, you could do a biography of Churchill that would fill massive volumes from like any two years of his life.
00:07:41.120The author of Ecclesiastes is a little bit like that.
00:07:43.580There's this full exploration of the potential, the possibilities of work, money, pleasure, power.
00:07:49.840And so I think in the modern world is in some ways defined by a lot of options.
00:07:55.360There's a lot of different paths you can follow.
00:07:57.180And 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.
00:08:09.420Well, I don't think we have a kind of confident or certain knowledge.
00:08:13.940Historically, 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.
00:08:45.420So 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.
00:08:52.880There's ways you can map it onto Solomon.
00:08:54.580But I think in some ways the author is making his experience even more accessible by that degree of anonymity.
00:09:01.660What's the overall structure of the book?
00:09:03.220Yeah, well, Ecclesiastes, you know, some books of the Bible have a pretty clear or transparent literary structure.
00:09:10.760Ecclesiastes is a little bit harder to discern.
00:09:14.120Roughly 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.
00:09:26.360Then 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.
00:09:39.380So there's kind of a loose literary structure.
00:09:41.180As 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.
00:09:52.080And frankly, you can agree with that just by experiencing the same things or kind of reflecting yourself.
00:09:56.600But 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.
00:10:09.420And he talks about life as being a gift.
00:10:13.600He counsels rejoicing in your work, rejoicing in your marriage, even the toil of your work, taking pleasure in it.
00:10:19.380And so there's kind of a tone shift from saying everything is vanity or fleeting or absurd.
00:10:24.360That's kind of his dominant message in the first half of the book.
00:10:27.580But 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.
00:10:38.880I 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.
00:10:45.660He 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.
00:10:50.200And that God will ultimately hold all people to account and even bring about a whole new world in the end.
00:10:55.640And so that's a perspective that only comes through in a few places.
00:10:58.520So 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.
00:11:09.020He doesn't always tell you any switching point of view.
00:11:10.980But 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.
00:11:27.840Yeah, those first two floors where everything's absurd and then everything's a gift, that's kind of like the imminent frame.
00:11:33.140It's like, well, this is the life now.
00:11:34.660And then that third floor is like, that's the transcendent frame.
00:11:39.200And 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.
00:11:45.540But 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.
00:11:56.400He says at one point, drink your wine with a merry heart.
00:13:11.480It's like a one-word summary of his whole observation of all of life.
00:13:15.560And 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.
00:13:25.900Something that doesn't meet your expectations, even something that's deeply wrong, like a case of injustice.
00:13:31.840You 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.
00:13:40.100And actually, Kohelet will use the word hevel to talk about a situation like that.
00:13:47.780I would actually say a good kind of modern translation of it is absurd.
00:13:51.080Even 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.
00:14:00.800Because there's things that don't meet our desires.
00:14:03.380There's things that don't meet our expectations.
00:14:05.280There'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.
00:14:16.680Yeah, I like how you used absurd because I think that's a better word to describe hevel.
00:14:21.080That idea that we're in this world and things don't go according to how we think they should go.
00:15:00.280That'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.
00:15:05.920But 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.
00:17:00.040So yeah, you also bring the thinking of sociologist Harmot Rosa into your exploration of Ecclesiastes.
00:17:07.660For those who aren't familiar with his work, what's his big idea?
00:17:11.380Yeah, he's got a few really insightful big ideas.
00:17:14.940One that's really relevant for my book is that modernity is a project of control.
00:17:21.820And so he's got this great, slim little book, The Uncontrollability of the World, that's very accessible and really insightful.
00:17:27.820And 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.
00:17:35.880You know, I'm in a room right now that has been set to 67 degrees.
00:17:39.420And if it dips below 67 degrees, the heater will kick back on and keep me at exactly the controlled temperature I want.
00:17:46.600You 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.
00:17:57.180So you can be, you know, working and awake whenever you want.
00:17:59.920All those kind of things have kind of created a world in which we live, the world that we experience.
00:18:06.400We 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.
00:18:18.180You've got this job and you work in an older city and you're at the mercy of all these different forces.
00:18:22.640We expect to be able to control a whole lot of stuff.
00:18:29.060And yeah, Rosa does a really good job kind of opening up the disconnect that we experience when control runs out.
00:18:35.320He 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.
00:18:45.560Think about falling in love, you know, getting this woman that you're incredibly into to actually go out on a date with you.
00:18:50.880And 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.
00:19:03.780All those type of peak experiences are things you can't control.
00:19:12.760And in a way, the more you try to control it, the more the meaning drains out of it, the color drains out of it.
00:19:17.920And so Rosa also identifies this paradox where the more we try to control, the less we actually kind of enjoy our lives.
00:19:24.440And his thick concept he's developed for that kind of enjoyment is what he calls resonance.
00:19:30.420And resonance is basically any experience in which kind of the invisible wire that connects you to the world is humming.
00:19:38.900It could be a really engaging conversation.
00:19:40.640It 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.
00:19:59.400Rosa talks about resonance as basically anything in which you kind of light up with a connection to the world.
00:20:05.740And resonance is only an in the moment reality.
00:20:08.560It's not something you can kind of file away and stockpile.
00:20:11.660It's not something you could just pull out of the fridge.
00:20:13.840You 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.
00:20:22.620It depends upon your own kind of internal condition.
00:20:25.500It depends upon the conditions of the world out there.
00:20:27.300And so the tension between control and resonance, I think, I think Rosa is really insightful in showing there's like an inverse relationship.
00:20:35.060The more you control, the less resonance there is, but we keep trying to control more.
00:20:38.560One 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.
00:20:51.180Think about the kind of circumstances of the tools or technology we use on a daily basis.
00:20:56.120Think about even kind of basics of like morality or expected kind of patterns of life.
00:21:03.400In traditional societies, those things are pretty stable.
00:21:06.580They change a little bit over time, but it's pretty much like things have kind of gone on the way they always have.
00:21:11.880Once you get into the modern world, particularly in Europe and kind of the early modern era, you might have generational change.
00:21:18.100You 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.
00:21:25.740But 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.
00:21:41.400Those 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.
00:21:53.540And 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.
00:22:06.120I don't know, defined roughly by the last, you know, couple of generations.
00:22:08.880So 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.
00:22:21.980But 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.
00:22:30.620I think this really goes to what the preacher has to say about why life is absurd.
00:22:35.460And 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.
00:22:47.800I 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.
00:22:57.740You could live at any time, you could live in any place in the world, and this book would really resonate with you.
00:23:04.040At 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.
00:23:20.400I 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.
00:23:31.040They're kind of deepenings or they're making even more vivid a lot of the exact things that Ecclesiastes identifies.
00:23:37.240So 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.
00:23:53.520So 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.
00:24:04.140Yeah. I mean, this idea of controlling how intense it is in the modern world, like just look at our health.
00:24:10.540We have all this technology, these tools to look at what's going on inside of our body.
00:24:15.040We can measure our blood. We have all these supplements we can take. We can measure our heart rate variability.
00:24:20.500And then we end up getting some sort of debilitating disease. You're like, how could this happen?
00:24:25.400Like I'm doing all the things. I'm tracking everything. What's going on?
00:24:28.620So 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.
00:24:35.120You 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.
00:24:41.880Like 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.
00:24:47.480So you just feel even more frustrated.
00:24:49.860Yeah, 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.
00:25:00.360It makes it even harder for us to be reconciled to the realities of accident, injury, illness, ultimately death.
00:25:08.580Like if you're in any kind of pre-modern society, you are just so much more surrounded by death.
00:25:12.720It'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.
00:25:21.860Whereas we can sort of put death behind this kind of sealed off door. You know, people mostly tend to die in hospitals.
00:25:29.400We 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.
00:25:38.480And so, yeah, I think it also makes it easier to persist in the illusion that somehow we'll be around forever.
00:25:44.700Or 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.
00:25:57.120And Ecclesiastes has a lot to say about death.
00:26:01.020And 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.
00:26:34.320And 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.
00:26:41.020I'm just curious, did you have any advice for your son in the moment?
00:27:33.400I 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.
00:27:44.680And, 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.
00:27:50.540And, yeah, I think we're in the early stages of seeing, you know, some pretty profound disruptions due to that.
00:27:56.920And I'm not sure there's a lot of people out there with great answers.
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00:30:25.740Okay, 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.
00:30:36.340So let's actually dig into what Ecclesiastes has to say about our relationship to time and feelings of progress and permanence.
00:31:51.120But this is kind of a poem of reflecting on nature's cycles.
00:31:55.760A generation goes and a generation comes.
00:31:57.920Everybody who's alive today is going to die.
00:32:00.340They're going to be replaced by their kind of successors in the next generation.
00:32:04.500You 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.
00:32:10.920So 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.
00:32:20.400And so what happens is that there's finally no gain.
00:32:24.220It's not like the whole system moves forward.
00:32:26.500The whole system just kind of returns to its original setting.
00:32:29.380And Ecclesiastes is observing these different patterns in nature to basically preach to humanity the message that's going to happen to you.
00:32:38.660Your plans, your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, they're all going to get reset.
00:32:42.860You know, whatever mark you make on the earth, those footprints are going to get filled in.
00:33:38.560But the point is, there's this misfit.
00:33:41.220The world's not built like that, but our hearts are.
00:33:43.840Yeah, 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.
00:33:55.260And 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.
00:34:04.940Like, okay, I got to be here at this time.
00:34:07.200This thing's got to start at this time.
00:34:08.660And if it doesn't start at this time, then things have gone wrong.
00:34:11.060Yeah, you know, and clock time obviously enables all kinds of stuff to happen.
00:34:16.680Like, time only got standardized in terms of, like, everybody being on the same hour, minute, et cetera, ready, set, go.
00:34:22.800I think as a kind of international congress meant to facilitate train travel, because it has to be this incredible precision.
00:34:30.340And 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.
00:34:36.740So there are things that it enables, this kind of regime of the clock.
00:34:41.700But it also creates a constant pressure.
00:34:44.140It creates a kind of constant sort of, like, external accountability.
00:36:44.380One person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil.
00:36:50.660And his eyes are never satisfied with riches.
00:36:52.940So that he never asks, for whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?
00:36:58.480This also is vanity and an unhappy business.
00:37:01.440He'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.
00:37:12.280So yeah, he says that's motivated by envy.
00:37:15.120You want to have more than the person next to you.
00:37:16.960But 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.
00:37:36.640And I think in some ways, even more subtle than money can be the promise of status.
00:37:40.800You 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.
00:37:52.340And in our society, the only universal currency of status is work.
00:37:57.300What you do in your work is the most definitive aspect of kind of where you stand before other people.
00:38:02.460And so Ecclesiastes diagnoses envy as the big motive that would keep you kind of running on that hamster wheel, that treadmill of always working.
00:38:11.320And I think envy in some ways, not just of money or of possessions, but frankly, even more so of status, is a huge motivator.
00:38:18.420And then this idea of money, like the preacher, he makes a lot of money, and he's like, it's absurd.
00:38:23.000Like, I didn't feel good after making all that money.
00:38:25.200He 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.
00:38:32.080They'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.
00:38:39.000Yeah, you know, there's all kinds of reasons Ecclesiastes finds money dissatisfying.
00:38:44.280Like you said, one is you've got to give it all away, and who knows what they're going to do with it.
00:38:47.840Another is, you know, just you can't take it with you personally.
00:38:51.060You leave this life naked as you came into it.
00:38:53.660Another kind of famous line from Ecclesiastes that gets reused all the time.
00:38:57.240Another reason is that the more money you have, it frankly brings more problems.
00:39:02.500There's people who want to mooch off you.
00:39:04.140There's cares that keep you up at night.
00:39:05.840There's more things you've got to pay for now that you have this money and this property.
00:39:10.340And of course, the kind of most basic one, the deepest problem, is that you can always want more money.
00:39:16.980The problem is ultimately your love of money, that if you start being motivated by money, it becomes your ultimate good.
00:39:24.140And so Ecclesiastes, in a couple of places, warns about, yeah, being sort of driven or controlled by the love of money.
00:39:31.100And so I think that's hugely relevant.
00:39:32.900I mean, in our society, more than ever, money can get you virtually anything.
00:39:36.660And you can sort of monetize anything.
00:39:40.120I 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.
00:39:48.800But there's also kind of a flip side to the sort of, you know, ethic of entrepreneurship.
00:39:57.500You 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.
00:40:57.740How did that work out for the preacher?
00:41:00.660Yeah, his ultimate problem with wisdom, well, there's a couple of them.
00:41:04.960One 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.
00:41:17.000And then he says, how the wise dies, just like the fool.
00:41:22.260And 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.
00:41:47.080There's no sort of this worldly knowledge that will give you power over death or freedom from death.
00:41:52.340So 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.
00:41:59.900He really puts wisdom to the ultimate test and finds it wanting.
00:42:04.880And then also, I think, too, the more wisdom or knowledge you gain, it gives you, again, that false sense of control.
00:42:11.880And then things don't work the way you think they should work.
00:42:42.340And there's a sense in which Kohel is kind of similar.
00:42:45.100Part 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.
00:42:55.060Yeah, you know, sometimes our kind of quest for wisdom is really motivated by a quest for control.
00:42:59.960It'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.
00:43:19.340So 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.
00:43:27.200He also tries general pleasure, like wine, food, laughter, but he doesn't find lasting meaning there either.
00:43:35.540You mentioned earlier that he also talks about death a lot.
00:43:43.820Oh, 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.
00:44:01.280Chapter nine, verse 12 is a good passage on that.
00:44:12.780I mean, one thing he says about death is that death is the end.
00:44:15.640Like you were pointing out, you know, you could amass this fortune.
00:44:18.300This is basically the end of chapter two.
00:44:20.040You 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.
00:44:25.820So 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.
00:44:39.080Death is just an absolute end to all of it.
00:44:42.240And especially, you know, death doesn't discriminate.
00:44:46.160Kohelet would agree to that extent with, what is it, Aaron Burr's song in Hamilton.
00:44:50.080So 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.
00:44:58.620And Ecclesiastes, Kohelet experiences that as a kind of insult.
00:45:15.820Okay, 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.
00:45:53.060Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun.
00:45:58.120Because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun.
00:46:03.020Whatever 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.
00:46:09.820So, it seems like he's saying do the things that earlier he said won't bring you happiness.
00:46:57.740My work, my skill may have contributed, may have helped to kind of bring this about.
00:47:02.780But there's so many things beyond me and apart from me that had to take place.
00:47:07.580You 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.
00:47:19.660And I think Ecclesiastes would say, yeah, actually, every good thing in your life is like that.
00:47:24.980So, recognizing the limits of your influence, recognizing the limits of your control, even frankly, realistically recognizing the limits of the good thing itself.
00:47:52.240And so, I do think Ecclesiastes commends to us, you could say, an ethic of gift, an ethic of gratitude,
00:47:58.220an ethic of recognizing that life is something much more fundamentally that you receive rather than something that you sort of control or conquer.
00:48:08.580And 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.
00:48:18.480You're free to experience all of these things as small good things, small good gifts.
00:48:24.400So, I do think there's a freedom that comes from trading control for thankful receiving.
00:48:31.760That'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.
00:48:41.400So, what does that gift stance look like towards work, for example?
00:48:50.000I 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.
00:49:15.280And 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.
00:49:29.300And the payoff could even be some hoped for kind of fruit of the work itself.
00:49:33.000You 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.
00:49:40.500You literally have no idea, you know, what's going to happen tomorrow.
00:49:43.880And 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.
00:49:53.360But 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.
00:50:04.900I mean, in terms of the work, its growth, its influence, its development, whatever it is.
00:50:10.280So 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.
00:50:23.800One kind of one word summary for it would be trying to have an ethic of craft as much as I can.
00:50:28.960One, 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.
00:50:51.720You can control the tools you're working with.
00:50:53.260You can respond to difficulties and challenges as a way to actually grow in your skills.
00:50:58.280So just for me, very personally, you know, I write a lot.
00:51:02.520I preach and teach a lot to try to apply kind of an ethic of craftsmanship to anything at all that I can.
00:51:09.440When 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.
00:51:18.740Yeah, so focus on the process, not the outcome.
00:51:22.120Try to invest as much as you can and learn to enjoy the process, even the more frustrating parts of it.
00:51:28.280Yeah, learn how to become absorbed in process and care less about outcome.
00:51:32.740Well, what does that gift stance look like towards wealth?
00:51:34.920Because, you know, the preacher says, yeah, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your money.
00:51:38.200But a lot of scripture can seem kind of down on money or gives a lot of warnings about money.
00:51:43.040So what does a gift stance towards money and wealth look like?
00:51:46.200Yeah, 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.
00:51:57.380You 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.
00:52:04.800But 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.
00:52:11.240And that really resonates with Ecclesiastes.
00:52:13.080So I think there are ways to wisely, responsibly enjoy good things in this world.
00:52:18.860I think there's also ways to kind of set disciplines, limits, boundaries.
00:52:22.760You know, can you use those things in a way that's generous and open-handed and really freely letting others partake of them?
00:52:28.360Well, 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.
00:52:39.880So I do think there's practical and spiritual disciplines you can put in place to, frankly, guard against the dangers of wealth.
00:52:46.060At the same time, Ecclesiastes says, yeah, enjoy it.
00:52:50.740Yeah, and he says you can enjoy other pleasures of this world too.
00:52:53.380Like even though he said before that pleasures can be hevel, he says that there is a way you can truly enjoy them.
00:53:01.460So like in chapter 6, verse 9, he says,
00:53:04.940Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite.
00:53:09.240This also is vanity and a striving after wind.
00:53:11.480Which 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.
00:53:24.500But 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.
00:53:31.680You know, there is this thing in front of you if only you'll look at it.
00:53:49.340There'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.
00:54:25.480And Rosa even talks about resonance having the character of a gift.
00:54:29.780And that's one way to understand the experience of resonance.
00:54:32.880So I think that's, I think Rosa's really insightful.
00:54:35.800And 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.
00:54:45.200You know, if you've got little kids, it might be cleaning up their messes, taking care of their bodily needs.
00:54:50.400You know, there's aspects of taking care of little kids that are a grind.
00:54:54.520But 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?
00:55:03.440It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.
00:55:05.300And 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.
00:55:23.040Something 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.
00:55:31.680And so when I print something, it's like, and I'm like, and I want to yell at them, close the printer drawer.
00:55:37.920But then I think, you know, I have kids.
00:55:41.680This wouldn't happen if I didn't have kids.
00:55:44.020They come with frustrations, but I'm so glad I have kids.
00:55:49.200You 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.
00:56:13.220Yeah, 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.
00:56:22.100Both that that's a gift to be enjoyed, and frankly, that it takes a certain discipline.
00:56:27.180Like you're at the pool with your kid in the summer.
00:56:33.560That is the only place you can be, and boy, is it a great place to be.
00:56:39.580So 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.
00:56:50.100That'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.
00:57:00.160It's the only one that belongs to you.
00:57:02.980And there really is a choice of receiving it as a gift, enjoying it, and that takes a kind of self-limiting.
00:57:09.300It takes kind of shrinking yourself down to fit yourself in.
00:57:14.120You know, as a Christian, I believe here's where God has put me.
00:57:16.940Here's the moment he has for me right now.
00:57:19.020Well, 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.
00:57:25.800Some of these lessons start to kind of dawn on you.
00:57:28.400But 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.
00:57:42.820Well, Bobby, this has been a great conversation.
00:57:44.880Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?