Posted on 03/14/2026 7:56:31 PM PDT by DoodleBob
The writer of Ecclesiastes had seen enough of the world. Wealth, wisdom, labor, pleasure – he’d tried them all and arrived at the same conclusion: Vanity. A breath. A chasing after wind.
No one seems to talk about Ecclesiastes anymore. Not even in Christian circles. Scholars and early Jewish rabbis have argued for centuries over whether the book should be considered canonical. Its apparent pessimism is a stumbling block for some. I submit that this is because we generally want our beliefs and politics to be hopeful. But the words in Ecclesiastes 1:18 have aged better than most of our optimism: “Because in much wisdom there is much grief; and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.”
I don’t see that as despair. I don’t see that as nihilism. I see it as the honesty that follows an investigation into the inner workings of the world.
I’ve previously written about the virtue of disengagement – about how we’ve interpreted access to information as an obligation to have opinions on all of it. That instinct came from the same place: a suspicion that the world is running ahead of our ability to process it, and that the healthiest response might be stillness, rather than acceleration.
But there’s a deeper point to be made. Not just that we shouldn’t comment on everything, but that we should stop being surprised when things go wrong. This is the spirit of true pessimism – realism without the flattery.
Like the anonymous author of Ecclesiastes, H. L. Mencken is another thinker who saw our situation clearly. Writing a century ago, he tracked the trajectory of democratic civilization and arrived at a conclusion that reads less like prophecy and more like weather forecasting: “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Keeping Mencken’s biting remark in mind, consider David Foster Wallace’s surreal vision of America that features in his opus, “Infinite Jest,” in which Johnny Gentle was the first U.S. president to swing the microphone around by the cord during his inauguration.
It goes without saying that we’re closer to this kind of funhouse politics than we were during Mencken’s time.
The secular pessimists drew from the same well as the writer of Ecclesiastes, even if they didn’t know it. Emil Cioran – the Romanian philosopher who spent his life cataloguing the absurdity of human persistence – put it simply: “Man starts over again every day, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.” There’s something almost theological in that line, The Fall re-enacted each morning. The same mistakes, the same distractions, the same misplaced hope.
Albert Camus reached a similar impasse. His absurd rendering of Sisyphus must roll the proverbial boulder up the hill, knowing it will come back down, only to repeat the process without end. The question Camus asked wasn’t how to stop the boulder. It was about living without pretending that things would somehow get better.
What strikes me about all four thinkers – the author of Ecclesiastes, Mencken, Cioran, and Camus – is that none of them went mad. The pessimist’s reputation is one of paralysis, but the opposite is usually true. Once you stop being shocked by human folly, you free up an enormous amount of energy. You become harder to manipulate. Outrage merchants, selling their rage bait, lose their grip on you. The news cycle, which runs on the fuel of perpetual surprise, suddenly has less to offer.
This is likely what the apostle Paul was getting at in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 when he urged his readers to aspire to live quietly, mind their own affairs, and work with their hands. Paul wasn’t recommending passivity, but proportion. In the throes of our daily lives, we have mistaken global issues for personal ones. We absorb distant catastrophes as if they’re happening in our own backyard. And then we wonder why we feel perpetually depleted.
This isn’t a fashionable position. It doesn’t generate clicks. It won’t land you on a panel.
But look around. We’ve spent decades being surprised by things that, on reflection, were entirely predictable. We’ve burned through enormous reserves of collective outrage, and what do we have to show for it? The boulder is back at the bottom of the hill.
Maybe Ecclesiastes was right all along. Not as a counsel of despair, but as an invitation to sanity – to see clearly, to bring our expectations into proportion, and put our energy where it belongs.
The world has always run amok. The wise person is simply the one who stops being shocked by it.
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Jim
Blah blah blah. The whole essay sounds more like ‘Ignorance is strength!’ I rather be educated, thank you very much!
Bkmk
I like Ecclesiastes. But I am a bit of a pessimist.
“...I rather be educated, thank you very much!...”
I once had a talk with my father on the differences between optimism and pessimism. He put it like this:
No matter what you want to be just be happy in it. But if you are going to determine who is happier, for anything to go wrong for an optimist, he’s downtrodden. For anything to go right for a pessimist, he’s pleasantly surprised. Which one has the greater opportunity for happiness?
wy69
The writer is missing the whole trajectory of the message of Bible. Although chronicling mans interaction with God throughout history, it is the overwhelming good news of the redemption and salvation from certain death(vanity) through the advent, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
Why the writer chose to opine on our reactions to the futility of life(a well known phenomena) and leave out the best news in history is strange to me.
Bookmark
Bookmark.
Japanese Christian author Ayako Miura opened her first Bible to the middle, and it was Ecclesiastes. She was shocked that it was the only religious writing she knew that was honest about how futile life is, and that compelled her to read the rest of the Bible and eventually submit to Christ.
For me Optimism and Pessimism = Hope + Caution = if it goes right then take the next step. If it goes wrong keep trying till it goes right (but don’t flog a dead horse).
Be better tomorrow than you are today.
We were supposed to be wiped out during the Cold War. Reagan - possibly the last traditional President we had - effectively snuffed that last real and great threat.
Since then, the media-industrial complex fomented fear over Saddam Hussain and his WMD, terrorism next door, and Covid=Black Death. Parenthetically, converting your two-year old girl to a boy is fine, rioters in 2020 didn’t have to wear masks - it’s science, and abortion is healthcare. Meanwhile, Antifa, Occupy Wall Street jack wagons, pediatricians, educators, and other assorted losers have soaked up the oxygen on social media to push the latest boogeyman.
As a small side note, if you do the research, threads that trigger outrage get more comments than otherwise.
The writer isn’t advocating for ignorance, blah blah blah. He’s advocating for not being a useful idiot. “Once you stop being shocked by human folly, you free up an enormous amount of energy. You become harder to manipulate. Outrage merchants, selling their rage bait, lose their grip on you.”
It’s an idea worth pursuing.
“It’s an idea worth pursuing.”
Unfortunately in the words of P.T. Barnum, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” And there seems to be a steady supply of them called democrats.
And they always think it is better to get something for nothing for these people. Bet if you told them they could fly by themselves by flapping their arms, they’d vote for you. The only ways to correct that is get rid of liars or democrats. (Carbon copy)
wy69
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