12/03/2025
Over on Substack, I'm thinking about spiritual perspectives on desire, and how avoiding desire is not necessarily the way:
"When I turned forty, I felt curious to reread Ecclesiastes. I’d read it once or twice in my life, and had little appreciation for it, but this time I thought, “Wow, this guy really gets it!” You might read it as a profoundly cynical text that decries the emptiness of all pursuits in life, and yet it is also a deeply humbling and confronting wisdom about all we really have while we live. A younger me read books like this thinking the writer was encouraging one to renounce all pleasure and desire to become a spiritual person. These days, I find a different nuance. To get to that, first I want to offer my reading:
So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless.
Ecclesiastes 2:20-23
There is a subtlety in this passage threaded throughout the book that suggests different possibilities. The refrain of meaninglessness (translated in some versions as “vanity”) here suggests that for all of one’s efforts and good works in life, eventually they are lost to us. In life, every effort to make something of ourselves, grow wealth, become wise or beautiful, eventually must be abandoned in death and accomplishes nothing for us in the end."
