No amount of wisdom can put us into a situation where we don’t die. The clock is always taking, for the wise in for the unwise.  The same could be said of hard work; we can’t work our way into eternity, and we certainly can’t save our own life.

The author makes is abundantly clear that living life for the simple sake of enjoyed it, living for the sake of being wise and being known as such, and living life with the purpose of working hard; all of this is “vanity”, or “chasing after the wind”.

In my world, my professional work, people come in all the time and it seems like there are two really common themes in the world of financial planning: reduce fees and taxes and avoid insurance.  In reality, what people want is to be able to live the life I wanna live, to enjoy it, and to know that if something happened to them the people they love will be taken care of. But those are hard things to define.  Most people spend more time brushing their teeth or picking out their clothes than they do sitting and thinking, and therefore, it’s not that they are stupid, they just have spent very little time considering how to get from point A to point B.  And when I asked about it, all I can come up with is avoiding fees and taxes and insurance, as if avoiding those things are the difference between success and failure. In 15 years I have never seen a story of someone being successful financially because they avoided fees and taxes and insurance; they are successful because they save more and spend less.  And because they don’t think about it, they spend all their time trying to avoid fees and taxes and insurance, and they miss the point.

This reminds me, what the author here in Ecclesiastes is writing, of this phenomenon in my professional life. Wisdom is good, hardwork is good, I hope the level of self indulgence is good… But those should be viewed as tools leveraged in having a great life, not a goal.  These tools can’t be seen as being “the point” of life - THAT is the point I believe the author is making.