I’ve always been fascinated by the book of Ecclesiastes. Here’s this strange little book of philosophy in the middle of the Bible. There’s nothing else like it. It almost reads like an existential manifesto. What is going on with this book? Why is it in the Bible? I was excited when I saw that Bobby Jamieson has a book coming out dealing with just those questions: Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness.

An Existential Enigma: The Philosophy of Ecclesiastes

“Everything is Never Enough”— the title alone is golden. It reminds me of Arcade Fire’s Everything Now album. The perennial problem in our consumeristic age is the more we have the more we want. The easier life is the easier we want it. I don’t know if that sentence works, but you get what I mean. We live in the age of anxiety (another Arcade Fire reference). People desperately search for meaning, but even when they think they’ve found it, it never feels like enough. Jamieson articulates the problem this way:

One of happiness’s many paradoxes is that you don’t get happy by aiming at happiness but by leading a life worth living. So the question “How can I be happy?” opens downward onto a deeper one: “What makes life worth living?”

Ecclesiastes explores what makes life worth living, yet it is such a strange book. The strangeness begins with the author who identifies only by a title: Qohelet (pronounced like “Go yell it,” according to Jamieson). This word refers to an activity—someone who makes a living speaking to groups. Many translate it as “teacher.” Now, the author does say he is a son of David and a king, so tradition says this is Solomon. We don’t know that for sure.

Qohelet’s Experiment: Testing Life’s Promises

Qohelet invites us into his experiential research project. He tests all the things we generally think will bring us happiness and make life great. You name it: work, pleasure, food, drink, money, knowledge. He explores everything in search of meaning and satisfaction.

Jamieson had me hooked with this sentence: “Ecclesiastes tries to convince you that many of this world’s most common promises are false friends and you should break up with them.” This isn’t a feel-good book. It’s a hard look at why we struggle to find happiness. Guess what? The problem is largely in ourselves. As my pastor @ChaseHinson ofter says, it’s a bad news / good news proposition. You get the bad news first.

Jamieson writes:

We long for permanence, but life proves fleeting; we desire wholeness, but the world stays broken; we crave satisfaction, but our appetites always rebound. This aspect of absurdity is a problem not only with the world but with us.

The Three Floors of Life: From Absurdity to Divine Insight

He uses a great metaphor to describe Ecclesiastes. He calls it a three-story building. Qohelet spends most of the book on the first floor looking out the windows with a limited view of all the elements of life. He declares everything hevel or absurd. “Vanities of vanities! All is vanity!” (Ecc 1:2)

What does he mean that everything is absurd? Again, this sounds a lot like existential philosophy. In fact, Jamieson quotes existentialist Albert Camus who calls the tension and hostility between the self and the reality of the world “the absurd.” We personally want things a certain way, and the world is indifferent to what we want. It often does the opposite.

According to sociologist Hartmut Rosa, the central drive of modernity is to “make the world engineerable, predictable, available, accessible, disposable … in all its aspects.” In a word, controllable. We want to control everything, down to the temperature of the room I’m in as I write and the one you’re in as you read… The compounding discoveries of science serve mastery. We want to know so that we can control.

Jamieson goes on to explain that it is this desire for control that aches within us. Qohelet comes to realize this on the ground floor of Ecclesiastes. We certainly feel this today. As humanity advances scientifically and technologically, we increasingly struggle with anxiety, despair, and anger. Mental health issues have skyrocketed.

There are many variables involved, but perhaps the deepest is this desire we have to control the uncontrollable. Of course, this goes all the way back to the garden and chapter 3 of Genesis. We want to be God for ourselves. We want to be in control, but no matter how much you prepare or how much you learn, you can’t control the ultimate outcome.

You may not get the job even though you’re the most qualified. You may not win the match even though you trained the hardest. You may not stay healthy even though you ate all the right things. Bad things may happen to you even though you were morally upright. And as Jim Morrison said, “No one here gets out alive.” You certainly won’t live forever.

The modern world teaches us that we are the captains of our ship. We tell our kids you can do anything and go anywhere. Jamieson writes, “But you’re not the captain; you’re not even on the boat. In the end, you’re a fish in the ship’s net.”

Qohelet systematically tries gain, work, knowledge, pleasure, money, time, power, death, and satisfaction itself. Jamieson dedicates a chapter to each of these. There was so much gold I felt like highlighting entire chapters at once. He highlights how Ecclesiastes is so applicable to our culture.

What does Qohelet learn on the ground floor? “So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is absurd and a striving after wind.” (Ecc 2:17) Everything is absurd to the point that he hates life. A few verses later he says he gives up his heart to despair because all his labor equates to nothing. What an encouragement, right? Remember, we have to get the bad news before we get the good news.

Jamieson writes, “The more you expect to be able to control, the more you will resent the uncontrollable.” This is where Qohelet is after doing his research on the ground floor. Don’t we get frustrated when things don’t go the way we think they should go? How about when people don’t do what we know they should do? We want to scream, “Just do what I told you!” Yet, that’s not where we will find happiness.

Jamieson goes on to say:

A masterful sunrise; a series-winning shot; a look that says all you need to hear; hearing, live, the opening chords of your favorite song: None of these would cause the skin on the back of your neck to tingle if they lacked the uncontrollable. You can’t control the sun, the shot, the look, the song. If you could, their meaning would splatter then disappear, like water from a burst balloon.

He goes on:

Letting go of control is like taking a deep gulp of air after you’ve held your breath too long. Happiness comes not from controlling your life but from realizing that everything you care about most is entangled with forces beyond your control.

Qohelet moves to the second floor of Ecclesiastes. Here his view has changed a little. He can see a little better from this vantage point. Life may be absurd, but it is still a gift. Gifts are meant to be enjoyed.

Qohelet realizes that we are to enjoy what God has given us, but we are to enjoy it in the moment. He goes through food and drink, toil, wealth, portion, marriage, and what Jamieson calls resonance. Each has its own short chapter in Everything is Never Enough.We are to enjoy these as gifts, not as ends themselves. That is often what we struggle with. We end up worshipping the gift instead of the giver.

Here’s an example from the chapter on toil:

The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.

We are to find enjoyment in work, not from it. We should get enjoyment from craftsmanship, effort, and a job well done. However, work is not meant to be our identity. This is true of everything that Qohelet surveys from the second floor. We are not meant to find our identity in the gifts of life. They are temporary. They should point us to the gift giver who is eternal. That is where we will find true happiness.

Beyond Control: Embracing God’s Sovereignty

Qohelet finally makes it to the third floor of Ecclesiastes. He spends the least amount of time at this level, but he can see the clearest from this height. What does he see? God is sovereign over all. We are not in control, but he is. If control is the thing we desire most, we would do well to fear him.

Qohelet surveyed all and judged it all absurd: We can neither understand nor control it. But the creator of all, by definition, both understands and controls all. The verdict of absurdity teaches us not only that the world is not all we wish it were but that we are not all we think we are. Only God is the creator, sustainer, and judge of all. Only he sees the whole tapestry because, ultimately, he is the one weaving it. Only he understands the whole story because, ultimately, he is the one telling it.

Jamieson uses the final chapters of Everything Is Never Enough to show that Qohelet’s ultimate lesson—drawn from his life’s experiment—is that if we fear and trust God, we have nothing else to fear. This is the good news. God entered the absurdity of this world by taking on human form as Jesus Christ. He suffered and took the absurdity to the cross so that we could experience the wholeness of God not just temporarily in this world, but fullness in eternity with him. That is where we will find happiness and satisfaction.

Bobby Jamieson’s writing is smart and engaging. I know it’s an odd thing to say, but he makes Ecclesiastes, a book of philosophy, exciting and accesible. His exposition of the scripture is insightful, and his analysis challenges readers to think deeply about their lives. I greatly enjoyed it.

I enjoy when a book takes a deep dive into a specific book of the Bible. Since Ecclesiastes is my favorite, I had high hopes for the book. The narrative felt a bit disjointed and repetitive at times. The style was written in a more stream of consciousness format, so for readers who are looking for that, they’ll like the conversational tone,