Vanity

Rather than enjoyment being man's great motivating passion, envy and ambition really are the driving force behind his activity.

"Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man's envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind." {Eccl 4:4 RSV}

How accurately this records what is happening in human history! People really do not want things, they want to be admired for the things they have. What they want is not the new car itself, but to hear their neighbors say, "How lucky you are to have such a beautiful car!" That is what people want -- to be the center, the focus of attention.

The drive to be admired is the true objective of life. This too "is vanity and a striving after wind."
Sometimes, however, when people become aware of this they flip over to the opposite extreme: they drop out of society, they get out of the rat race, they go on relief and let the government support them. We saw a lot of that kind of reaction here in California ten years ago. Young people, particularly, were then saying, "We don't want to be a part of the rat race any more; we don't want to strive to be admired. We'll drop out of society." But that is not the answer either.

"The fool folds his hands, and eats his own flesh." {Eccl 4:5 RSV}

Many young people who were part of the youth revolution, the counter culture society of a few years ago, have found this to be true: that when you sit in idleness you devour yourself, your resources disappear, your self respect vanishes. They had to learn the painful lesson that the only way to maintain themselves, even physically, let alone psychologically, was to go to work and stop devouring themselves.

It would be much better to lower your expectations and choose a less ambitious lifestyle.

"Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind." {Eccl 4:6 RSV}

Yet so powerful is ambition and the desire to be envied that men actually keep working and toiling even when they have no one to leave their riches to.

"Again, I saw vanity under the sun: a person who has no one, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil, and his eyes are never satisfied with riches, so that he never asks, 'For whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure?' This also is vanity and an unhappy business." {Eccl 4:7-8 RSV}