Happiness is about now. Meaning is often about our reflections on the past, the commitments we make in the present, and the way that we think about and shape the future.40 Happiness, however, can never replace meaning.

It appears more of a finessed rationalization of decades of acquisitive pursuits justified as if they were all part of a test rather than an expression of unbridled material desire that, from the very start, could bring nothing but enjoyment. After all, the experiment was not bound by any demonstrable time in which to question if materialism could

Kohelet is the Hebrew Bible’s textual memento mori; the words are the author’s sacred canvas.

How persistent and reliable can memory be when the time that anchors our memories is itself warped?

“Death is that inevitable occasion in life, when all of our pretenses are punctured, when all our illusions are laid bare, and all that we have thought is so terribly important now appears in the blue and dismal light of havel havalim, the vanity of vanities.”

Once you make peace with just being a lump of meat on a rock, you can stop stressing and appreciate the rock itself.

The myth of our own resourcefulness repeats itself on an endless loop,

We are here now to enjoy life’s pleasures now, a sentiment reinforced by biblical verses that remind us not to wait for gratification because it may soon be eclipsed by random terror: “Because you would not serve the Lord your God in joy and gladness over the abundance of everything, you shall have to serve – in hunger and thirst, naked and lacking

Money, in their world, was an instrument to support a transformative occupation and to feed an addiction, indeed a compulsion, to live on a higher spiritual plane.