A child on a beach builds a castle below the tide line. The tide is not a secret. Even the child can see the water coming. The castle gets built anyway, with total seriousness, moats and walls and a stick for a flag, and when the wave takes it the child grieves for one minute and starts again, or goes to dinner. The adults in the folding chairs call this innocence. It is closer to wisdom, and most of them lost it somewhere between that beach and a mortgage.
What the adults have instead are two industries. The first sells denial: productivity, optimization, life run as a project that could be completed if the system were good enough. Its customer has a system for everything, and the system has a system. Sleep is scored, steps are counted, the year is planned to the quarter and the quarter to the week. None of it is foolish on its own. Together it is a bet that a life managed closely enough will hold still. The second sells distraction. Its customer has no system at all and does not need one. He has a screen, and the screen is always on, and the evening goes wherever evenings go. Nobody planned to spend a decade this way. Nobody had to.
They look like opposites. One is all discipline and the other is all release. They are the same business. Both are profitable, both are respectable, and both sell one product, which is not looking. They compete for the same customer, who is anyone who has noticed that the steam comes off the cup and would rather not watch it go. They also feed each other. A day of scoring everything ends on the couch with the screen, and a night on the couch ends with a promise to score everything tomorrow.
It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.
That is a strange line from a writer who also says eat your bread with joy, until you see what he is doing with the funeral. He is sending you there to practice. The house of mourning is the one room where the vapor is visible and nobody is selling anything, and the living lay it to heart there, which is to say they get ready. Both industries fail in the same place, and it is not the wasted evenings. It is the unreadiness. The vapor waits. It shows up at the scan result, at the graveside, on the morning the last kid drives away, and the customer who spent thirty years not looking meets it with no practice at all. The dashboard has no metric for it. The screen has no channel for it.
The alternative is not a third industry, and it is not a better attitude. It is the child at the tide line. The castle was never the point. The building was. Somewhere in the middle years most of us reverse the two and start mourning castles in advance instead of building anything at all: the trip deferred until the market settles, the toast deferred until it can be perfect, the reconciliation deferred until the other party moves first, the joy deferred, always, until the conditions firm up. The conditions never firm up. The Preacher's word for the conditions is vapor.
David Gibson, who wrote one of the most useful short books on Ecclesiastes, calls the book's central move this: life is gift, not gain. Take it one step further. Life is gift, not guarantee. There is no contract that says the cup will be refilled, or that the friend will be at the table next year, or that your body will keep doing what it does. A surprising share of adult unhappiness is negotiation for that contract, conducted under the name of prudence. Prudence has its place. The fantasy underneath it, that enough planning converts gift into guarantee, does not. Nothing converts. The gift stays revocable, which is exactly what makes receiving it every day a serious act instead of a soft one.
So build the castle. Know the tide is coming, the way the child knows, and build it with total seriousness anyway, moats and walls and the stick for a flag. When the wave takes it, grieve for one minute. Then start again, or go to dinner.