Precedented Days: A Substack on the Book of Ecclesiastes

Isn't everything terrible? The planet is on fire, actual Nazis are running the government, the minimum wage hasn't gone up for decades, social media and far-right media publish lies all day long and nobody holds them to account. Everything is terrible, right? What happened? How did everything get so terrible?

It turns out that actually everything has always been terrible. The rich use their wealth to gain power and use that power to gain more wealth, all the while destroying the lives of ... everyone else. 

People work hard, do everything right, have all the right experience, and then the job goes to the boss's nephew. The fastest runner is leading and then a slow runner, a lap down, steps on her heel.

As Qoheleth, the voice behind the biblical book Ecclesiastes, said a couple thousand years ago, "The heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead." That's Ecclesiastes 9:3, so perhaps we weren't as clever as we thought ourselves for saying in the 1980s, "Life's a bitch and then you die." So there is nothing new under the sun. Oh, that's from Ecclesiastes too, by the way (it's 1:9, if you're wondering).

Anyhow, Precedented Days is a Substack I'm writing about Ecclesiastes and its dour main speaker, Qoheleth. I think Ecclesiastes is the book you need right now to endure These Terrible Days™. For more than a decade I've been researching, reading, and talking to people about Ecclesiastes, and I think turning regularly to Ecclesiastes will help you. 

Ecclesiastes is the disgusted, angry, pissed-off, dope slap of a love letter to our heartbreakingly disappointing world that every one of us needs to remind us: life has always been hard; shitheads have always stolen our resources from us and then tried to sell them back to us. We're not so special: it's always been hard. So maybe we can cope too. Anyhow people have been coping for millennia. Read Precedented Days for some perspective.