“Therefore I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labour which I took under the sun.”
Qohelet's turning away from his accomplishments, his heart yielding to despair at the thought of laboring only to leave the results to another, captures the psychological weight of futility. When the causal chain connecting effort to lasting result snaps, when one recognizes that one's labor will feed another's convenience, motivation collapses. Yet despair itself becomes labor; Qohelet continues to think, to question, to articulate his nihilism, suggesting that even the recognition and expression of vanity requires ongoing engagement with life.
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