Ernest Hemingway, born in 1899, was the epitome of the twentieth-century man. At age 25 he sipped champagne in Paris, and later had well-publicized game hunts in Africa and hunted grizzly bears in America's northwest. At the age of sixty-one, after having it all—; wine, women, song, a distinguished literary career, Sunday afternoon bullfights in Spain; —Hemingway chose to end his life, leaving a note saying, "Life is one [expletive] thing after another."

Ecclesiastes says this is what seeking after ultimate meaning through pleasure is like. The writer wants us to wake up to this fact before we're sixty-one years old and realize too late that our lives have had no meaning and fulfillment.