As a writer, David Foster Wallace is probably best known for his gargantuan novel Infinite Jest—the copiously footnoted book many fans have started but struggled to finish.
But I first encountered Wallace through his essays. In college, I spent many evenings veering between audible belly laughter and choking back tears while absorbing classics like “Consider the Lobster” or “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.”
Bobby Jamieson’s new book Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness transported me back to those days. In particular, it called to mind one of my favorite Wallace essays, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again.”
The “fun” thing that Wallace had found disappointing was spending time aboard a cruise ship, an experience he chronicled in 1996 for Harper’s Magazine. The essay is both hysterical and moving in its anthropological insights. After cataloging the ship’s dizzying list of delights—the food, fashion, festivities, and the like—he asks a passing but vital question: “Is this enough? At the time it didn’t seem like enough.”
Summarizing his time aboard a floating paradise, Wallace writes:
There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair.
Something of that same paradox—existential despair amid bountiful sources of delight—comes through in the question Jamieson, a pastor and author, poses at the outset of Everything Is Never Enough: “Shouldn’t you be happier?” Given all the blessings life has to offer—especially in advanced Western societies—the answer might seem obvious. Yet Ecclesiastes is relentless in proclaiming that none of it brings lasting satisfaction.
Jamieson will not leave his readers to wallow in despair, however. His book, built upon the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, delivers on the promise of its subtitle by offering a path toward resilient happiness in an unhappy world.
Throughout the book, Jamieson proves an invaluable guide to navigating a confusing and often dispiriting ancient text. In particular, he distinguishes himself in three ways: by clarifying the structure of Ecclesiastes, by articulating a deep understanding of human happiness, and by keeping Christ’s redemptive work firmly in view.
First, consider Jamieson’s exegetical blueprint for Ecclesiastes. Biblical scholars often disagree on how to interpret this book, even on basic matters like establishing the author, determining when it was written, and mapping its basic contours—to say nothing of the enigmatic pronouncements that fill its pages.
To understand Ecclesiastes, Jamieson argues, we should envision a three-story building. On each floor, we confront different questions, emphases, and views of the world. Everything Is Never Enough follows this three-story model, with the first 11 chapters examining the first floor, the next eight heading upstairs, and two climactic chapters giving the view from the top.
In Jamieson’s telling, Qohelet—the mysterious figure commonly credited with writing Ecclesiastes—remains on the first floor for most of the book. Here, his “far-seeing eyes take in the whole of human life,” as he “weighs the merits of work, sex, food and drink, wealth, power, and many other possible sources of meaning and satisfaction. He finds them all wanting and pronounces them all ‘absurd.’ ”
Qohelet only ascends to the second floor on a handful of occasions—“seven, to be precise,” as Jamieson argues. Here, he “surveys the same territory, considering many of the same subjects.” Yet “he sees something astonishingly different.” Certain things that had struck him as absurd on the ground floor are now revealed to be gifts worth savoring.
The third floor is visited even more rarely. As Jamieson writes, Qohelet “comes here only a few times, gives no warning before he does, and never stays long.” After venturing upstairs, he returns with “two crucial reference points: one, fear God because, two, he is going to judge all that you do and all that everyone ever does.”
Just as a three-story building remains intact even as the individual stories have different layouts and afford different views, the perspectives of Ecclesiastes cohere despite the outward tension between them. We learn something about the inherent limits of earthly life. We learn something about the gifts of contentment—and even the joy—we can experience within those limits. What holds it all together is the importance of fearing God, who reveals himself as the sole source of durable satisfaction through the limits and gifts alike.
As he guides readers through Ecclesiastes, story by story, Jamieson exhibits a mature and nuanced view of human happiness. This stands in stark contrast to the shallowness that pervades so many visions of the good life in contemporary culture.
To see this shallowness on full display, simply browse the self-help section of an average bookstore. The titles housed there often rely on upbeat exhortations and tidy formulas, avoiding any kind of deeper reflection on the good, the true, and the beautiful. By presenting happiness as easily within our grasp, such books set us up for disappointment when securing their promises proves harder than expected.
Everything Is Never Enough does not suffer from such shallowness. In one especially moving chapter titled “Enough,” Jamieson gets readers to consider one important reason we struggle to find happiness in this life. In short, God has planted desires within us that this life can’t fulfill. As Jamieson writes:
The problem with stuffing the vastness of eternity into the cramped compartment of the human heart is that it doesn’t fit. What God has put inside us guarantees an enduring mismatch between what we want and what this world can give…. The human heart is pierced with a hole that lets in the infinite. That is why all the finite goods that our toil gains fail to satisfy.
Jamieson’s insistence on the futility of our quests for happiness can bring about a measure of disenchantment. Occasionally, I found myself frustrated by sections in the book about the first floor of Ecclesiastes, where everything—money, sex, power, you name it—is judged worthless and absurd. Jamieson’s gloomy refrain—“It will not satisfy”—can grow wearying.
Overcome by exasperation, you might exclaim, “Fine, I get it. These things will not ensure happiness. So what will?” But here is where we encounter the beautiful irony of Everything Is Never Enough: By continually bumping up against these dead ends, we open ourselves to the possibility of paths we hadn’t considered.
Only after the book left me thoroughly discontented could it finally turn on some lights in my soul. If it seems repetitive, then this is a mark in its favor. Your soul needs to have the point driven home: The things of this world will ultimately come up short, even if—as the second-floor perspective reveals—they are good.
Once you recognize the absurdity of obtaining happiness on your own terms, you can appreciate another ironic lesson Jamieson emphasizes: Happiness can never be earned or bought. It can only be received. In each of the first 11 chapters, which spend pages unfolding the disheartening reality of what won’t lead to lasting happiness, he offers a sentence or two suggesting what will.
A few examples illustrate how Jamieson reframes happiness as something we receive from God, who gives from the plenitude of his own life.
About the ideal of control, he writes, “Happiness comes not from controlling your life but from realizing that everything you care about most is entangled with forces beyond your control.” About the pursuit of money: “Happiness comes not from building a contingency-proof cocoon of money around your life but from seeking and sharing what money can’t secure.” About the lure of power: “Happiness comes not from making it to the top but from love that won’t rise on the way up, fall on the way down, or desert you at the bottom.”
When we learn that “happiness can’t be taken by the world because it wasn’t given by the world,” we can laugh at the vanities and absurdities that might otherwise drive us to despair. And we can better appreciate that “every source of happiness in [our lives] is a comet, trailing celestial glory that discloses an origin beyond all [we] can see.”
I worry that some readers of Everything Is Never Enough will interpret Jamieson’s conclusion, titled “Pierced from Above,” as a “Jesus juke” of sorts—a cheap evangelistic trick that makes the book feel like a bait and switch. I will put it frankly: This is simply not true.
In fact, the book would be incomplete without it. Jamieson’s goal across his exploration of Ecclesiastes is to help us discover a depth of happiness this world cannot shake. To do that goal justice, Jamieson needs to make Ecclesiastes’ concerns his concerns.
Yet Ecclesiastes is not an isolated piece of literature. It is a vital book within a larger canon. We can’t grasp its full significance without following its echoes across the entire redemptive arc of Scripture. That arc, of course, bends toward fulfillment in Jesus Christ, who alone can offer the abundant blessings for which we yearn (John 10:10).
Up to this point in the book, Jamieson has convincingly argued that our hearts never wash up on the shore of satisfaction because they were built for infinity. Yet that insight could easily lead to hopelessness if not for an astonishing fact: Infinitude has taken on flesh and dwelt among us. Because of Christ, there is real hope that our hearts may find the rest that feels so out of reach.
In resolving the aching frustration that pervades so much of Ecclesiastes with the ultimate fulfillment found in Christ, Jamieson guides his readers to something far greater than temporal happiness. I feel confident that Qohelet himself would have been pleased with the outcome.
Ronni Kurtz is an assistant professor of systematic theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Light Unapproachable: Divine Incomprehensibility and the Task of Theology.
This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "You Should Be Happier".
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