How do most people think of work? Most people think of work as something that you have to do, so that you can afford the things that you want to do. They work for the weekend. But the weekend is often just as hard, if not harder, at least for those with families. There are kids to raise, notoriously difficult and labor intensive. If it isn’t labor intensive then you are doing it wrong! There is a house and lawn to keep up. Don’t forget about the fact that all week, spouses have been able to avoid one another while one or both of them were working outside the home. Remember what God said about the curse on marriage? Will it be fun for the wife to have a “desire [that] shall be contrary to [her] husband?” It is potentially no fun for either one of them.
And so much of the work is in the hopes of gaining enough to spend on pleasures. But those pleasures always fall short of being worth the effort. When one lives for comfort and pleasure, the best part is the anticipation and the work to achieve them. Getting the comfort and pleasure is never as great as we anticipate that it will be. Why?
Because pleasure seeking is not actually what we’re made for.
Think about something pleasurable, like eating cake. Anticipating it is great. Smelling it is great. The first two or three bites are great. But the third through the seventy-fifth bites become increasingly not great. In fact, they start to impact our emotions negatively as we begin thinking about the pain that is coming, the weight that will be gained, the early death that we can expect if we keep doing this, how disgusted with ourselves we are for not stopping. If cake is not your thing, insert sex, drugs, alcohol, shopping, and you’ll see that emptiness and depression are the result of all of it. Right now in history is the worst time to be dealing with this, because we are so prosperous. If you didn’t have time for any of these things, because you spent all your time on toil in order to survive, you’d have other problems, but you wouldn’t have this one. The current age is the most dangerous in history in terms of having the time and resources to seek pleasure and comfort to our hearts content, which is actually impossible, though we are killing ourselves to learn that.
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