There is a tale told of a craftsman named Matthias. Day after day, he carved wood into furniture, tables, chairs, and cabinets. His hands were skilled, his pieces beautiful, but he felt increasingly estranged from them. The merchant who bought his work sold it for great profit, while Matthias barely made enough to feed his family. Worse, he knew that when he died, the fruit of his labor would pass to others who neither knew his struggle nor shared his love of the craft. Lying awake at night, his hands aching, he muttered to himself: Why do I work, if the work consumes me and leaves nothing behind?

“So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless.
So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune.
What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless.”
(Ecclesiastes 2:17–23, NIV)

Few passages speak so directly to the frustrations of work. Qoheleth unmasks what many prefer not to face: that toil consumes life, breeds anxiety, and leaves its fruits to others who may squander them. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestled with this paradox in his reflections on vocation. For him, work was meant as service, participation in God’s sustaining of creation. Yet he also knew that under sin and injustice, work becomes distortion: exploitation, drudgery, and the endless cycle of production without rest. Simone Weil, the mystic philosopher, captured the same tension. For her, work could be a path of attention, turning the soul toward reality and even toward God, but in practice, most laborers experience it as affliction, a force that crushes body and spirit.

Philosophers have long exposed the burdens hidden in labor. Karl Marx diagnosed alienation as the central wound of modern work: the worker becomes estranged from the product of labor, from the process of labor, from others, and finally from the very self. The craftsman Matthias feels this alienation keenly, his labor produces goods he cannot enjoy, wealth he does not share, and a life he no longer recognizes as his own. Hannah Arendt distinguished labor from work and action: labor as endless necessity (eating, producing, consuming), work as the making of durable things, and action as the realm of freedom. For her, the tragedy of modernity is that life collapses into labor, endless cycles of production that leave no lasting mark.

Qoheleth’s lament anticipates all this. What is crooked cannot be straightened, what is gained is lost, what is built is left behind. Camus saw in the myth of Sisyphus, the condemned man rolling a stone up a hill only to see it tumble back down, the essence of human labor. “His fate belongs to him,” Camus wrote, “his rock is his thing.” Toil is grief, and yet it is inescapable. Even in futility, Camus dared to imagine Sisyphus happy, finding dignity in revolt against the absurd.

But the Teacher’s words cut deeper than philosophy alone. Theologically, toil is cursed ground. In Genesis, humanity’s fall twists work from vocation into burden: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground” (Gen. 3:19). Ecclesiastes reflects that curse back to us, naming plainly what we often dress up with slogans about passion and productivity. And yet within Scripture, there are also glimpses of redemption. Bonhoeffer saw work not merely as curse but as service transformed by grace: in Christ, labor can again become vocation. Weil glimpsed holiness in attention to even the smallest task. The New Testament proclaims that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58), but that promise only makes sense because, under the sun, labor so often feels vain.

In our own age, Matthias’s lament is multiplied in the gig worker, the factory hand, the office employee chained to the 24/7 email cycle. Burnout has become a defining disease of modern life. Sociologists note that workers often find themselves tethered to jobs that consume their identity without providing stability or meaning. Even the privileged professional discovers that “work-life balance” is elusive; toil colonizes the mind even in sleep. “At night their minds do not rest,” Qoheleth observes, and every weary insomniac nods in recognition.

What, then, is to be learned here? Not the abandonment of work, since to live is to labor, but a sober clarity about its limits. Marx reminds us that alienation is real and structural, not merely individual weakness. Arendt reminds us that we must seek realms beyond necessity, spaces of freedom and creativity. Bonhoeffer reminds us that work, however distorted, can still serve neighbor and creation. Weil reminds us that even afflicted labor can be offered as attention, a sacrifice of presence. Camus reminds us that revolt against futility itself can dignify toil.

The takeaway point is this: you cannot escape toil, but you can refuse to let toil be your god. If you expect work to secure meaning, you will be disappointed. If you treat labor as service, as participation in something beyond yourself, you may glimpse dignity even in futility. And if you remember that your labor’s fruits will pass away, you may learn to hold them lightly, not anxiously. Qoheleth does not hide the grief of work, he insists on it. But he also leaves open the possibility that grief can be borne truthfully, neither denied nor idolized.

Matthias’s story ends, as all such stories do, not with escape but with recognition. His hands still ache. His work still passes into others’ hands. But he no longer expects it to secure immortality. Instead, he learns to see his labor as what it is: fleeting, heavy, yet capable of being offered. And perhaps that is Ecclesiastes’ strange wisdom: to teach us that work is not salvation, but service. To see this clearly is not despair, but the beginning of freedom.