溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
While Building a Bigger Barn for Tomorrow, What Remains If Tonight Was Never Counted?
Is the plan to build a bigger barn for a bumper harvest true wisdom for the future, or an illusion that left death out of the reckoning?
Fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared — whose will they be?
This parable became a landmark case that made the accumulation of wealth confront the finitude of death head-on. Early Church Fathers read it as a warning against material accumulation in general. Stoic philosophers reached a similar conclusion without any religious coloring — Seneca held that living always with death in view (memento mori) was true wisdom. The Eastern Ecclesiastes arrives at the same place with its lament of "vanity of vanities." Across cultures and religions alike, accumulation that leaves death out of the reckoning has repeatedly been named folly.
In an age when retirement planning and asset management are major life tasks, this parable — asking whether finitude has a place within those plans — remains as sharp as ever.
A rich man, blessed with a bumper harvest, resolves to tear down his barns, build bigger ones, and settle in to eat, drink, and be merry for many years.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
A rich man, blessed with a bumper harvest, resolves to tear down his barns, build bigger ones, and settle in to eat, drink, and be merry for many years. But that very night, his life is demanded of him. I do not read this parable as condemning saving or planning itself. The problem is that his plan left out exactly one variable: death. Preparing for tomorrow, and forgetting that today could be the last, are two different things. I too check today whether my own plans leave room for finitude.
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