Everything I build will be forgotten in fifty years. How am I supposed to care about my daily work?

“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

The Preacher has spent twelve chapters demonstrating that pleasure, work, wisdom and wealth all fail to hold weight on their own, and he never softens it. Then he closes the argument with a conclusion reached after everything has been examined rather than before. It is the settled verdict of a man who genuinely followed the emptiness all the way down and came back up.

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”

Paul writes this at the very end of his long argument about resurrection, and the word therefore is doing serious work. Because the dead are raised, present effort is not simply swallowed by time. He applies the most cosmic doctrine in the letter to the most ordinary thing imaginable: keep working. Permanence, on his account, comes from resurrection rather than from being remembered.