Vanity, wealth, expertise, and the quiet revolution of a life that actually matters

“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher, “vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” — Ecclesiastes 1:2

I have been thinking a great deal about institutions lately.

Perhaps grief does that to you.

Toward the end of my father's life, I spent more time than I ever wanted inside hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, nursing care, medical systems, insurance systems, and the bureaucracies surrounding them.

There were wonderful people inside those systems. Nurses who cared. CNAs who showed tenderness. Physicians who understood that the person lying in the bed was somebody's father.

Two things can be true at the same time.

There are extraordinary people practicing medicine in America.

And something about the system is profoundly broken.

The contradiction became difficult for me to ignore.

We live in one of the wealthiest civilizations in human history. Healthcare represents an enormous part of our economy. Hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, healthcare corporations, and investment interests generate staggering amounts of revenue.

And yet a family can still find itself standing beside the bed of someone they love, wondering:

Is anyone actually paying attention?

That question has haunted me.

Not simply because of what happened with my father, but because I began realizing that the same question could be asked almost everywhere.

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Is Anyone Actually Paying Attention?

Consider education.

People come from around the world to attend American universities.

We have institutions whose names themselves have become symbols of intellectual prestige.

Harvard.

Yale.

Princeton.

Stanford.

Degrees from these institutions can open doors around the world.

And yet we increasingly encounter highly credentialed people who know astonishingly little about the civilization that produced the institutions granting those credentials.

They may understand complicated financial models while knowing very little about Washington or Lincoln.

They may understand artificial intelligence while never having seriously wrestled with Augustine.

They may know how to build an algorithm but never have encountered Dostoevsky's question about what happens to humanity when everything becomes permissible.

We have confused education with credentialing.

Just as healthcare can confuse treatment with healing.

Just as philanthropy can confuse giving with goodness.

Just as wealth can confuse accumulation with wisdom.

These are not the same things.

And somewhere along the way, civilization began confusing the measurement with the meaning.

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We Were Warned

The strange thing is that none of this should surprise us.

The writers warned us.

George Orwell gave us 1984.

Aldous Huxley gave us Brave New World.

Alvin Toffler gave us Future Shock.

Ray Bradbury gave us Fahrenheit 451.

T. S. Eliot asked in The Rock:

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”

That may be one of the great questions of our age.

We have more information than any civilization in history.

More technology.

More universities.

More physicians.

More specialists.

More billionaires.

More data.

More ways of communicating.

And perhaps fewer people asking the ancient questions:

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What is enough?

What is good?

Who is God?

And what does my life owe the person standing beside me?

Those questions cannot be answered by an algorithm.

They cannot be purchased.

And they cannot be inherited.

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The Great Illusion of Wealth

There is another uncomfortable subject we need to discuss.

Generational wealth.

We tend to assume that wealth represents competence because, somewhere in its history, it often did.

Someone invented something.

Someone built something.

Someone took enormous risks.

Someone worked extraordinarily hard.

Someone created value.

But inherited wealth introduces an interesting human problem.

When you possess enough money, you can become remarkably insulated from the consequences of being wrong.

You do not necessarily have to become wiser.

You can hire wisdom.

You do not necessarily have to understand investments.

You can hire investment managers.

You do not have to understand taxes.

You hire accountants.

You do not have to understand the law.

You hire attorneys.

You do not even have to understand the businesses you own.

You can hire people for that too.

Money can therefore create one of the most dangerous illusions available to the human ego:

the illusion that because I possess much, I must understand much.

But possession and wisdom have never been synonymous.

Jesus understood this two thousand years ago.

So did Solomon.

So did the prophets.

So did the great writers.

Civilizations are not ultimately advanced by people who merely possess wealth.

Civilizations are advanced by people who possess wisdom, imagination, courage, truth, sacrifice, love and a willingness to give themselves to something larger than themselves.

Money can help accomplish those things.

But money cannot become those things.

That distinction matters enormously.

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The Ego Builds Monuments

This is where all these seemingly unrelated observations begin coming together for me.

Healthcare.

Education.

Wealth.

Philanthropy.

Politics.

Religion.

Corporations.

Even families.

They all suffer from the same ancient human disease.

The ego.

The ego wants recognition.

The ego wants control.

The ego wants security.

The ego wants its name on the building.

The ego wants the photograph of the oversized check.

The ego wants the honorary degree.

The ego wants the press release.

The ego wants everyone to know what it accomplished.

And here is where we must be careful, because two things can be true at the same time.

A person can give millions of dollars and accomplish tremendous good.

A hospital corporation can make billions and save thousands of lives.

A university can become enormously wealthy and educate remarkable people.

A corporation can pursue profit and create products that improve civilization.

The question is not whether good occurred.

The Soulprint question goes deeper:

What is happening inside the human soul while we are doing it?

Because Jesus repeatedly moved the conversation there.

He warned about practicing righteousness “to be seen by others.”

He spoke about giving without turning generosity into theater.

He warned that a person could gain the entire world and somehow lose himself.

That is an astonishing proposition.

You can win the game everyone else is playing—

and lose the only game that ultimately matters.

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Eventually the Piper Gets Paid

Ecclesiastes may be the most brutally honest book ever written about this.

The Teacher essentially conducts the experiment for us.

Pleasure.

Achievement.

Buildings.

Knowledge.

Money.

Possessions.

Status.

Power.

He tries the entire catalog.

And eventually he looks across everything human beings spend their lives accumulating and says:

Vanity of vanities.

Not because these things are necessarily evil.

That is important.

Because they cannot carry the weight of eternity we keep placing upon them.

Your résumé cannot.

Your bank account cannot.

Your university cannot.

Your corporation cannot.

Your reputation cannot.

Even your accomplishments cannot.

Eventually the piper gets paid.

Eventually somebody else occupies the office.

Somebody else lives in the house.

Somebody else controls the money.

Somebody else receives the title.

Somebody else decides what happens to everything you spent your lifetime trying to control.

Ecclesiastes asks the devastating question:

Then what was it all for?

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And Then My Father Died

That question became considerably less philosophical for me recently.

My father died.

And death has a remarkable ability to edit a man's résumé.

Standing near the end of someone's life, the things civilization teaches us to measure begin disappearing surprisingly quickly.

Nobody really cares about the titles anymore.

Nobody asks about last year's earnings.

Nobody cares about the organizational chart.

The scoreboard changes.

You remember conversations.

Kindness.

Stories.

Forgiveness.

Laughter.

Trips.

Mistakes.

Second chances.

The people someone helped when nobody was watching.

The grace they extended when grace was inconvenient.

And my father lived in a complicated world, just as all of us do.

He lived among egos.

He had one himself.

So do I.

So do you.

That is the human condition.

But what strikes me about Dad's life is that so much of what mattered about him cannot be entered onto a balance sheet.

He gave.

He encouraged.

He forgave.

He befriended people others might have overlooked.

He practiced his faith imperfectly but genuinely.

And he increasingly understood something our culture seems determined to forget:

Life is not ultimately about what you can accumulate. It is about what passes through you into the lives of others.

That is an entirely different accounting system.

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Jesus Proposed Another Civilization

This is why I remain fascinated by Jesus.

We have domesticated His teachings so thoroughly that we sometimes fail to recognize how radical they were.

Jesus proposed an entirely different measurement of human greatness.

Want to become great?

Serve.

Want to become first?

Become last.

Want to find your life?

Lose it.

Want to become rich?

Give.

Want to defeat your enemy?

Love him.

Want to understand power?

Look at a cross.

The entire architecture is inverted.

Because Jesus was not teaching the ego how to become religious.

He was teaching human beings how to live from the soul.

That distinction is at the heart of everything I call The Soulprint Project.

The ego asks:

How will this make me look?

The soul asks:

Whom will this help?

The ego asks:

What do I receive?

The soul asks:

What can I give?

The ego asks:

Who gets the credit?

The soul asks:

Does it matter who gets the credit if someone is healed?

The ego builds monuments.

The soul builds people.

And only one of those survives.

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Perhaps Our Institutions Need Soulprints Too

Maybe the crisis facing our civilization is not fundamentally political, financial, educational or medical.

Perhaps those are merely places where a deeper spiritual crisis becomes visible.

We have built institutions around purposes and gradually allowed the institutions themselves to become the purpose.

Healthcare exists to heal people.

Education exists to cultivate wisdom.

Business exists to create genuine value.

Government exists to serve people.

Religion exists to awaken us to God.

Wealth exists as a resource, not an identity.

When the institution forgets why it exists, the ego fills the vacuum.

Revenue replaces mission.

Prestige replaces learning.

Recognition replaces generosity.

Power replaces service.

Dogma replaces transformation.

And appearance replaces truth.

That happens to organizations for precisely the same reason it happens to human beings.

We forget who we are.

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Recovering the Soulprint

The Soulprint Project begins with a simple but revolutionary proposition:

You were created in the image of God.

Before your résumé.

Before your bank account.

Before your degrees.

Before your mistakes.

Before anyone applauded you.

Before anyone rejected you.

There was something placed within you that cannot be purchased, inherited, credentialed or manufactured.

Your Soulprint.

The spiritual journey is therefore not primarily about constructing a more impressive version of yourself.

It is about stripping away everything false until the person God intended begins appearing again.

And perhaps civilization needs the same awakening.

Perhaps hospitals must remember healing.

Universities must remember wisdom.

Churches must remember Christ.

Wealth must remember stewardship.

Families must remember love.

And individuals must remember their souls.

Because eventually Ecclesiastes comes for every empire.

Every fortune.

Every institution.

Every one of us.

Vanity of vanities.

Everything the ego desperately attempts to preserve eventually slips through its fingers.

But something remains.

A life touched.

A burden carried.

A stranger welcomed.

A child encouraged.

An enemy forgiven.

A frightened person comforted.

A hungry person fed.

A grieving person embraced.

A human being who discovered God partly because another human being loved them.

These things appear terribly small on civilization's balance sheet.

Jesus called them eternal.

And perhaps that is the final lesson my father left me.

In the complicated maze of human egos, institutions, money, families, ambitions and disappointments, the most important question was never:

How much did you accumulate?

It was:

What became more alive because you were here?

That is the question of the soul.

That is the question of eternity.

And that is the question at the heart of The Soulprint Project.

The art of learning to live perfectly imperfect lives.