In Ecclesiastes, the Teacher (1:2–12:7) tells us about his attempts at figuring out the good life. As far as he's concerned, there were two phases in his journey.

In the first phase (1:2–2:26) he had assumed that the good life would be something that he could gain for himself by grasping it, both in the sense of understanding it and in the sense of taking hold of it. However, at every turn he is prevented by hevel, a word variously translated as “vanity” (ESV), “meaninglessness” (NIV), or “futility” (NET), but which literally means “vapor”. As the Teacher uses the word, hevel is any feature of our life that frustrates our ability to grasp the good life for ourselves. In the first phase, when he was trying to do just that, the Teacher hit up against four sources of hevel that led him to abandon this approach: our limitation prevents us from being able to know or influence the course of events (1:12–18); despite how much we work or achieve we are always in a state of unrest (2:1–11); no matter how wise we are we die physically and in the memories of others (2:12–17); and the incongruity of life means that we can fail even when our skill or effort meant that we should have succeeded (2:18–23). Thus, when introducing this first phase, the Teacher declares that all our efforts to gain the good life by our own efforts will not bring progress, and that ultimately we will find nothing but hevel (1:2–11). And his takeaway from this phase is that we should approach the good life differently (2:24–26).

In the second phase (3:1–12:7), this is exactly what he does: instead of trying to gain the good life for himself, he chooses to receive the life God has already given him as the good life. Instead of working to find pleasure, he says, we should find pleasure in our daily toil. With this new perspective, he returns to the four sources of hevel, and shows that limitation (3:9–15), unrest (4–6), death (7:1–9:10), and incongruity (9:11–11:10) are not as problematic for the person who receives the good life from God as they are for the person who tries to gain the good life for themselves. Life is still full of hevel, but this doesn’t get in the way of accepting it as a gift from God. When introducing this second phase (3:1–8), his point is that just as everything has its time, so too are we to view our life as the time given to us by God. And his takeaway from this phase is that we should do our best to take pleasure in life and in God, before difficulties accumulate to the point where it’s impossible (12:1–7).