A Reflective Essay

I usually dedicate the first 60 minutes of my waking hours to a strict daily routine: make my bed, perform the usual bathroom rituals, drink lukewarm water with Himalayan salt, meditate and pray, exercise lightly for 10 to 15 minutes with Gospel songs playing in the background, and then, for the final activity, read for at least 10 minutes—or whatever remains of that first hour.

Phones and other gadgets are off-limits.

Yesterday morning, I reached for my 30-year-old Bible and read Ecclesiastes. It is a Devotional Study Bible, New International Version, that a pastor friend gave us as a wedding gift. I even brought it with me when I came to South Korea in 2013.

I opened the Bible to page 569. Before the first chapter of Ecclesiastes was a two-page introduction. I intended to skip it and go directly to the first verse, but its title ambushed my attention:

“When Life Seems Senseless.”

So I read on.

One paragraph told Howard Hughes’s story. It contrasted the poor who imagine that more money would make them happy with Hughes, one of the richest men in the world, who eventually withdrew from society and spent his later years secluded in darkened hotel rooms. It described his long hair and beard, overgrown fingernails, and emaciated body.

Honestly, in that instant, I could not recall anything about Howard Hughes. For a moment, I even wondered whether he was a fictitious character used simply to illustrate the lesson.

My curiosity got the better of my gadget-free morning rule. I had to know who this man was.

So I reluctantly reached for my phone and asked Gemini:

“Is Howard Hughes a fictitious character?”

Gemini promptly doused my ignorance with a bucketful of information. For a moment, I felt as though the AI application were telling me:

How can you know nothing about this great man, you stupid moron?

Then something clicked.

The Aviator.

Leonardo DiCaprio. Howard Hughes.

Suddenly, I remembered. I had actually watched the movie, and some of my students had even used it for their movie reviews in my literature class back in the Philippines.

The Martin Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio was based on Hughes’ life. Suddenly, the miserable recluse described in my Bible’s introduction acquired another identity: aviator, filmmaker, businessman, engineer, risk-taker, record-setter—a complicated and extraordinarily accomplished human being. The man I had wondered about only moments earlier might be a fictitious character, but he suddenly emerged as an almost larger-than-life figure. Hughes had set aviation records and contributed to aircraft development long before he became best known for the eccentricity and isolation of his final years.

And then another question occurred to me:

What happened between those two Howard Hugheses?

The introduction had told me about his enormous wealth at the beginning and his miserable condition near the end. But it had said almost nothing about the road between them.

That omission bothered me.

Perhaps the writer simply wanted Hughes to illustrate one of the central themes associated with Ecclesiastes: worldly wealth, achievement, and pleasure cannot guarantee meaning or happiness. Hughes certainly makes a powerful example. He possessed extraordinary wealth and accomplishment, yet neither protected him from suffering.

But a human life becomes dangerously easy to moralize when we remove its middle.

In 1946, while test-flying the experimental XF-11 reconnaissance aircraft, Hughes crashed into a residential area in Beverly Hills. He was pulled from the wreckage in critical condition. The accident was only one part of a complicated life, but it was no trivial footnote.

His later years were marked by worsening isolation, poor nutrition, heavy drug use, and deteriorating physical and psychological health.

Does the crash explain everything that happened to Howard Hughes afterward?

Probably not.

And this is precisely where I must be careful not to commit the same mistake I am criticizing. It would be unfair to replace one simplified Howard Hughes with another—to turn “the miserable billionaire” into “the great man destroyed entirely by one accident.”

Human beings are rarely that simple.

Hughes had his flaws. His psychological difficulties were complex. His wealth, power, personality, physical suffering, medications, relationships, choices, and circumstances all belonged to the same human story.

But that is exactly the point.

The whole story matters.

The introduction reduced that complicated story to an effective contrast: a man had tremendous wealth and nevertheless ended his life miserably.

As a sermon illustration, it works.

As an account of a human being, it leaves me uneasy.

There is a difference between saying something untrue and telling only the part of the truth that serves our argument. The passage about Hughes may not have lied about him. But by omitting important context, it made his decline appear almost like the inevitable moral consequence of wealth itself.

And perhaps that teaches a lesson quite different from the one the writer intended.

When we use real people’s lives to illustrate moral or spiritual truths, we owe those people fairness—even when they are long dead.

Their suffering should not become merely a convenient prop for our argument.

This realization also changed the way I looked at the pages in front of me.

I had initially thought: How ironic that a Bible should contain something I find so incomplete.

But then I realized that I needed to make another distinction.

The introduction was not Ecclesiastes.

It was not Scripture.

It was commentary written by a human being to help readers approach Scripture. Like every piece of human commentary—including this essay—it carries the writer’s choices, limitations, interpretations, and assumptions.

Perhaps that is another reason we should read carefully.

Not cynically.

Not suspiciously.

But carefully.

Faith does not require us to surrender critical thought. If anything, a commitment to truth should make us more reluctant to accept a convenient story simply because it supports a conclusion we already agree with.

And ironically, learning more about Hughes did not weaken the message of Ecclesiastes for me.

It deepened it.

Howard Hughes possessed things most people spend their lives pursuing: money, fame, influence, achievement, adventure. He flew aircraft others would not dare fly. He made movies. He built businesses. He broke records. Yet none of those things could make him invulnerable.

But perhaps the lesson is not simply:

Look at Howard Hughes. He was rich, and still he was miserable.

Perhaps the more compassionate lesson is:

Look at Howard Hughes. He was powerful, accomplished, wealthy—and still painfully human.

Money could not protect his body from injury.

Achievement could not guarantee peace.

Power could not make him immune to illness, dependency, isolation, or mortality.

And neither can ours.

That, to me, is closer to the haunting wisdom of Ecclesiastes.

Not that achievement is worthless.

Not that wealth inevitably corrupts.

Not that ambition makes life meaningless.

But that none of them can bear the weight of becoming the meaning of life itself.

Yesterday morning, I opened my old Bible intending simply to read Ecclesiastes.

Instead, before reaching its first verse, I found myself reading about Howard Hughes, reluctantly reaching for my phone despite my gadget-free rule, consulting artificial intelligence, remembering The Aviator, investigating a plane crash, questioning a Bible commentary, and eventually questioning my own first conclusions.

Quite a detour before Chapter 1.

But perhaps not a meaningless one.

Because before Ecclesiastes could remind me that life is complicated, Howard Hughes already had.