Pleasure-Seeking as the Root of Poverty

According to Joseph S. Exell's commentary on Proverbs 20:17, the love of pleasure stands as "the secret of the failure of nine-tenths of our unsuccessful young men." The wise man identifies pleasure—particularly when pursued as hedone (self-gratification)—as fundamentally opposed to material and spiritual prosperity.

Exell distinguishes between legitimate happiness, which is a "necessity of our nature and a positive duty," and the destructive pursuit of voluptuousness and carnality that the Bible condemns. The margin reading—"He that loveth sport shall be a poor man"—reveals how even seemingly innocent amusements become ruinous when pursued inordinately.

Self-indulgence operates through two mechanisms of impoverishment. First, it demands extravagance of expenditure: pleasure becomes "an expensive divinity" upon whose altar the largest fortunes are sacrificed. Second, it cultivates laziness. The self-indulgent person becomes such a lover of ease that the spirit of industry forsakes him entirely.

Exell notes that material poverty follows naturally from such choices, but the deeper tragedy is intellectual and spiritual poverty. A business leader of his era observed that only three of every hundred entering mercantile life achieve success; the failures stem from causes "within the young men's own control"—dishonesty, lack of capacity, sheer idleness, mistaken calling, instability, or extravagant boastfulness.

The proverb warns that character itself is revealed by what affords us our intensest pleasure.