Baruch 3:9-19: in context

Baruch, writing to a people in exile, calls out to them to come back to wisdom, the wisdom of God's ways they had abandoned. Hear, O Israel, the commandments of life; give ear to understand wisdom. He tells them plainly why they are in a foreign land, grown old among strangers: you have forsaken the fountain of wisdom. If you had walked in the way of God, you would have lived in peace. And then, to press home how little the alternatives are worth, he asks where all the impressive people of the past have gone, the ones who seemed to have it figured out.

Where are the princes of the nations, he asks, the ones who ruled and hunted and amused themselves, those who hoarded up silver and gold, in which people trust, and never stopped acquiring more? Those who worked so anxiously to pile up silver, whose enterprises seemed too large to fail? And his answer is stark: they have vanished and gone down to the grave, and others have come up in their place. All that anxious accumulation, the endless getting with no end to it, and now they are gone, forgotten, their works past finding out, simply replaced by the next set of people doing the same thing. The silver they trusted did not go down with them, and it did not keep their names alive.

That is a mirror I would rather not look into, because I know the anxious getting he describes from the inside. So much of my energy goes into acquiring, securing, building up a store of the things people trust in, and Baruch's question stops me: where does it end? He says the people who spent their whole lives at it simply vanished and were replaced, while wisdom, the way of God, is what he calls the commandments of life. Am I pouring my anxious effort into piling up what will vanish and leave me forgotten and replaced, or into the wisdom of God that Baruch calls life itself?