The Cure for Greed

The power of imagination makes us infinite ~ John Muir

You probably don’t consider yourself a greedy person.

You live simply. You don’t steal or cheat. You give and are generous with your time and resources.

In a world where examples of spectacular individual and corporate greed abound, you may feel like an outright saint in comparison. An unbridled desire for money, power, status, or fame can drive people to cause serious harm to themselves and others.

Though lust for money and power are hallmark signs of greed, they only begin to scratch the surface. What’s the real driving force behind our greed? Who qualifies as greedy? What if greed is less about money or status and more about the stories you tell yourself about who you are and what you’re worth?

Are you enough?

The desire to have more to the point of greed is often said to come from the feeling of not having enough. A person can have all the money in the world and still relentlessly pursue more. A person can be generously loved by a friend, yet feel like they need to control that person so as to make themselves the only object of their affection.

The mantra, “You are enough,” says that you are lovable just the way you are. You don’t need any more money, material goods, or attention to feel loved.

This is a powerful idea. However, do you ever get the feeling that in order to be enough you have to settle? Do you ever find yourself secretly saying, “Yea it’s good to be enough, but I actually want to be more than enough.”

If you don’t have these thoughts, the “enough” mantra will work for you. If you do, you probably keep it a closely guarded secret lest the world discovers how greedy and ungrateful you are.

But the truth is that you’re not greedy or ungrateful for having these thoughts. You’re simply hungry to discover the real you. The real you cannot be measured in terms of “enough” versus “not enough.” The real you is infinite.

When have you ever heard someone say, “God is enough” or “the universe is enough” or “the ocean is enough?” Instead, God is all powerful, the universe is infinite, and the ocean is vast.

If you consider yourself a child of God, then you too are infinite. But we resist this because it sounds too heretical, woo-woo, or grandiose for our more measured tastes. But the soul knows better.

We’re starving ourselves

You’re likely familiar with some basic version of the Greek myth of Narcissus. The extraordinarily beautiful youth who falls in love with himself after seeing his reflection in a pool of water. On fearing that he would lose sight of his image, he stayed right at the edge of the pool till he died of starvation.

What was he starving for? Something he already possessed. He just didn’t know it. Greed works kinda like that. We become greedy when we hand over our infinite selves to finite things. And the saddest part is that we don’t even know the value of what we’re handing over in the first place, or that we’re even handing over anything.

That’s because we do this before we’re able to be consciously aware of what we’re doing. It happens to most of us when we’re very young. So we just grow up thinking that we need external things and circumstances to validate who we are. We can live our whole lives never realizing that we’re the ones creating our environment.

Put another way, we are, like God, creators of the universes we inhabit. It’s how a person like Viktor Frankl could survive and thrive after enduring the horrors of the Holocaust.

Instead, too many of us find ourselves starving on the edge of our societal reflecting pool, pining for images of ourselves that are fitter, richer, sexier, and smarter. By our greed and self-absorption, we starve ourselves of the happiness, joy, and well-being we could be experiencing right now.

Remember who you are

The key to avoiding the fate of Narcissus is to remember who you are. When you are tempted to looking into the reflecting pool society places before you, see yourself in all the things you desire. See that all the things you want and desire are being generate from within you rather than outside you.

The reflection you so desperately desire is you. There is no need to grasp at the images because you already know they are projections of what’s inside you. They are not real. What’s inside you is.

When you recognize this, you recognize the images as yourself. You’ll remember who you are.

You already have it

Is it possible to cure your greed?

I say yes.

When you’re tempted to chase a job for more money or prestige, say to yourself, “I already have it.”

When you’re tempted to act out in jealousy toward your partner, say “I already have it.”

When you’re sad because you didn’t get more likes on Facebook, say “I already have it.”

You get to decide what “it” is. What is the underlying source of your greed? What is the one thing you want most? That’s your “it.”

Stop choosing to live in misery by grasping for things you already have.