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Greed Is What Lives in Our Hearts

Are you the greedy type?

By Sabrina BoydPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
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Greed Is What Lives in Our Hearts
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Greed can be defined as an excessive desire to correspond to as many values ​​as possible. Greedy people behave very selfishly, especially when it comes to money, things, food, or any other kind of goods.

Greed is one of the seven sins described in the Bible. Also, in Buddhism, the desire to cause suffering is one of the fundamental obstacles to enlightenment. You will not be able to start on the path of happiness until you get rid of your obsessive desire to gain more and more.

"Do you want to get rich?" Then, do not lose all your strength to increase your wealth, try to moderate your greed ", Epicurus.

The greed you carry in your heart leads to self-destruction

Greed is generated by the fear of getting less than what is needed or deserved. Therefore, the more greedy a person is, the more he degrades, even without noticing it.

Trying to fill the inner void with material goods only aggravates the problem and the attitude towards oneself and the world around one another. The reason for greed is a fundamental feeling of lack of what we do not have or what is not available to us at all.

If this feeling of lack is experienced in a particularly strong (emotional) way, a person becomes obsessed with the search for what he "needs", which will allow him to get rid of the feeling of emptiness that is rooted in his heart.

But no matter what he acquires, even if it will be all the wealth of the world, all this will only give him temporary relief. It will be a while, and he will start to suffer again from an emotional emptiness, the healing of which requires a completely different approach.

A greedy person may be greedy for money, power, food, the attention of others, knowledge… There will always be something definite, something he will be obsessed with and will need more and more. As soon as the thought of this takes control of a greedy person's mind, life for him will turn into torture, because he will not be able to think of anything else.

Greed can be helpful

Richard Toughlinger pointed out that greed is the quality that contributes to our survival. The idea is that our desires are not harmful as long as they do not develop into an obsessive thought about something good that can save us from a sense of emotional emptiness.

According to Toughlinger, our desires motivate us to earn money so that we can pay for housing, clothes, food, and so on.

But can our desire for finance be called greed? We can't live without money. It can be perceived in two different ways: as a symbol of wealth or as a symbol of the resources needed for survival.

The more money you have, the better quality you can get. But the question is - what can serve as a boundary between our need to improve our quality of life and greed? This limitation is a person's desire to start buying things just to fill an emotional or existential void.

People are constantly afraid of the lack of something they need so much for "happiness." Because of this constant fear, a person obsessively wants what he thinks he should receive and is therefore extremely greedy.

He understands what greed is, to put an end to it

Greed is a toxic feeling that causes us pain and takes root and grows in us. We live in a competitive society where people measure the well-being of life by the success they have been able to achieve up to that stage of life. We want to be successful in having the right to look down on others.

The society in which we live is dedicated to the people who own the most expensive cars, the most fashionable clothes, and the biggest houses. Modern life favors the transformation of greed into a terrible addiction that takes over our souls.

We must find a remedy against the greed that will allow us to heal this spiritual wound so that we can put such qualities as altruism and generosity above material wealth.

Only by helping other people can we feel true satisfaction and true happiness.

Generosity is the path to a happy life because it is always better to give than to receive.

Generous people who help others out of love, and not out of a sense of duty, know that people who cultivate greed in themselves can never be satisfied. They look like sharks because all their lives they are only engaged in hunting and eating. And not all the world's oceans will be able to satisfy their hunger.

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