“Greed”- Brittany Jackson
There’s something candidly cold about being in love with money. It’s a very easy ledge to get to. You start making a little more cash and your options open up. You start seeing people and activities as “opportunity costs” as opposed to experiences and fellow human beings. Each action has a dollar figure attached to it. Each movement and thought focused singly on one goal; the accumulation of wealth. Duckets. Dollars. Benjamins. C-Notes. Dough.
So many words.
I would have to say that I’m a pretty shitty Hellenist. Sometimes I forget to pray, practice, or live in moderation. Sometimes I take the gods for granted, as if they’ll always be there when I “get around to it.”
But my biggest failure, here lately, has been greed. Pure and simple.
I have a friend who has asked me to help her set up a budget that includes debt elimination and a solid savings plan. When I look at her I see two things:
1.Someone who is financially ignorant. (And that’s not a bad thing, we’re all ig’nant about something or another.)
2. A fucking sucker.
The prior is a reason to help. The latter is that voice in my head that tells me her continued use of credit cards and over-consumption is what keeps my dividends coming in every quarter. Every piece of jewelry, every mile she drives to and from the mall, every cotton and rayon dress she will only wear once, drives her deeper into debt while buoying my ability to turn a profit. Eat me. Drink me.
Greed is being willing to eat someone else even when you aren’t hungry. Even if you know better. Even if that person is someone you love.
And it’s sitting inside of me now; brewing, coiling in the pit of my stomach to the point that I have taken to avoiding my normal investing/finance blogs so I can get back to some form of equilibrium.
So what do you do when your conscience says “no” but your mind and society says “yes?”
I guess I’ll pray and get back to basics.
As a member of the poor plebeian class as opposed to your Equestrian status, this post rather frightens me.
Truth be told, it scares me too. I’ve been a lot of things in my life but “greedy” has never been one of those things. So I’m definitely going to be doing a lot more prayer and penance.
I have read this post seven times now. I finish it and I start again. I finish it and I start again. I feel a need to respond, but I’m not sure what I want to say. I mirror Castus in saying that your post frightens me, but I do understand the… addiction that belies this post.
I don’t like money. I have always had an aversion against it. To me–raised in a left wing household–money is pretty much the root of our society failing. Mostly for reasons laid out in this post. Yet, I can not judge. While I don’t obsess about money, I have to constantly monitor my actions, intake and anything else I do repetitively because I’m wired to get addicted to something at the drop of a hat. Both my parents struggle with addiction and I’ve had to pull myself away from the edge of my share of far less harmful addictions.
So I understand. I might not agree with it, I might not like it, but I understand it. I am glad you have realized you have teetered over that edge just a little, and you would rather step back than dive in.
I wish you luck and strength. Changing a mindset is incredibly hard. I hope you get there within your current (working) environment.
The fear doesn’t lie in the recognition, or even that it’s happening. Greed can happen to anyone. For example, I have a bizarre obsession with resin molds shaped like super heroes and videogame characters. I wants them. All of them. I want to occupy all of the special edition videogame releases! Then we look at what our money can do. We become obsessed with accumulation, rather than satisfaction. When “I can’t hang out, I’m broke” really means “I’d rather wait and have four figures in the bank than high threes,” there’s something wrong. When it’s mid-fours bordering on fives, but “you’re broke,” you’re doin’ it ‘rong, and that’s a larger issue that this post identifies. It isn’t the long walk towards greedy elitism, it’s more the arrogant saunter that “we” are doing it better than “them,” see the OP point 2, “fucking sucker.”
So it’s hard. You see bills getting paid off, you see debt coming down, you see your spending power go up and you wind up with a nearly unavoidable air of smug self-righteousness that you’re achieving some kind of fiscal success in a world dominated by the credit starved and debt mired. Then.
Then.
You have to remind yourself that it’s all incredibly, horribly, fucking fragile. We give thanks for what we can achieve now and pray for continued success in troubled times, and do our best to not deny others those things they need, or having experiences with us. That we must continue to live in moderation.
It’s hard. Genuinely, soul wrenchingly hard. Money isn’t evil (I’ll never agree with that), but it can corrupt even the most pious among us.