Are you eating according to need or greed?

Greed has officially been elevated to the status of virtue.

Gekko’s speech comes to mind:

Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

But there’s a different brand of greed that’s lesser known. It’s not necessarily the intense and selfish desire for wealth, power or all the chocolate cookies.

Rather, it’s the compulsive need to do and see everything.

Nepo has a beautiful meditation about this in his book of awakening:

We suffer, often unknowingly, from wanting to be in two places at once, from wanting to experience more than one person can. This is a form of experience greed. The assumption that we can do it all. Feeling like we’re missing something or that we’re being left out.

When was the last time you felt a nagging sense of fomo? Did your greed take the helm and try to sign you up for everything, just so you didn’t miss out on anything?

That kind of compulsion can have very real impact on your body, mind and spirit. If you try to push yourself past where you are honestly able to go, day after day, week after week, it’s going to add up.

Enwrapped by greedy tongues, your spirit will fatigue.

One of my startup jobs had this affect on me. The entire team, all five hundred of us from fifteen countries, would meet twice a year in various cities around the world. And in addition to the actual workday, there were breakfasts, lunches, happy hours, team building activities, dinners, dance outings, late night pub crawls, even breakfast again the next day, for those who stayed up all night.

Europeans sure known how to party, don’t they?

Naturally, trying to be a team player and impress my foreign colleagues, my participation was through the roof. For about three days. Until all that action caught up with me in the form of exhaustion and losing my voice.

Lesson learned, we can’t experience everything. Even if we could, we wouldn’t want to.

Greed might be good in the stock market, but when it comes to our daily lives, the fear of missing out is not a healthy motivator.

Being the person who never misses out on anything is not status symbol worth pursuing. It’s okay to say no to things. It’s okay to not attend everything.

The people who matter won’t love or value us any less, just because we decline an invitation in favor of taking care of ourselves. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What is your greed obliging you to do that you don’t really want to do?