Greed is one of the fundamental characteristics of humans throughout known human history. Let’s discuss greed in this post.


Greed is good or bad?

This question sounds kind of rhetorical as according to most of us - greed is bad. But I feel, if we can control greed, it can also give some net positive outcomes.

Sometimes, greed can give us motivation to get up and work hard to achieve financial independence. As it goes without saying, at the end of the day, we all need money to survive and thrive.

However, I think most of us can’t control greed even after we earn “enough” money to survive in this world. How much money is enough? That depends on your location. In India as of 2022, if you’re earning 4 lakhs per month(₹4L after taxes), you can live a very comfortable life. You don’t need to worry about your survival after that point. You will be able to live in a good house, eat good hygienic food & take care of your family. For developed countries like the USA, this “enough” money can be around $200k or $250k.

Real conflicts start at that point. You need to ask some hard questions to yourself once you start earning “enough” money to survive and thrive. If you still want to earn higher, you’re good to go. But there’s no need.

It’s good to make it clear that, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting more money. We all have different priorities and goals. If you can make more money without sacrificing other pillars of life like health and relationships, more power to you.

But, if more money is coming with lots of stress and huge commitments, you need to face some trade-offs and make some hard decisions.


Career, Health, and Relationships

Career, Health, and Relationships are 3 pillars of our life. We need to balance those 3 in order to live a happy fulfilling life. Greed is mostly associated with the career pillar.

Nowadays, we might need to compromise health and relationships(with our family and friends) to some degree in order to earn huge amounts of money. However, it might not feel like that to people who are doing it as they might have different priorities.

No one is right or wrong here. There are no objective correct or ideal answers. But I feel most people will agree that we all need to balance our careers, health, and relationships.


Money is not the end goal

For almost all the rich people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mukesh Ambani, making lots of money was never the main goal. They wanted to build great problem-solving products to make a positive impact on billions of people’s lives. And because of that, our capitalistic society and financial system rewarded them.

However, sometimes this falls in the grey area. We can also find some examples, where rich people did unethical things to earn more profits. So, for some people, money is the end goal. They don’t care about solving any problem or making an impact. This is the dark side of greed.

To conclude, greed has some positive and negative effects. But when someone gets sucked into the downward spiral of greed, it gets very hard to come out as there’s no end. We all need to make some tradeoffs to live a balanced life.