Greed: How to Avoid and Why We Should

This is going to be a series about the Seven Deadly Sin to help you avoid doing it by understanding what they are and the consequences.

Greed is everywhere and even those who have live a pious life have done some greed in their life.  It is our human side that with proper understanding leads to proper handling of behavior.

That is why I believe that sins and ignorance have links, one way or the other.  And also knowledge and sins are also linked.

I will try my best to write this as clear as possible for everyone, including me to be enlightened.

Greed is wanting more than we need.  It is really hard because needs and wants have a tendency to switch places or very hard to determine which is the want and the need.


I bet that if someone throws a big bag full of real money up in the air, a lot of people will come rushing.  And I will be there to get some myself.

Money is very easy to attract anyone.  Even a person with good intention can get attracted to it and possibly loose their selves just to get to the gold mine.

We all have reasons in the world that is why there is a tendency to love money.  It buys the basics, get us to places, buy us a place to live, put food to our plates and so on.

So getting more money provides security.  Can we get security without being greedy?  That is the question that is impossible to answer with a straight face.

Now let us start looking for things to avoid greed.  Now the best place to start is to find out the answer to the question 'Why do we want more than we need?'

Now the technique to eliminate a very broad question such as that is to apply the 5 whys technique.  It is in fact a problem solving skill that I found from one of the website that I really admired.

Now to give it a shot to try and narrow down and broad question like that let us start asking ourselves 5 connected questions.  It is like answering the first question with another question with an answer of another question and so on.  I guess, it really don't need to be 5 questions.  It can be 3 or may be a case of 10.  Depending really on how you really want to be specific.

I am going to ask a question that I am really having a greed about.  And let me try to ask 5 connected questions.

Here goes:

1.  Why do I always have the feeling of I need more money?  Because I want to buy things even if I can't afford it.
2.  Why do you want to have those things, even if you can't afford it?  It is because I saw them either from someone else or from an advertisement.
3.   Why do you want something that someone else have?  It is because of an envious feeling that why can't I have those things.

Base from my personal example, I now know that it starts from a negative behavior.  Envy is also a deadly sin that I will talk about in the future.

So what should I do about it?  Simple answers are usually the hard things to do.  Don't look at others.  Or may be try to tell to myself that they have those things because they deserve them.  Or I could just have a mindset of counting my blessings.

There can be a lot of things to work with when it comes to managing being envy.  As long as I know now to myself what triggers the greed behavior,  I know now that it really starts somewhere.  Somewhere within that I should control, not to be controlled.

You may try to do the self check yourself anytime.

Why we should avoid being greedy?  Not only that it is a sin, it is a big downfall that can happen to anyone.  For instance, a person with power and influence.  Yes, power can be very seducing since it brings convenience to life.  But we should be responsible when practicing power and influence.  But we are human, the more we gain a certain level, the more we are wanting more.  And since more power and influence requires more time and it tends to be a distraction.  And when you are distracted, you won't be able to do a self assessment of what to do because you are going to be busy getting more.  I know that you can get a picture of what I am saying.

To sum it up, find the root cause by using any method.  The about method of using the 5 Whys is just one of them.  Once you find the root cause, look for things to do to avoid the behaviour.  And finally, to really answer why you should avoid it is to do a self check and realize that all of the greed in the world is not the answer to your problem.

My resources and special thanks to the following websites below:

5 Whys - Quickly Getting to The Root of The Problem
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_5W.htm

For the vocabularies and definitions
http://www.merriam-webster.com/