Greed ruins all beautiful things

Everything you ever loved was probably wrecked when someone decided to make money off it. And I'm not just talking about your favorite band selling out to a record label, that video game turned into a service, or the neighborhood restaurant now being a soulless chain. I'm talking about a pattern so consistent and predictable that the Catholic tradition considers it one of the seven deadly sins.

The endlessly repetitive pattern

Did you know that Pets.com spent over a million dollars on an ad during the 2000 Super Bowl? It became "the most paradigmatic case of the dot com bubble". A plush pet selling dog food with the slogan "Pets can't drive!". It went bankrupt the same year. The ironies of life give me life.

Psychologists Stephen Lea and Paul Webley have shown that compulsive money seeking activates pleasure centers in the brain, creating a dependency that can never be satisfied. It's an addiction with all legal respect, but socially accepted. More than that, it's celebrated.

Look at what happened with Enron. Fortune magazine named it "America's most innovative company" for six consecutive years. The outcome? A corporate culture where "greed and a win-at-all-costs mentality became norms". Shares fell from $90 to less than $1. More than 29,000 employees lost their jobs and retirement savings. All because of the obsession to inflate numbers for Wall Street.

Elizabeth Holmes promised to revolutionize blood testing. Theranos claimed it could conduct "a wide range of tests from just a few drops of blood". Pure lies. They used conventional Siemens machines. Holmes was found guilty and faces up to 80 years in prison. As the prosecutor said, "She chose fraud over bankruptcy, she chose to be dishonest".

And what about Adam Neumann from WeWork? He claimed his company was "bigger than Amazon". Accumulated a debt of over $16 billion. Decisions like buying a coffee company for 500 million dollars. WeWork went bankrupt in 2023.

The pattern is always the same: unrestrained ambition, disconnected from reality.

This one is my favorite. Microsoft offered $44.6 billion for Yahoo! in 2008. Jerry Yang, Yahoo!'s co-founder, wanted more. He demanded $51 billion.

The result? Microsoft walked away. Yang had to resign. Stocks plummeted. As the press headlined: "Jerry Yang's greed broke the sack".

The endless loop of destruction

Erich Fromm described it perfectly: "Greed is a bottomless pit". And that pit swallows everything.

• Companies: Lehman Brothers had over $600 billion in assets. Its bankruptcy triggered the global financial crisis of 2008

• Jobs: WorldCom left 20,000 people jobless due to a $4 billion accounting fraud

• Trust: FTX collapsed in 10 days, losing $8 billion in client funds

• Innovation: Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 but hid it to protect its film business. It went bankrupt in 2012

Fast fashion contributes to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Between 2000 and 2014, clothing production doubled, but the number of times you wear a piece dropped by 36%.

It's the perfect model of modern greed: produce cheap trash, sell it as trends, repeat until the planet and everything collapses.

Therapists point out that extremely frugal people don't understand why they should spend money on beautiful things. They can't appreciate the emotional aspects of life. Greed, on the other hand, turns relationships into transactions.

How many families do you know have been destroyed over an inheritance? How many friendships turned sour when a couple of bucks got involved?

The real tragedy isn't that greed destroys things. It's that we've become accustomed to it.

We look at Bella Nilsson, the Swedish "queen of trash" who illegally dumped 200,000 tons of toxic waste, and think "what a piece of work". But then, we shop at Shein because it's cheap.

We get outraged by "corrupt CEOs", but celebrate "entrepreneurs" who are "rocking it" selling courses on how to become a millionaire.

The exit, give me an exit

Aristotle recommended being liberal with material goods, living in the middle ground. Ensuring they were tools for living, not objects of attachment.

Sounds bland, I know. But the alternative is to keep watching how everything beautiful becomes a product. How every natural space becomes real estate development. How every artistic expression transforms into an NFT. We're looking for a life that isn't fragile, remember?

Greed doesn't just destroy companies or ecosystems. It destroys the human ability to create beauty without an agenda. To do something simply because, because it's beautiful, because it contributes.

You know what's most ironic? That the most valuable things in life —genuine love, real friendship, pure creativity, untouched nature— are precisely the ones that can't be bought.

And maybe that's why they're the first thing greed tries to destroy. If you're obsessed with your own individuality as much as I am, I invite you to never forget this: valuing your time doesn't mean you have a price.