Jan

3

Excess

Filed Under Life, Psychology 

Being endowed with the memory of a sieve, I cannot recall if I have addressed this matter before. If I have, I hope that I can at least supply a new spin on the matter.

There is some evidence to support my suspician that we are greedy by nature. This opportunist clamouring for all that we can grab almost certainly served us well in the past, where a short excursion to the supermarket was not a possibility.

But this greed is not limited to food. The drive is for greater status, assets, range of friends and so on. But the inevitable consequence of greed is an often repeated overshoot to excess. These individual overshoots are benign in themselves. It is an accumlated excess that fails to serve us.

If we step back, it is easy to see the opposite situation, where countless millions struggle to survive each day. Their life is severely compromised by the daily struggle for food, shelter and the work that might finance their supply.

Many a study has shown that a happy existance is not that far beyond such a struggle. As long as we do not struggle, as long as we have enough and a margin above this that creates a security blanket, then we have the foundation for happiness. Adding more, whether through greed or circumstance, does not have a proportionately enhancing effect on our lives.

Taken to an extreme, a submergence in excess cannot be healthy. Natural tendencies to stop eating when full are overridden by the attraction and ready availability of rich and tasty food. We can only live in one room at a time, no matter how many our mansion contains. And we flounder, lost for direction. When our drive to improve our life is gone - when we have all and more than we need, we are less. We drown in excess.

We cannot easily avoid the instinct to acquire an excess, but we can recognise when it does not serve us, and curb it’s message.

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