A Trade With No Exit

How large can the surface area of greed be?

Unlike fear, which often times can be pinned down to a specific, tangible threat, greed seems more elusive to me in terms of capturing what it is that it actually hopes to satisfy.

If fear is hitting rock bottom, greed can be equated here with aiming for an endless sky; it's just never enough and can go on and on and on until a hard stop is reached outside of the originator of the greed, which is basically the exhaustion of resources or the collapse of the system that triggered the greed for the person under the influence of the insatiable ego.

For me, a rather nuanced example of this is the pursuit of material success. I'm not sure which begets which: is it the greed that invents the need for status, or the social hierarchy that fuels the already pre-existing greed, where playing status games was born along side the accumulation of material wealth?

Either way, I think it's an endless feedback loop of comparison that breeds more comparison.

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Asymmetry of fear and greed

It is said that fear is governed by the amygdala and is largely a biological brake that both saves us from danger and prevents overextension beyond biological limits.

Once the lion is gone, the fear subsides and body needs to return to homeostasis.

On the other hand, many aspects of greed live in the dopamine side of the brain associated with anticipation, i.e the brain gets a hit from the pursuit, not the possession, which is why the surface area of greed grows the more you feed it. Constantly seeking the "high" of the next acquisition.

I think when looked hard enough, one of the absurd aspects of status games is the mimetic trap of not knowing what many players of the game really want. We basically look at what others want and imitate them.

You want the watch because the person you admire has the watch and once you get the watch, you don't feel satisfied, you just look for the next person to imitate.

In this context, greed is essentially a "category error." As it attempts to solve an internal sense of insufficiency (a psychological hole) with external accumulation (a physical pile). Since a pile of gold cannot fill a hole in the soul, the pile must grow forever.

But then, peeling back the curtain a bit, I think there's a good argument to be made that deep down greed is inversely proportional to self-worth. The less you believe you're inherently enough, the more you need to acquire proof.

On a trading pov longing greed can be a profitable asymmetric bet trade to take in favourable conditions provided there's a pre-determined take profit level. IRL, that level is seldom defined no matter how many fortunes we've seen lost to the same trap.


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