The Goalpost Moves the Moment You Reach It: Greed's Trap

The Mahabharata tells the story of Yayati, a king who, through a curse, suddenly turned old before he felt finished with the pleasures of life. Desperate, he asked his sons to lend him their youth. Most refused. The youngest, Puru, gave his. So Yayati took his son's young body and went back to enjoying everything a king could enjoy — for a thousand years.

Think about what that means. He had the one thing the rest of us never get: unlimited time and unlimited means, the perfect conditions to finally fill the hunger all the way to the top. If indulgence could ever satisfy desire, a thousand years of it should have done the job.

It didn't. At the end, Yayati returned Puru's youth and said the line the text remembers him for: 'na jatu kamah kamanam upabhogena shamyati' — desire is never, ever stilled by feeding it; 'like fire fed with ghee, it only blazes higher.'

Here is the non-obvious part. Yayati's confession is not 'I should have been more disciplined.' It is the opposite — he ran the experiment to its absolute limit and discovered the limit doesn't exist. The emptiness was never a shortfall of supply. More was never going to be the answer, because 'more' is the disease wearing the mask of the cure.

The advice handed down is simple: 'stop being greedy, learn to be content.' It sounds right, and as an instruction it almost always fails — for the same reason 'don't think of a monkey' fails. You cannot order a feeling to leave by frowning at it. Telling yourself to want less just adds a second voice that nags the first one, and now you're tired and still wanting.

There's also a real confusion to clear. Greed is not the same as need, and not the same as healthy ambition. Wanting to feed your family, to grow at your work, to build something — these point at a real goal and rest once it's met. Greed is different: it never rests, because its goal keeps dissolving the instant you touch it. The test is not how much you want. It's whether getting it ever actually quiets you.

So what do the texts offer instead of the failed command? A change of looking, not a change of effort. The Gita's image is the sea (2.70): rivers pour into it endlessly, yet it stays still and full, unmoved — and 'peace comes to the one whom desires enter like that,' passing through without running the show. The point is not to kill wanting. It's to stop believing the next thing is carrying your peace.

None of this means living without wanting anything — that's neither possible nor the point. It means catching the trick while it's happening, and a few small moves help.

First, watch the line move. The next time you finally get something you chased, pause and notice the moment the mind drops it and reaches for the next thing. You don't have to stop it. Just see it happen, once, clearly. After you've watched the line slide forward a few times, it loses some of its authority over you.

Second, ask 'and then what?' Whatever you're chasing — picture actually having it. Then ask honestly: and then what will I want? If the answer arrives instantly, you've just met the moving line face to face.

Third, notice what's already here — not as a forced gratitude exercise, but as plain accounting. The mind is expert at editing out everything you already have so that only the gap is lit up. Reading back the things that are already in your hands, even briefly, is not pretending; it's correcting a distortion.

Notice what's missing from this list: there's no step where you scold yourself for being shallow. Greed is not proof that you're a bad person. It's a very ordinary fire doing what fire does — and the first real freedom is simply seeing it clearly, instead of feeding it in the dark.

Of all the inner enemies, greed is the one we're least ashamed of, because it dresses so well — as drive, as success, as 'providing for the family.' That respectable costume is exactly why it can run a whole life without ever being questioned. A person can spend forty years climbing, sure the summit is just above, and never once notice that the summit moved every time they did.

But sit with everything above and the picture turns gentler, not harsher. The fire was never a sign of a flawed character. It's a structural feature of the wanting mind — and the texts, from the Gita's dushpura to Yayati's thousand-year confession, are not wagging a finger. They're handing you a map of a trap they watched clearly, so you might spend a little less of your one life running toward a line that runs away.

The lesson is quietly radical: you don't win against greed by finally getting enough, because 'enough' is not a number the moving line will ever let you reach. You loosen its grip the moment you stop believing the next thing holds your peace — and start suspecting the peace was available before the chase began.

Which leaves a small question to carry, not a grand resolution. The next time you're sure that one more thing will finally settle you — pause, and ask where you've felt that certainty before, and what it delivered.