Cow in EE's woods

3 weeks ago

@milkyCow[MC]

#cw-graphic-imagery Greed is the oldest hunger that never learned how to eat. Man digs into the earth and calls the wound a mine. He empties the oceans and calls the silence profit. He strips forests to their roots, stacks coins upon the graves of lesser men, and congratulates himself for having climbed higher. Always higher. As though height has ever spared anything from the fall. There is no finish to it. Give a man a kingdom and he will stare across the border. Give him the world and he will curse the stars for being beyond his reach. Greed does not desire wealth. It desires more. And more has no end. So mankind feeds the machine. Years become wages. Friends become connections. Homes become investments. People become numbers scratched into ledgers by hands that will someday stiffen in the grave. Every beautiful thing is given a price, every sacred thing dragged beneath the auctioneer's hammer. And for what? Your life is microscopic. A flicker of nervous flesh stumbling through a universe so ancient that the entirety of human history is less than dust caught between its gears. Your empires will crumble. Your currencies will become artifacts. Your monuments will lose their names. Even your bones will eventually surrender themselves to the dirt. Yet still you clutch your little treasures. Still you whisper: Mine. That word will bury you. Because greed does not merely consume what surrounds a man. Eventually, it turns inward. It eats compassion first. Then dignity. Then love. Then whatever trembling fragment of humanity remains beneath the appetite. And when there is nothing left to sacrifice, greed finally devours its master. The richest corpse owns exactly as much as the poorest. Nothing. The universe will not remember your fortune. Death will not negotiate your net worth. The worms will find no distinction between the flesh of kings and beggars. You will spend your minuscule life accumulating things you cannot keep, sacrificing things you cannot replace, desperately trying to fill a hole whose only defining characteristic is that it cannot be filled. Then your heart will stop. Someone else will take your chair. Someone else will count your money. Someone else will sleep beneath your roof. And the great hungry machine will continue grinding without noticing that you are gone. That is greed's final cruelty. After everything it convinced you to sacrifice... it never needed you at all.