Hearts Break When They Get Greedy

Human folly—the doomed waltz of longing and ruin, where the heart, ravenous with desire, reaches beyond its grasp only to plummet into the abyss of its own making. It is the moth mistaking the flame for salvation, the Icarian wings dissolving beneath the sun’s indifferent gaze.

At its core, folly is a mirage—a cruel trick of light, whispering that more will satisfy when, in truth, excess is a slow, exquisite poison. It sings honeyed lies of fulfilment, luring the soul into a hunger so vast it devours itself. This is hubris—pride swollen to the point of rupture, ambition untethered until it drowns out reason.

But to be human is to crave, isn’t it? To stretch trembling fingers toward the heavens, convinced the cosmos owes us its stars. Yet the gods are patient executioners. They let us climb—just far enough to ensure the fall will break us.

You see… hubris is the architect of its own undoing. Narcissus, lost in the glassy abyss of his own reflection. Macbeth, choking on the crown he wrenched from fate’s hands. Icarus, his wings kissed by arrogance, tumbling from the heavens he dared to claim. Each believed themselves untouchable, blind to the price of their ambition—but greed is a debt that never goes unpaid, and the heart that covets too much crumbles beneath its own weight.

In the end, folly is the grand tragedy of humanity. These greedy hearts of ours—rabid, reckless things, caged beneath fragile ribs—do not know restraint. They do not know how to love in fractions, how to measure desire in careful doses. No, they spill over, uncontrolled, breaking not from lack, but from the unbearable burden of wanting too much. Daft things, foolish things—splintering at the brink of choice.

So why do these reckless hearts of ours persist in their hubris—that fatal defiance of the gods, that blind overreach born of arrogance? Greek myth has long warned us: those who dare reach beyond their due are doomed to ruin. And yet, the heart, insatiable and heedless, does not merely break when it grows greedy—it shatters.

Arthur Schopenhauer once argued that human life is governed by an insatiable Will—an endless cycle of desire and suffering. The more we crave, the more we ache, for satisfaction is fleeting, forever slipping through our grasp. Greed, whether for love or for worldly indulgence, is a hunger that devours itself, leading only to inevitable heartbreak. We chase fulfilment, yet remain restless, especially when it comes to love—to loving and being loved—for what could ever be enough for a heart that always wants more?

Schopenhauer argues that this relentless hunger of the heart is no mere folly but an intrinsic feature of existence itself. To him, human suffering is not incidental—it is inevitable and given rise to by what he calls the Will. This force drives all living things toward endless striving, an unceasing pursuit that offers no satisfaction, only the fleeting illusion of it. Desire is a fire that, once kindled, refuses to be extinguished. 

And greed—what is it, if not the Will in its most ruinous form? A heart that takes too much, that demands more than its due, does not merely suffer; it invites its own destruction. For Schopenhauer, to crave without limit is to condemn oneself to perpetual torment, an agony not unlike that of Tantalus—forever reaching, forever denied.

To Schopenhauer, suffering is not merely a part of life—it is what makes up our very existence. To exist is to suffer, just as the heart is tied down to the weight of all its greed. We are held within what we hold inside ourselves—inescapable, indivisible. Happiness may come, but only as a fleeting interlude, a thread that stitches one sorrow to the next. And if these hearts of ours remain as greedy as they are, they will only affirm Schopenhauer’s bleak symmetry—where life and pain are one and the same, and the human condition is condemned to its miseries and woes. 

Schopenhauer’s philosophy cuts even deeper when we consider the heart’s greed not merely as a hunger for more, but as the fatal flaw of loving too intensely—of clinging too fiercely to what was never ours to keep. To love is to want, and to want is to suffer. What, then, of the heart that loves not just deeply but excessively, insatiably, as if love itself were a possession to be hoarded rather than a momentary grace to be received? A heart that loves too much, or worse, loves two things at once with equal, unrelenting fervour—does it not set itself up for ruin?

To Schopenhauer, this is the tragedy of desire itself. “Human desires would always outstrip the world’s potential to satisfy them, leaving each individual in a kind of permanent deficit.” The greedy heart, in its yearning to have it all, forgets that fulfilment is an illusion, that every passion contains its own dissolution. The more desperately we grasp, the more love turns to longing, and longing to torment. We are never satiated, never whole—only reaching, only wanting, only suffering.

In this way, the heart’s greed mirrors the larger human condition Schopenhauer so ruthlessly dissects: a pursuit of what cannot be held, an ill-fated chase after a satisfaction that will forever slip through our fingers. Love, then, is no sanctuary from suffering, but one of its cruelest architects, binding us to the very affliction we seek to escape. 

So why is it that we cannot keep ourselves in moderation, in control? What is it about this feral creature of a heart that refuses restraint, that shudders at the mere thought of discipline? It is assumed—naturally so—that love is not a choice. It happens. One moment, we stand unscathed, and the next, we are orbiting another, our world narrowing to the circumference of their existence. If this choice is not ours to make, then why can we not temper its force? Why do we let greed override sense, let desire turn to gluttony, let our souls unravel for the sake of another?

Aristotle posited that virtue lies in balance—every trait a scale, tipping between excess and deficiency. Love, ambition, desire—each must be tempered, for too much is ruin (greed), and too little, desolation. But greed, insidious in its nature, pushes the heart past its breaking point, stretches it thin until it finally snaps.

Aristotle’s Golden Mean asserts that virtue is found in moderation—too much or too little of anything leads to vice. Love, too, must find its equilibrium, lest it tip into the ruinous extremes of reckless passion or barren detachment. But the greedy heart knows no measure. It does not love in moderation; it loves wildly, desperately, consuming all in its path. Oftentimes, it stretches itself between two loves, foolishly believing it can cradle both, or clings so desperately to one that it chokes the very life from it—only to watch the other slip through its trembling fingers. Perhaps a greedy heart is star-crossed from the start, caught in a game it can never truly win.

For this reason, it is often argued that: to love too much is to let desire devour reason. To love two things at once, greedily enough, is to court self-destruction, as the heart—pulled in opposing directions—frays and fractures under the strain. The Golden Mean warns against this excess, reminding us that unchecked longing does not deepen love; it corrupts it. Just as ambition turns to hubris when left unrestrained, love, when unbound by temperance, ceases to be love at all—it becomes obsession, possession, an insatiable hunger that devours the very thing it cherishes.

And so, the greedy heart defies balance, convinced it can grasp without consequence. But every scale will find its tipping point. Every overreaching hand will quiver. And when love is stretched beyond its limits, it does not bend—it breaks. 

But how does one temper a greedy heart? How does one teach it restraint when it was made to ache, to yearn, to seek? To love is to hunger, to reach beyond oneself, to long for something just out of its reach. Can we truly fault the heart for wanting? For clinging to love even when it knows better, even when it has been warned or even once broken?

Perhaps the answer is not in denying the heart its nature but in guiding it toward wisdom. Love, after all, is not meant to be hoarded like gold, nor squandered like something easily replaced. It is meant to be held with open hands, neither crushed in possessiveness nor neglected in fear. The heart must learn to endure its own hunger, to sit with longing without letting it rule. And yet, even with all the temperance in the world, the heart will still stumble, still falter, still crave what it cannot have.

And where love exists, grief will follow—for as long as there is love, there will be loss, and grief is merely love’s inevitable aftermath. It is the price of having felt deeply, the shadow that lingers when love has nowhere left to go. In this grief lies the suffering Schopenhauer spoke of—the inescapable burden of desire. And what the heart cannot speak of in love, it will weep in sorrow, for that is the suffering it must endure.

Because at the end of the day, the most unfortunate thing is that we are so terribly human. We love knowing we may ruin ourselves. We reach, even when we know the fall will break us. We ache for love, not just to give it but to be chosen, to be held in return. And if the heart is greedy, it is only because it was made to seek warmth in a world so often cold.

---

Glossary:

Folly - lack of good sense; foolishness.

Daft - silly; foolish.

Gluttony - habitual greed or excess in eating. Star-crossed - thwarted by bad luck.

Squander - waste (something, especially money or time) in a reckless and foolish manner.

---