Forbidden Knowledge

Some things you are better off not knowing. If possible. Let’s call it forbidden knowledge. But in spite of knowing this, curiosity, loose lips, or having to know because of your job can place this information in your brain anyway. And then you have to deal with it. For example: I know what I make compared to some other people. Conversely I know how much I do compared to others. They don’t match. Sometimes they aren’t even on the same continent.

Having forbidden knowledge can eat you up. I’ve been there, done that, seen it up close and personal. Some get over it. Others don’t. It can be very upsetting when you find out someone less deserving is getting bigger rewards and more blessings. The more you think about these situations the more upset you get. It can keep you up at nights and distract you by day – maybe more than any other thing on earth.

To depersonalize the whole thing, let me tell you about two people I know. They both went into the same line of work. They sold drugs for one of the largest drug companies in the world. One sold a line of a dozen drugs for things like depression, asthma, and migraines. Whenever I saw him he always asked me if I needed anything. Yeah, right. I always gave him a list and never got me anything. He had been in the business and done well for a decade or so. The other person had only been doing this for about four or five years and sold a small line of oncology drugs; the ones for chemotherapy and cancer treatments. Both were paid salary plus bonuses based on sales volume. The first made a bigger salary but the second more than made up for it on bonuses.

I was with both of these folks when this revelation came to light and the one who’d been in the biz the longest almost blew a vein out the side of his neck. I probably talk to these folks four times a year and over the next month I spoke to the freaked out friend at least that many times. He was completely traumatized and tormented that the other friend was making so much. It ate and ate away at him and made him more and more frustrated. It was obvious to me that greed and envy are a real bad-boy combination!

The only advice I could come up with for my self-destructing friend was that he had to get a grip on understanding the forces at work on him; the forces that were invading his thoughts and destroying his happy place (the place with unicycles and little people.) Before the forbidden knowledge came to light, everything was fine. But once it surfaced, apparently my friend's compass was broken and had been broken and was pointed toward greed rather than thankfulness that he is able to do what he does and make what he made (which was not too shabby.) Both of them should have had pity on me, the poor public servant. The pain he was feeling ought to have been an indicator to him that he was off course.

This brings me to my point. Greed is a weed.

Weeds are considered undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome (except in the wacky world of zeriscaping), especially when they grow where they are not wanted.

Greed is undesirable, unattractive, and troublesome, especially when it appears where it is least needed. Greed is a weed.

Greed is a great big morning glory weed and if we don’t kill it, it will take over. Killing it, like morning glory you might know, can be tricky. It takes skill and perseverance. Until we kill it, though, greed makes us think we can’t move on unless or until we get what we want. In fact, it can make us think we want even more than we really do. Sometimes it can even trick us to thinking we can have whatever we want, even if it isn’t right for us.

I’m sure everyone caught the news story about the man and his sister who stopped at a McDonald’s in California while they were doing their Monopoly promotion? I think how it worked was you peel off something from your drink cup and you win stuff. I’m not exactly sure because I only go there to get the Happy Meals with Superheroes for my good-guy grandsons. In any event, somehow there are things you can win.

Well, this man in California peeled off his sticker and won $1,000 a week for the rest of his life. Not too shabby; $50,000 a year for as long as you live. What could be the problem? Nothing, of course, unless you worked for McDonald’s and you and your immediate family were thus ineligible. Well, guess what? He did and they were.

He and his sister hatched a plan though. He would give the ticket to his girlfriend and have her cash it in. The arrangement he brokered with her was that she would turn in the prize sticker and they’d share half of the winnings each. You can probably already guess the end of this story even if you didn’t read it. For six years it worked out fine to the tune of $330,409. But eventually they had a fight and were not getting along about something and the guy got ratted out. Ah, true love. What a beautiful story. Tale as old as time. The payments were, of course, stopped. And there was the pesky firing (why he stayed employed at McDonald’s is beyond me) and the court case to collect the winnings back.

Clearly greed got the best of this person and his friend and the sister. It trapped them and as the Greeks say, “Greed is like sea water. The more you drink, the thirstier you become.” True dat.

Key to the whole point – as I see it:

You’ve seen the oldie-but-goodie comedy routine where a man shows his doctor that every time he raises his arm in this unusual position, he gets a sharp pain. The doctor’s suggestion, “Don’t do that any more.” The point of the skit is that if something hurts, stop doing it.

Like with my friend, he just needed to suck it up and realize there is nothing he could do to change the fact that oncological drugs have a higher markup and are in more demand than his stuff. That’s life, dude. Get over it. If he focused more on his own great job and the good living he was making, he’d be much better off and would probably enjoy the time he spends out by his very nice swimming pool much more.