Hella greedy

I’m so greedy that if was a cartoon I’d be Greedy Smurf.

We fold into realities that match our vibrations. Accordingly, meaningful personal change always comes from the inside out, and never from the outside in. Practice leading with the heart and being the change.

-Good Vibes

There’s no two ways about it—I’m hella greedy.

I reflexively put my needs before others’ as if I’m somehow more important. I still buy furniture and fast fashion from Amazon even though I know it’s bad for the planet and worse for human rights.

Those cheap goods get produced by exploited labor and shipped halfway around the world on freighters that pump out loads of carbon just so I can save a few bucks on a bookcase. There’s no spin to put on that—I’m literally contributing to global warming and modern-day slavery to save money. I’m just not ready to stop, because I’m greedy about my money and my stuff, and part of me fears that if I stop being greedy, I’ll lose both.

I live in the heart of the city and pass unhoused humans on hard drugs every day, yet I usually walk right on by without helping. The other day outside Target I saw a mother and her three kids holding “please help” signs and I didn’t give them a dime. I could’ve gone to the ATM and handed the mom enough cash to feed her family for a week without it impacting my ability to feed mine—but instead, I kept walking, hoping they’d be gone by the time I came out with my cart full of groceries, including junk food I don’t need.

Like I said, I’m hella greedy.

Sometimes, I sense multidimensional beings—perhaps descended from humans like us—observing me the way I might watch a goldfish flitter about in a bowl. I imagine they’re appalled that I can even keep afloat while my brothers and sisters starve in the streets and babies get banned at the border. Much in the way I marvel at chimpanzees’ ability to survive in brutal conditions, so I sense these evolved beings marvel—and shudder—at how we humans survive as spiritual beings in this rough physical plane of existence we call life.

As selfish as I am, I’m far less greedy than I used to be. I’ve donated much of my savings to worthy causes, enough that I’ll run out of money if I don’t sell some books or find work soon. I’ve cut down my consumption and shrunk my carbon footprint. I divested from mutual funds that own corporations I previously loathed in principle but funded in practice.

My aim wasn’t to persuade anyone else—it was to improve the quality of my own consciousness and lead by example.

But as President Trump moves our country closer to a corporate police state, I feel a growing urgency for everyone to do the same. It dawned on me that if even a quarter of Americans divested from the stock market, we could bring corporatism—and by extension, Trumpism—to its knees.

I shared this revelation with friends who rail against corporatism even louder than I do—friends with vacation homes and seven-figure portfolios. I thought they’d leap at the chance to divest and make a difference. Instead, they looked at me like I’d asked them to jump off the Golden Gate bridge. When logic failed, I tried guilting them into compliance, pointing out that their complicity in corporatism was hastening our extinction. That didn’t work either, unless you count alienating loved ones as success.

Then I remembered something I wrote from Good Vibes:

Trying to persuade people to see things our way is futile. It drains our energy, ejects us from the present moment, and severs our connection to Source. The more we fight for our views, the deeper we sink into negativity.

Accepting that I couldn’t convince anyone to be less greedy brought inner peace—but also sadness. I could see how corporatism was devouring the planet, and I thought I’d figured out how to stop it. Yet no one wanted to listen. Even though it’s obvious that when Earth becomes uninhabitable, all our possessions and profits will mean nothing. There will be no markets to trade in, no stuff to buy, no air to breathe.

If even my rich, ostensibly progressive loved ones wouldn’t divest because fear and greed held them hostage, how could we possibly escape this existential mess we find ourselves in?

But one man gives me hope: NBA All-Star Fred VanVleet.

I’ve avidly followed the NBA since I was a lowercase j, and I still watch my hometown Golden State Warriors whenever they’re on national TV. I watched every game of the 2019 Finals, when a stocky point guard for the Raptors torched the Warriors and helped bring Toronto its first championship. His name—at least in this three-dimensional experience we’re currently sharing—is Fred VanVleet.

But that’s not his name where I come from. In the timeline I’m from, it was Fred VanFleet. Somewhere along the way, I jumped to a timeline where a few details shifted—including the surname of the Warriors  nemesis.

I can accept it because I once experienced intense, uncontrollable timeline shifting during my Dark Night of the Soul. For three straight days, my reality glitched and shifted similar to the Spider-Verse movies or the TV show Undone. Sometimes I forgot my name; sometimes others forgot me. In one reality, I could sense my gravitational relationship to celestial bodies on a soul level; in another, my SO Jodi had to reteach me the names of basic things like trees and chairs and how to walk. It was terrifying.

Ayahuasca finally helped me regulate. I have ambivalent feelings about that medicine and the culture around it—at least the one led by white folks here in Minnesota where I live—but there’s no denying it steadied me. Since then, I’ve mostly stayed in a relatively stable, albeit slighlty different timeline from the one I remember before my Dark Night.

Here, Sinbad never starred in Shazaam, a movie I distinctly remember watching in the ’90s where he played an inept genie with a heart of gold. In Palm Springs, a portal to a hidden waterfall opened up; on Picketpost Mountain in Arizona, one closed.

And now, I’ve shifted again into a reality where Fred VanVleet is the heady point guard for the Houston Rockets, not Fred VanFleet.

Until recently, I thought that was the only difference between Earth-VF and Earth-VV. But when I fact-checked a j’essay last week, I discovered something new: in this timeline, the richest 10% of people control 85% of the world’s wealth. A depressing figure on its face. But in the timeline I came from—Earth-VF—it was 90%.

I don’t believe global inequality magically improved, nor that my personal growth shifted global wealth distribution. Rather, I believe I folded into a reality that matched my vibration. I’m still hella greedy—but less so than before.

And in this new frequency, the world is about 5% less greedy.

Five percent isn’t much, but it’s a start. And it proves that change really does come from the inside out.

So instead of trying to persuade anyone how to be, I’ll keep leading by example—and keep folding into timelines that are a little less greedy, one Van point at a time.