They say, too much money, rots. Its not the money that actually rots, but its us, who are perishable. Even as our body slowly marches to death, we are busy accumulating for a future we won't be participating in.
Our riches are in the perception of what we have, not the thing we hold in our hands. Every moment is the one we have been lucky to experience, if we are not alive to the moment we are already dead.
Updated: May 2
In Greek mythology, Procrustes , was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who attacked people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed. -- (source wiki)
I came across this concept in Taleb's Antifragile and was astonished at how much of our daily life is governed not by human potential but by systemic and psychological limitations. These iron beds of systems and mindsets end up atrophying our being and in-turn create a society that is shackled to mediocrity.
Modernity is a Procrustean bed, good or bad—a reduction of humans to what appears to be efficient and useful. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
 "Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?
    Ay, and it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.  Though its hands are silken, its heart is of iron. It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeer at the dignity of the flesh. It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels. Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed." - Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet)