The easy answer to the question “What keeps people from living contented lives?” is “They are greedy.” But often what presents as greed is actually just a by-product of chaos and the feeling of being time-constrained. When chaos reins and the calendar is over-scheduled, then we begin to make decisions that prioritize convenience, we imbibe the aggregate tastes and habits of our peer group as a proxy for our own (because we have no time to cultivate them for ourselves), and we seek shortcuts to pleasure through buying as we have limited time to seek it in other ways.
Contentment requires agency, and agency requires discipline, and discipline requires time. So maybe the best way to reduce greed is to reduce chaos.
Meaningful Returns 