A peasant named Pahom is offered all the land he can walk around in a single day for a fixed price, on condition he returns to the starting point by sunset or forfeits everything. Greed drives him to circle too wide a tract; he races back just in time, reaches the start, and drops dead from exhaustion. He is buried in a grave six feet long, the only land he ultimately needed.
Each gain resets the baseline so that what once felt like enough now feels insufficient, and the pursuit accelerates rather than satisfies. Pahom secures more land at every stage yet remains restless, suggesting the appetite grows with feeding rather than being quieted by it.
A reward structure that pays by quantity but imposes a hard time limit turns greater acquisition into greater risk, because the same effort that claims more ground is the effort needed to return and secure any of it. The constraint makes maximal grasping self-defeating: past a point, each additional acre claimed lowers the odds of keeping all the rest.
Viewing material wants against the finite body and its eventual grave reframes 'how much is needed' from an open-ended maximization into a small, fixed quantity. Seen this way, vast holdings are revealed as irrelevant to the actual bodily requirements of a mortal life.