Early Christian ascetics counted seven deadly sins—pride, greed, envy, sloth, gluttony, wrath, and lust—that threaten our ascension to goodness (and, by extension, to heaven). But in an era ruled by an all-knowing Internet, a surreal beauty standard, and an insatiable appetite for material wealth, these vices are more of a playbook for success than a warning. What is a sin in 2026? For the Indulgence issue, we asked seven figures—Jamieson Webster, Dries Van Noten, Christine Sun Kim, Griffin Dunne, Mia Khalifa, Brontez Purnell, and Helen Molesworth—to examine how one sin threads its way through their life and work. Here, Van Noten reflects on greed.
The world today feels shaped more by greed than by beauty. You feel it in politics, in technology, in the relentless pressure to produce more and react faster. Everything accelerates while the space to reflect, to doubt, to truly look at things, quietly disappears.
Greed, as I understand it, is not only financial. It is emotional and intellectual, too. A desire to control, to optimize, to push uncertainty out of every corner of life. But we human beings do not grow through certainty. We grow when something changes us unexpectedly— through friction and mistake and surprise. That kind of change cannot be planned for.
The tragedy of greed is that it slowly closes people up. It standardizes desire, tells us what to admire before we have had the chance to discover anything for ourselves. The algorithm decides what deserves attention. Everything becomes predictable, and we consume endlessly while feeling less and less.
I grew up in a family of tailors, so commerce was never something abstract or frightening to me. I understood early in my life that fashion lives between creativity and business, that one is not the enemy of the other. But when business becomes the only language, something essential disappears. The care inside a garment. The quiet relationship between the person making it and the person who will one day wear it. The pressure to produce more collections, more images, more visibility rewards speed in ways that make it nearly impossible to ask why something should exist in the first place.
Stepping away gave me distance. It reminded me of what first drew me to this work, which was never really the industry. It was the feeling underneath it. The emotion a material carries. The atmosphere certain objects hold. The traces left by the hands that made them. It reminded me of something I had never underestimated: how much creativity depends on other people. On being challenged. On being occasionally proven wrong. The moment you become too certain of your own perspective, something closes inside you. And when that curiosity goes, beauty goes with it.
Greed accelerates. Beauty asks you to slow down; you cannot experience it while rushing. For me, it is not about decoration or luxury; it is something necessary. It can calm you or bring a kind of order to your thoughts or simply make you notice the world differently for a moment. In a culture growing increasingly loud and aggressive, that is not a small thing.
In my own process, coincidence has always mattered enormously. You begin with an idea—then something unexpected happens. Very often, a corrected mistake holds more life than the original intention. This is why I still believe so strongly in craftsmanship. Not because technology is bad, but because human beings bring something that resists replication. A sensitivity to atmosphere. An intuition about when something is technically correct but emotionally empty.
People are hungry for this again. There is a growing search for what feels genuinely human.
Maybe because greed has pushed life to such extremes, and reduced everything to usefulness. Beauty reconnects us to emotion, to memory, to other people, to the physical world. Not an escape from reality, but a way of remaining human within it.
More Deep Dives on the State of the Seven Deadly Sins
Artist Christine Sun Kim on How Her Deaf Rage Grew Into Deaf Wrath
The Laziness Canon: Helen Molesworth on Artists Who Made Great Work by Doing Nothing
In an Ozempic-Suffused Scene, Brontez Purnell on Being a ‘Fake Skinny Bitch’
What Mia Khalifa Learned From Two Long Years of Celibacy
According to Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, Pride Gets a Bad Rap
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