All the dreams, hopes, ideals, and notions of happiness that people imagine begin with bodily desires perceived through the five senses — seeking tastier food with the mouth, more amusing sights and sounds with the eyes and ears, greater comfort and pleasure with the body. But desire through the senses never ends, and so true satisfaction is impossible. All human societies, cultures, religions, and teachings dream of an eternal happy ending, a peaceful home, success stories, and a joyful life — yet these hopes are in fact excessive fantasies born of insatiable desire.
Human culture expresses the endless desires for more convenience, tastier things, better things, and more entertainment under the noble names of happiness, love, and success, but in truth these are only greed born of the pleasures sought by the flesh. The world and human culture package the fleeting pleasures and momentary delights that always vanish as if they were family happiness, beautiful love, or success myths, decorating and glorifying them. In short, momentary joys and passing pleasures — values that must disappear — are simply sensual pleasures born of desire, yet contemporary culture treats them as if they were the proper standard and definition of a beautiful life.
Because standards for love, ideals, and happiness in the world lack a firm center or clear limits, they are vague and nebulous, changing with each person’s temperament and life circumstances. What counts as genuine love or true happiness varies by each person’s background and environment, and shifts with moods and feelings. Human love and happiness that sway with the moment, with circumstances, and with passing emotions are fickle and ever-changing. Inflating and romanticizing such notions of happiness and love produces dreamy illusions and fantasies that can never be fully achieved, no matter how long one pursues them.
Take marriage as an example. Frequent quarrels and arguments, sometimes several times a day, are common in most households. Unlike the early honeymoon illusion that “if I marry this person I’ll be happy forever,” people soon find that small things cause mood swings and dissatisfaction, and build up recurring conflicts. Over time the honeymoon happiness and ideals prove to have been nothing more than a fairy-tale dream — a conclusion discovered with regret. Many marry following the pleasant feelings of early romance, but those variable emotions breed complaints and repeated fights that can push a once-happy marriage toward divorce.
The fickleness that moves from immediate expression of love to quick anger means that human happiness and love are often just memories that fade and bubbles that burst amid wounds. The ultimate objectives people pursue for family happiness and harmony are power and material goods to satisfy insatiable desires. Through such means they hope for greater convenience, joy, pleasure, and happiness in the home — and so many pursue power and possessions by any means, even illegal or immoral ones. Contrary to the packaged success myths of society or the inflated sermons about beautiful family life in religion, most people grow tired, worn down, and increasingly hollow in heart. Religious people are no exception.
Religions that teach, “If you only believe in God or attend church, your family will enjoy abundant joy, overflowing gratitude, peace, love, and success,” propagate ideas that cannot and in reality do not exist — they entirely forget the essential, insatiable nature of human desire. These falsehoods are spread as if they were truth. Religious sermons that promise success and household bliss only magnify the dreams of their hearers; they are like cotton-candy mirages that amplify desires.
All human societies, cultures, religions, and teachings dream of an eternal happy ending, peaceful families, success, and joyful lives — but those dreams are fantasies created by unending desire. Culture rationalizes the endless desire for convenience, good food, better things, and entertainment as if real happiness, love, and success will result, when in fact they are merely the pleasures of the flesh rebranded as family happiness or success. Because the essence of human desire is to live according to one’s own will and wishes, desire never ends; therefore people endlessly chase the illusion of success and happiness born of unsatisfied cravings. Life becomes weary and degrading as people exhaust themselves chasing insatiable desire; they grow increasingly impoverished inwardly and hollowed out. Human happiness is an ecstasy born of the hope — emotion that fluctuates with desire — and human love is a momentary thrill that can never achieve lasting satisfaction because it follows continual bodily desire.
All human pleasures and joys, pursued for momentary delight, are fleeting pleasures that vanish. Yet people call these hollow pleasures “hope,” “ideal,” “success,” and “happiness.” Therefore, there can be no true satisfaction in human hopes, ideals, successes, and happiness born of bodily pleasures. Chasing a lifetime’s fantasy of a happy ending or success myth is only following the insatiable pleasures of the flesh; the imagined satisfaction rarely, if ever, arrives. Even if one attains some outward success, the imagined fullness and contentment are absent. Instead, people continue, until death, repeating greed and sin that spring from their own appetites.