Man's natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and moreby Parker on TwosMan's natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and moreAs it is difficult to resist fears of the gods and the afterlife, so too it is difficult to resist the compulsive sense that security, for oneself and one's community, can somehow be enhanced through exploits of passionate acquisitivenness and conquest. These exploits, however, only decrease the possibility of happiness and put everyone engages in them at the risk of a shipwreckThe goal must be to escape from the whole mad enterprise and observe it from a position of safetyNothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure powerThe greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusionThe principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fearThough we are finite and mortal, humans are gripped by illusions of the infinite—infinite pleasure and infinite pain. The fantasy of infinite pain helps to account for their proneness to religion: in the misguided belief that their souls are immortal and hence potentially subject to an eternity of suggering, humans imagine they can somehow negotiate with the gods for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradiseHumans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happinessGrasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance—the fact that it is not all about us and our fate—is the good newsHuman beings must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and that they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives that they have. These lives, like all other existing forms in the universe, are contingent and vulnerable; all things, including the earth itself, will eventually disintegrate and return to the constituent atoms from which they were composed and out of which other things will form in the perpetual dance of matter. But while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially eroticThere are no rewards for the dead, certainly there are no punishments eitherNone live more enjoyably than those who live righteouslyNo kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided no harm comes of it