Why do we want what we want?

What do we want? What do we pursue each and every day of our lives? This is a very simple and a basic question and each person will have a different answer to it. Some might say a peaceful happy life, some others would want to become famous, powerful and most people would want to become rich and comfortable. Now most of these wants (rather than needs) can be classified in to two categories. One, we want to be secure and two, we want to be able to satisfy our desires. These are called Artha and Kama respectively in Vedanta (a school of Hindu philosophy) and are described as two of the four goals of humans. They clearly say human goals, because they seem to know that no other animal seem to want what we want and these have been our goals since time immemorial. These two also occur in our minds in that order of priority. First we want to be secure and then we want to be able to explore ways to satisfy our desires. When we get our pay checks, first we pay our rent, home expenses, insurances, loan repayment to make ourselves secure and then we indulge in treating our senses in good restaurants and theme parks. Don't we?

Now the next question is, "why do we want what we want?". Why do we feel insecure? Why do we think that to make ourselves happy, we need to indulge in our senses? Who are we afraid of? We constantly keep comparing ourselves with others and we desire to become others that we admire. We project our life in to the future, that we do not know about, and feel the need to secure ourselves from any eventualities that may befall us. We are not happy with what we are and we constantly move our happiness away only to chase it over and over again. Why do we do this? Why do we feel this way? For most of us, the answer is that we feel limited. We feel that we lack those things that could make us happy and we chase them. When we get them, we feel that there are other things which only can give us happiness. This chase goes on and being happy has thus become an Utopian adventure. Are we really so limited? Do we really lack those things that will make us happy? Can we ever not be happy now? In my previous post, I discussed how our faculties deceive us in to believing that we are what we are not. Do they play a role in also deceiving us in to thinking that we really ought to chase happiness forever?