From time immemorial there have been two ever present, all consuming human motivations: the possession of material things and the pursuit of sexual pleasure.
A great many societies have been built around their acquisition or their restriction. America and much of the advanced world are heaped with products for sale and are obsessed with sex. Hundreds of billions of monetary units are spent selling one with the other.
Unfortunately, neither is satisfying over the long term.
Solomon, King of the ancient Jews, was arguably among the richest humans of his era. He had vast possessions and a virtually unlimited array of sex partners but he wrote that nothing he had was a comfort to him so it would have been better to never have been born at all.
In the modern day, well-to-do people who earned more in a year than an average worker earned in a decade or a lifetime illegally manipulated the stock market and bankrupted the savings and loan industry so they could have far more than too much. Obviously they were not satisfied with what so many devote their lives to achieving.
Materialistic, pleasure seeking societies encourage the generations to pursue instant gratification at the same time that they frown on discipline. Spending billions to motivate people to give in to impulses that they have never learned to control is a recipe for all manner of crime among a great mass of humanity that either can not achieve society's goals or that are not satisfied even if they succeed at that endeavor.
In their efforts to achieve society's recurrent, hedonistic goals, humans have ravaged the planet and its surrounds. They have littered space with debris, damaged the ozone layer, leveled vast forests, wiped out countless land species and turned their ATTACK ON THE SEAS.
A species that purports to reason requires loftier meaning if its members are to find contentment and peace.