The question was going to be about greed. That is if greed is natural desire of people of is it a result of our society?
Though I thought it would be better to ask and try to find out what is it that we will desire in contradiction to what society would want us to desire. Sex is a classic example of what we desire naturally but our society tries to make us have less sex for the good of society.
So what else, besides sex, do people naturally desire?
Comfort, ease, warmth, a full stomach.
Take a look here: The Maslow pyramid. I am not sure if that’s what you mean.
To live and reproduce.
To crush their enemies ,see the driven before them, and hear the lamentation of their women.
The solution to how to work an interesting job that gives you the money so that you can do fun things in your free time with your friends and loved ones without spending all of your free time earning the money. Somewhere there must be an equilibrium. If you find that you are golden. Lots of sex and peach pie would work equally as well. 
Skully, GQ is for questions with factual answers. Matters of opinion belong in IMHO. I’ll move this to IMHO.
Please read forum descriptions carefully before you start your next thread. Thank you.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
I thought that there was a factual answer to this. Guess not…
Salt.
I remember hearing somewhere that researchers (yet another bunch with too much time on their hands) had proved that most humans crave salt as much as sex.
I certainly do.
I find that many people including myself desire to fit in and be excepted by everyone.
My main desire in life is to be left alone. No obligations to anyone in any way. People try to tell me that that is ‘wrong’ to feel that way. From an evolutionary standpoint, perhaps they have a point, but personally, I don’t care what society thinks I should desire. I don’t have any intention to make anyone else see things my way. I just want to be left alone and leave others alone. And it’s actually a lot harder than it would seem…
Re: humanity at large … I say Control is the one common thing that all people want. For most of us, controlling our own life is enough. For some, they need control over others. It could manifest in plenty of ways… money or power or making your kid sit in the corner or whatever.
For that matter, I’d say the need for control holds true for many other animals as well.
Most people want all the appropriately flavored salt, fat and sugar they can eat. Sometimes I think if humans put salt on ice-cream they’d never eat anything else.
People desire first to survive, with a minimum of pain and discomfort. All else is secondary.
Given enough pain/discomfort, the desire to survive can be overcome.
We can’t say that the first desire is to be pain free, because humans can tolerate an amazing amount of pain/discomfort and still wish to survive.