"The Vanity of Human Wishes" is a poem about, well, the vanity of human wishes. Great, so we're done here? Well… not quite. You see, this is not the most optimistic poem. In it, the speaker lays out why all our hopes and dreams are likely to come to nothing. We want lots of money? Good luck to us. Lots of power? Too much power will only get us into trouble. We want to look beautiful? Our beauty will destroy us.

Not only that, but the poem dwells on our weakness as human beings. We can't help being too proud or arrogant or greedy. We're far from perfect, in other words. It's inherent to our human nature to be weak. And it's this weakness that gets us into trouble.

Written in 1749, while Johnson was working on his far-more-famous Dictionary of the English Language, this poem is inspired by the "Tenth Satire," which was written by the Latin poet Juvenal. It's a "satire" because it holds a very unflattering mirror up to humankind. It's a poem that shows us all that's wrong with us, and all that's wrong with our values. We're guessing that Johnson was loads of fun at parties.

We all want to lead happy lives, don't we? But we can only do that if we're wise and clever enough to avoid making other people's mistakes. But hey, who has the time to sit there and study human nature and figure out what's the best way to lead our lives? That Xbox isn't going to play itself, right?

Thank goodness, then, for "The Vanity of Human Wishes." That's because we can use the poem as a kind of shortcut: it sums up all of those bad things we need to avoid in order not to end up miserable. So, let's thank Samuel Johnson for doing all the hard work for us, so that we don't have to. All together now: "Thank you, Samuel." We're sure he appreciates it—wherever he is.