Buddhism focuses on suffering. It teaches that attachment (to everything in daily life, past and future) is the source of suffering. Attachment can be ameliorated by focusing on the present, a practice of enlightenment.
This idea of suffering, the same that is found in most religion (Christ on the cross) is focused on 50,000 years of human history. For 50,000 years, most humans have experienced suffering: everyday hunger, medical and dental pain, horrible birth defects, untimely death and the vicious attacks of the natural world.
Today, since the modern world of commerce has created abundance and daily freedom of unimaginable proportions, the worst suffering we experience is a long airplane trip in coach class.
We don't suffer in the modern world except for untimely death and the horrors our minds create about other people (homeless, poor, minorities, the third world and the disasters of the daily paper-press and TV news reporting.)
We live most of our lives without suffering. I certainly have lived a rich, abundant, happy and pain free life... as have most of the people around me.
So how do religions get all their adherents? Somehow the anguish of a sore Achilles heel is conflated with the Black Plague of the pre-modern world. Our minds create a suffering from the long past of human life. Many of us are unable to accept the fountains of abundance and joy that commerce has brought us.
A pro commerce life is a good alternative to religion and theology.