What is need?
One way of defining it is that which you can’t survive without.
A person can survive without almost anything, at least for a time.
A person can survive without air, at least for a few minutes.
A person can survive without water, for a few days.
A person can survive without food, for a few weeks or months, depending on their circumstances and constitution.
Sooner or later thou, you have to have some of the following, or you’ll die.
Another such need is warmth.
All these could be called intrinsic needs, because they’re direct needs, as opposed to things we have to to get, like money, at least in this society, in order to get the things we need to get, like all of the above.
Money itself is not a need, but it can be used to attain something that is.
What’re some other extrinsic needs?
Another one is power, physical and mental.
Physical and mental power is something we’re born with, but it’s also something we must attain.
Some people are born with more potential than others, but that potential must be actualized.
While physical and mental exercise, especially rigorous, may not be needs, they can help us maintain our minds and bodies in optimal condition, which can extend our life expectancy, as well as help us attain the things we need, so long as we don’t exert ourselves excessively.
All these could also be called physical needs.
Is there such a thing as psychological needs?
If there is, I would say it’s when you need something so badly, mentally, emotionally, that you’re prepared to risk life and limb in order to get it, or end your life, if you can’t.
Some psychological needs can help us in attaining our physical needs, like our need to socialize can help us find a job we can use to put food on the table, or in socializing, we might get some advice on how to eat better, in order to extend life expectancy, or on how to avoid danger.
Other mental and emotional needs can be detrimental, like again our need to socialize, in some circumstances, we might hang out with the wrong crowd, with fools, psychopaths or psychotics, or on the other hand, we might make an ass of ourselves, because we crave attention, which may only further alienate us, or worse, cause other people to want to hurt us.
All these could also be called positive needs, because they’re things you have to do, or have, as oppose to things you have to not do, or have.
What’re some negative needs?
An obvious one is the need not to avoid physical danger.
Another is to not smoke… or is that a need?
While smoking itself will not kill you instantly, it will reduce your life expectancy, but so will a lot of things, and it’s difficult to say to what degree, you could die quickly of something else long before smoking and its adverse effects accumulate and compound to the point where you wind up with cancer, hear disease, or some other terminal illness.
So is avoiding intoxicating substances like smoking a need?
While a few smokes a day may not impact your health in any significant way, depending on your constitution, I suppose you could say it only becomes a need to quit after years of heavy and prolonged abuse, where you’re at high risk for developing a terminal illness, or at least a chronic, serious and severely debilitating one.
Smoking can creep up on you thou, on the surface of things you may seem perfectly healthy, especially to the unobservant person, but just underneath, you could be at risk for stroke, because your arteries have been clogged with lethal carcinogens.
We may call such needs like the need not to smoke or drink in excess, gradual needs, because if you don’t die in a freak accident, it’s only a matter of time before they kill you, but it also really depends of an individual, there are some people who’re heavy smokers and drinkers but end up dying in their 80s or 90s, of a nonsmoking/drinking related illness, or just of senescence.
Now that I’ve talked a bit about what need is, and some of the various sorts, I’m coming more to the point of this thread.
When someone asks us, what’s most important in life, what do we tell them?
The materialist will tell you wealth is the most important, especially monetary wealth/all manner of gizmos and gadgets, toys and trinkets, an aesthetically pleasing house, vehicle and so on.
The Nietzschean will tell you both mental and physical power is the most important, the ability to instill both awe and fear in others, achievement and success, and the psychological and physical tools, the virtues necessary to attain them.
The hedonist will at once say to you delicious food, or sex and drugs.
Your yoga instructor will tell you health and fitness.
The bohemian might say art, the nerd science, the monk God, and the hermit wisdom.
And others might say justice, and others still, might say romantic love, or platonic.
While all of these things are important on some level, more/less depending on the persons preferences and deficiencies, ultimately and arguably the most important thing in life is the word that’s in the title of this thread - need.
Needs come in all shapes and sizes, but the most important needs are physical, and these are also the things that’re really the most painful to do without, usually, and for good reason.
It’s why we torture people with pins and needles or starvation rather than name calling, and while isolation can be painful, it’s nowhere near as so as say, what the iceman Richard Kuklinsky did to his victims.
Social, sexual or romantic isolation may compound to the point where it is unbearable, and one is tempted to suicide, but physical torture is instantly unbearable, so much so that a few days, a couple of hours even, depending on ones physical and psychological fortitude, could succumb one to shock death or a catatonic, vegetative state, from which they may never snap out of.
This is also why moderns, who pride themselves on being humane, and not inflicting ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment on others, forbid physical torture, and not so much mental torment or isolation, because it’s not quite as bad or horrific.
The physical needs are also the most universal, we all need to eat, etcetera.
Now that’s not to say the psychological needs are not important, both intrinsically and extrinsically, because life would be insufferable without meeting them, and because they can often help us with our physical needs, there’s usually reasons why nature endowed us with this or that mental or emotional need.
All these other things, like material wealth, sensual indulgence and so on, aren’t needs at all, in the real sense and substance of the word, or only if one is totally deprived of them, to the point where one is suicidal or inconsolably depressed, or to the point where they jeopardize our physical needs in a round about way…but maybe they wouldn’t be so depressed if they saw these things in a different light, were more appreciative of what they did have, and the price, the cost, both to themselves, others, and to the environment, these things often have.
So if they’re not needs what are they?
You may call them wants, excesses, desires, luxuries, indulgence…
(There is also the need to see that others needs are taken care of, it’s a kind of need of itself, especially ones close friends and family, or the need to have a family of ones own, for that matter, we may call this altruistic need, or procreative need.)
All these psychological desires, you could say, at some point go from being genuine needs, into being desires, but this line is not always obviously crossed, it can differ dramatically for each person, and the situation they find themselves in, so it’s open to some interpretation.
But at some point, especially with the psychological needs, we move from need to desire, something we could almost just as easily, or sometimes easier, do without.
So ultimately it is needs that are really important, as opposed to the more subjective curiosity of the nerd, or the avarice of the miser.
Now all this brings me to the broader point that I want to make.
It is my theory that society has gone horribly wrong.
Because we’ve forgotten what’s really important, or we never really knew.
Nature has endowed us with all sorts of desires, and it’s good to some extent, these desires make us who we are, and many of them are often useful for our survival, directly or indirectly.
But it’s my view that human nature is badly flawed, and that the flaw is not that we have a deficiency of desire, generally speaking, but that we have an excess.
This causes us to jeopardize things we need for the sake of things we do not.
It’s not just human nature that’s corrupt, but society reinforces this corruption, rather than attempting to correct it.
It’s why civilization is on the brink, the verge of collapse, not just because of some abstraction, institution or system like capitalism, but because our values and our nature is warped.
I’d like to delve further into this corruption, here, and elsewhere.
Any feedback on topic is appreciated.