Why It's Important to Differentiate Wants and Needs

Getting everything you want is a fool's errand.

I really enjoy drinking coffee. My body is almost certainly addicted to it. I’d estimate the number of days I’ve gone without coffee in the last decade are less than a dozen. Coffee transitions me out of sleep, stimulates my digestion, and provides me with a daily ritual to collect my thoughts. As much as I enjoy coffee, as much as I want it first thing in the morning, I don’t need it. If coffee were unavailable or prohibitively expensive —both possible scenarios in our fraught geopolitical and climatically unstable world—I would stop drinking it. Sure, my body would go into withdrawal, but after a week or two of detoxing I’d return to the uncaffeinated state of my ancestors.

Let’s now compare coffee to breathing. I do not wake up looking forward to taking a big breath of air, nor do I typically wax rhapsodically about the flavor of the air I breathe. Yet I’d guess my longest break from breathing was less than three minutes. Breathing, unlike coffee, is a real need.

As I’ve opined here many times before, today’s consumerist economy depends on a persistent want of more—stuff, medications, apps, travel, speed, size, etc. In this system, things that were once rare treats like coffee and sweets are treated as necessities. Moreover, things that didn’t exist 20 years ago like smartphones and oat milk are rapidly added to the canon of necessary items for living. The people selling more want people to believe their wants are needs. It’s logical that if we need a car, we will go into debt, wreak havoc on the environment, economically support foreign wars, and do all sorts of distasteful things to satisfy that need.

But wants and needs are quite different. The easiest way to differentiate the two is evaluating what happens when we stop using or doing something. Life goes on when we don’t get what we want, but life stops or becomes intolerable when we don’t get what we need.

The topic of wants and needs has been on my mind for a variety of reasons. One concerns war in the Middle East and elsewhere, which, like most modern warfare is being fought over resources that ensure consumerist, often-Western wanters get what they want—cheap gas, cars, airfare, unlimited food, electronics, etc. In the interest of ensuring their wants are satisfied, the wanters dominate and destroy anyone who threatens to impede cut them off. It all seems so evil and unnecessary.

The topic also relates to my life, which lacks many things I want, but includes most of what I need (more on that in a second). I’ve found fulfilling my needs often requires relinquishing what I want. For example, in order to fulfill my need to play and move, I must often relinquish my want for surplus money. Life is inconvenient without money, but it becomes intolerable without play and movement. I sometimes need to remind myself why I do what I do, especially when what I’m doing is quite different than what most people are doing.

Below is my list of basic needs—things I try to incorporate into all of my days. If I do not include these things in my life on a regular basis, I will either die or wish I were dead. That list is:

1. Breathe

2. Eat

3. Drink/hydrate

4. Sleep

5. Defecate/expel waste

6. Play

7. Sing/Dance

8. Move

9. Connect (interpersonally and spiritually)

10. Be useful

11. Reproduce/continue

Note: my list represents categories, not the quality of those categories. This is to say that we can meet needs, but not meet them in full: we can breathe, but not breathe well, eat, but not eat well, move, but not rigorously, connect, but not deeply. Nevertheless, whether high or low quality, most of us would be far happier and healthier if to got acquainted with and started satisfying our real needs, letting our sundry needs fall by the wayside.