The service of shaia{R}

What Do We Really Want, Need?
"Nobody wants me. Everybody wants you. I need a miracle."

What do we really want, need? That's been going through my mind a lot lately.

Maslow comes to mind, with his hierarchy of needs - air first,
then good (whoops, typo - meant to type food),
and a long way up, self-actualization.

I'm tempted to go off on a tangent, about our need for good -
which I do think is a basic need - the need to do good.
But first, I will mull around with - what do we need, on some deep level?

I'm at an airport - but I could as well be at a mall or a grocery story or
on a busy street or in a parking lot cram packed full of cars that have unloaded people to do some busy thing.

Not much satisfaction on most of the faces around me.

Almost everyone looks like some big thing is missing.
They look like house plants that haven't been given enough light or water -
or that are drowning in too much water, roots rotting.

There are billions of us, teeming all over the place -
only a few with satisfaction on our faces.

Satisfaction is most common - in my mental image, anyway -
on the faces of people from low-tech high-religion cultures.
I think of my grandmother, alone for forty-odd years,
living in poverty most of her life, yet with a kind of quiet satisfaction to her, a lot of the time anyway. (At least that's how she exists in my mental image of her.)

Her kind of satisfaction is alien to me.
wants versus needs

****

Dissatisfaction isn't alien to me.

What I feel most, though, is longing - a hunger, a longing for more.

And often, I feel restless, edgy, close to anger.
I see that kind of close-to-snapping look on a lot of the faces around me.

Even more often (on the negative side) I see resignation, hopelessness, flatness.
Something is missing.
wants versus needs

****

What to we need, want, desire, long for?
When do we feel satisfaction, happiness?

First, wants versus needs - how do we tell them apart?
And then, does getting them met lead to satisfaction?

Needs - those are urgent things. Air. Water. Pretty soon, food. For many people, the need they feel most is for money, a loan, a job. (In other words, they have air and water, but urgently feel another lack.)

When the need is extremely urgent and we don't know how we could possibly get it met, then we say, I need a miracle.

Wants - those things, on some level, are optional. If we're desperate, we say I need money fast. We're not desperate when we say, I want a job.  (We may even desperately need a job, but not want a job.)

Needs - having them met brings relief. We're underwater. We surface, gulp in air. Relief.  We're lost in a blizzard. We spot a house in the distance. We knock on the door. It opens. Relief.

Then in the warmth of the house, warming up with a mug of something steaming, fingers thawing, we may feel much more than relief. Satisfaction.

But if there is nothing beyond the relief of need, the satisfaction isn't likely to last.  We get bored, fed up. Two hours after finding safety from the blizzard, we may be restless, irritable, irritated. We want to move, to get out of that little house, back to wherever we were heading when we got lost.

Wants - those come from a place other than need. We want an answer to a question going through our head. We want something that holds our interest. We want more friends, more money, a holiday, something to wear for a party, more time to ourselves, more peace and quiet. We want to learn something, don't want to have to do something.

Want - it comes from wanting.

Then there is desire - that is an urgent want, often not something socially sanctioned, often to do with love and lust. Dangerous desires. Endless desire. Burning desire. Dark secret desires. Fueled by desire. Shameless desire. Haunting desires. Unconscious desires. Forbidden desires. Beyond desire.

We don't just want what we desire. We're caught in the drip of something more powerful.

Then there is longing, yearning aching. Memories of past love, of hoped-for pleasures.
Often there's a bit of resignation to longing. We often long for ... things beyond reach. needs vs. wants

****

And with that, I come back to what I started with. The many dragging sagging flat faces around me when I'm at a mall, parking lot, airport.

How does one get to satisfaction?

In the West, there's more material comfort than in just about every low-tech society that exists or ever has existed, except a few where the weather is idyllic.  We have more things, more comfort, more access to more. Not more satisfaction.

You could say - we should not want so many things.

I say: much of what we want doesn't give satisfaction. Another to-shirt. Another big Mac.
Another cell phone, iPod, laptop. Another trip to the mall, the airport. Another trip.
A bigger home. New kitchen cabinets.

The want ("I want this or that") is satisfied. Often we're not.

That's the rub.

The question: what satisfies?

I'm not, by the way, against the things. I have lots of things. They satisfy the want for those things - a home in the country, a car to go city to country, high-speed internet, and so on.

But I know that, in the long run, kitchen cabinets, high-speed, and so on don't satisfy deeply. wants vs. needs

****

What satisfies deeply?

I am going to come back to my typo - we need good (food too, but also good).
It's doing good to build and reach and connect.
It is good to be able to help more than we ever could.

In my case, my greatest doing good has to do - according to the voice inside me - with sharing my gifts (my good) - and one way of doing this is by building one small part of the burgeoning web-based community - in my case a creativity and idea community.

What satisfies deeply?

I'll leave you to your own answer.

Here is mine for self satisfaction, life satisfaction.
I'd say that a huge motivation in my life is satisfaction motivation.