For just one minute, take a step back into your imagination and pretend that today is the day you’ve worried about your whole life. You are given one month to live and can only take three things from your present life into this final month. What would you take? How would you decide?
When it comes to something as abrupt as this, most people can easily separate their needs from their wants. If a fire destroyed your home and everything in it, you would be clear on what your needs were and feel remorseful about your wants at that moment. In today’s world, however, few people in Western civilizations actually know or feel the difference between needs and wants. It can’t help but make one wonder if this is part of the problem with our world.
There isn’t a day that passes when you don’t say to yourself—or hear others say—“I need” such-and-such. “I need a new computer,” “I need a new car,” “I need to get milk from the grocery store,” “I need a nap,” “I need a break,” “I need a new outfit for the party.” The word need has pretty much replaced want in our daily lingo. The problem with this is that a need is far different from a want. As humans, we need food, water, shelter, and each other to survive. We could, in fact, survive without fancy cars, four-bedroom homes, education, steak dinners, wine, $300 jeans, or a television. Perhaps our survival wouldn’t be as abundant in terms of being comfortable and living the life we fancy for ourselves—but we don’t need these things.
The Power of Gratitude
At the same time, what sets humans apart is that we have desires and cravings for more in our lives. These are the inklings born of thought that propel us forward and help us add to our bounties. In the archaic manuscript The Science of Getting Rich, Wattles deliberately reminds us that not wanting or desiring more is a fault in itself. Having lots of wants in life can be a good thing, but describing them as needs clearly clouds the reality of our situations.
The reason? When we begin talking in terms of needs, we are, by definition, speaking of our lives in terms of what we don’t have or what we lack. Eventually, we begin to feel that our needs are not being met when we don’t get the new house or car we talk about. Yet, clearly, if you are reading this on a computer, there’s a good chance that all your true needs in life are, in fact, being met—and then some.
At some point, all of us must realize the difference between needs and wants. Similarly, it is important to recognize that there is no gift in being satisfied with little. This doesn’t make one righteous or selfless, and no matter which religion you follow, this doesn’t bring you closer to God. In fact, most Gods promise abundance and beauty in our lives. Settling for little, being satisfied with less than what you can accomplish, actually makes people lazy and reluctant to offer more to their own life or another’s. No one should have to settle for less than what they are capable of achieving! Obviously, everyone’s capabilities are different, their desires are different, and their lives turn out differently because of this.
Needs versus wants is really about gratitude. Gratitude is another one of those terms in which the meaning has been lost. Gratitude isn’t just saying “thank you” to be mannerly or seem appreciative; it is something felt deep within all of us. Gratitude is what we would feel if we were forced to deal with the situations presented in the first paragraph of this article. All ancient and new age schools of thought agree on the fact that we need to be impeccable with our words, thoughts, and speech—and always be able to feel gratitude for the whole of our lives.
This translates to changing the way we talk, which eventually changes the way we feel and think. It enables us to put one step in front of the other, being grateful for the Earth beneath the shoes we are happy to have. If we begin to say, “I want a new outfit,” “I want a new car,” “I want a new pair of shoes,” and “I want to buy a larger home,” we begin to differentiate between the needs and wants in our lives. Doing this—and being truly grateful for the needs we already have in our lives—opens the door to more.
Another factor in figuring out needs versus wants is the understanding that all of these things we want, which we say we need, will not fill the emotional holes we feel. Passing down the idea to children that life is about living in a nice neighborhood, driving a new car, and having new, expensive clothes only perpetuates the tradition of not being grateful for what we already have. On any given Christmas, there are children around the world who are overindulged with no real appreciation for what they already own. Why? Because they watch and listen to the adults in their lives falsely ruminating about all the things they need, which convinces them—and their children—that they are living in some sort of lack. When a child comes home saying, “I need the newest Nintendo Wii game,” they honestly feel that if they don’t get it, they are living with less.
Perhaps the most frightening problem with speaking in terms of needs versus wants is that more and more people are becoming less motivated to work for either of them. It is common for new couples to feel that they must buy a brand new home in the best neighborhood that they really can’t afford. It is also common for someone just out of college to feel they must get their dream job, bypassing the many tiers to success. As a society, we just feel that these things should come to us, without much effort on our part. When they don’t, there is blame and shame for all the things we think we are supposed to have—but don’t know how to obtain properly.
The fact that more 50-year mortgages are being written now than ever before in the history of real estate says a lot about what we truly need in life versus what we want. The first step in life is to meet our needs so we can begin cultivating the real desire of wanting more. As we begin to want more, we are forced to work harder and more efficiently to achieve these things—and then, when we do, gratitude comes naturally.
Needs versus wants in life is something every person needs to think about at one point or another, making changes to their speech, thoughts, and feelings so they can recognize the difference.
