What do you need? We don’t mean ‘what do you want?’, ‘what do you desire?’ or ‘what do you wish for?’, inviting you to produce a long-cherished fantasy list of pretty consumer durables, or the Hollywood-meets-Instagram fiction of some ideal lifestyle. We mean, what do you really need to have a fulfilled, flourishing life? You may, as The Rolling Stones have it, not get what you want, but do you get what you need?
THE BASICS
Well, start with the basics. We all have physiological needs including sustenance, air and sleep. Next, we might think about safety and security—a place to live, employment, good health, social stability. We might then consider more psychological needs, the likes of affiliation with and the acceptance of others: friends, family and a sexual partner. Later, perhaps, the more esoteric likes of self-esteem through independence and achievement, competence and autonomy, respect through prestige and status and so on. Until we finally need what might be called self-actualisation: fulfilling one’s own unique potential and finding meaning.
Indeed, this is precisely what American psychologist Abraham Maslow called it some 80 years ago, in his groundbreaking . His thoughts on the subject of needs, (based in part on his study of what he called exemplary people; among them Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt) gave rise to what’s known as Maslow’s ‘, roughly following the structure sketched above.
