Know What You Need
Knowing what you need makes knowing what you want much easier.
It is often said about successful people that they “know exactly what they want.” I’m sure this is true, because in our modern culture, where we are constantly made aware of new choices and possibilities, knowing what you truly want is not nearly as easy as it sounds.
The more we know about the lives of others, the more we are influenced by them. That can be a good thing, if what we know is a matter of character and experience. But when we are voyeurs (and exhibitionists) about things, our desires are easily manipulated. In a culture as materialistic as ours, this is rarely a good thing.
It takes some discipline to change this. It sometimes means not looking, or being disconnected. The less I know about what other people do, the less those choices can influence mine. I find that helpful, because I am as influenceable as anyone else.
But this still leaves you with the question of what do you want? I think this is a question much easier to answer if you have already figured out what you need.
Needs and wants, of course, are often difficult to distinguish. For instance, we all need food, and we all have preferences for what kind of food we eat. The difference between eating to stay alive and eating to thrive is exactly that spectrum of need to want. But since we all eventually get full, it’s a much better one, than, say, the same need-to-want spectrum for just about anything else we might buy — clothing, a car, or a house.
I like to maintain a list of needs. It looks a lot like a budget, but my primary purpose in maintaining it is not to keep me from overspending. It’s to keep me from over-wanting. When I know what I need, the question becomes not just “what do I want?” but “do I want more than this?”
Below are my categories. The last one is particularly important, because if it is not a thing that supports one of the above, it’s a want, not a need. This is a big category; it contains everything from soap to a smartphone. But it’s also a subjective one. A smartphone might be a need; for me, upgrading it every year is not.
- housing
- food
- healthcare
- utilities
- transportation
- clothing
- supplies that support the above
I don’t run this list monthly and tally up each month’s expenses with it. There are apps for that and my bank does a pretty good job of it even within my regular statements. What I do is list all my regular expenses within these categories and treat it as a basic lifestyle ledger. The question it should answer for me is what does my day-to-day lifestyle cost.
It’s hard enough in this world to get all your needs met. And so I write this with a clear awareness and immense gratitude that I am able to meet the needs of my family and of my own. But I also remember, in the early days of my adult life, when not being able to fully meet my own needs created a daily anxiety that was still not great enough to sublimate externally influenced desires. That’s how much power even an ambient awareness of things and the other people who want them can have over you. It is exactly why people routinely choose to buy things they want instead of things they need — why TVs fly off the shelves but dentists have to beg people to see them once a year.
I think about my list often. I try to focus on the feeling I have when I am able to provide the things on my list. When I clean our house, bring groceries home, or buy my child a new pair of shoes, I enjoy it. And I’m astonished and grateful that this is so. There is so much in this world to want; what I truly want is, objectively, a tiny, tiny piece of that and yet it feels like abundance to me. I not only feel like I have won the lottery by having what I already have, I feel like I have won the lottery by having become someone who truly does not want more. I don’t know how this happened. I don’t feel that I’ve built it within myself, like I have scaled the mountain of materialism and avarice under my own strength. It’s just who I am, and not a day goes by that I am not in awe of my good fortune that I don’t have to struggle against wanting more than I have.
But the spectre of desire still looms. And so despite the fact that I know that what I want isn’t more than I need, I have no such confidence that this can’t change. My list is my defense.
Written by Christopher Butler on
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