214. Wants And Needs

We want pleasure but we need love. We want wealth but we need purpose. We want power but we need justice. We want righteousness but we need empathy. We want success but we need meaning. We want happiness but we need joy.

While our wants are often the main focus of our lives, we only rarely consider what we need. We set goals to fulfill our desires because we want the happiness that comes from getting what we want. We emphasize expediency, improving our material situation, and achieving our goals as quickly as possible.

We do not see any harm in prioritizing our desires. We take the happiness that results from their satisfaction as a sign we’re doing the right thing. But often our most pressing needs are in conflict with our most cherished wants. As human beings, our needs are not limited to things like food and shelter. We also need things beyond the material, like meaning, love, and joy. By focusing solely on our wants, our ability to meet these needs is severely limited. Our desires consume our attention and we manipulate our actions to achieve our goals, which prevents us from doing what is necessary to meet our needs.

If we can recognize the conflict between our wants and our needs, we can also transcend it. To do so, we must be skeptical of our wants and even of our own values. We do not have to abandon our values or desires, but we must not allow ourselves to become so attached to them that they become all of life. For it is when we live from attachment that we actively impede our own possible awareness and compassion.

To instead live from compassion will sometimes mean doing things we do not want to do, but that we see we must do, not out of duty or because of any outside authority, but because we feel the necessity of action. It is compassionate action itself that helps us eliminate suffering and create an endless bounty of love, purpose, justice, empathy, meaning, and joy.