Needs vs. Wants:
We are living in the Oversold Society. We have been oversold on labor saving devices and transportation (especially cars) to a state of activity intolerance where 70 percent of the population is overweight if not clinically obese, including children. Indoor temperature "needs" to be set to and maintained at a fixed a point with no noticeable variation. The condition of not feeling full, if not stuffed, must be avoided least any sense of deprivation with respect to any food be briefly experienced. Decades of relentless adverts have made the non-hyper-consumer life seem not worth living. Most people don't know their needs from their wants.
While our needs are not all material, as Maslow et. al. have noted, still material needs, as in physiological and safety needs, are basic. To start with basics, consider survival needs—and there really is only one: homeostasis. Homoeostasis is the maintaining of moderate conditions outside of which death or suffering occurs. Physiological needs include maintaining blood pH at about 7.365 and blood glucose within a tolerable range by eating. Breathing is needed to oxygenate blood and blow off CO2. Maintaining body temperature between hypothermic and hyperthermic conditions, by wearing or not wearing clothes, is a need in most places where humans now live. Living in a 75°F house, walking to the 75°F garage to get in a car whose AC or heater automatically comes on to drive to a 75°F workplace or mall, where only the walk from the covered parking to the elevator involves exposure to the elements, is not a need.
A failure to meet some needs does not result in immediate death, and so we enter into the less compelling shades of grey in thinking about "needs." Sleep is a need as humans deprived of sleep become dysfunctional and if forced to be active are prone to death by misadventure. The military is working tirelessly to develop technology, chemical or other, to keep soldiers from needing to sleep for at least 168 hours as sleep itself could possibly result in death on the battlefield. Still, at some point, the brain needs to cleanse itself through sleep.
Sex is often considered, especially by men, to be a need (or NEED!). This is because, for some, abstinence leads to a state of obsessive fixation that renders them dysfunctional, creating the need for consensual sex or masturbation to placate the reptile brain. Food is also a need, but like sex, food can become an extremely oversold "need" masquerading as a want. Humans in the Oversold Society find discriminating their food and sex needs from their wants to be extremely challenging. Billions are spent on media and the best psycho-marketing talent money can buy to make knowing the difference as impossible as possible.
Consumers are more likely to buy, buy, buy what they perceive as a need. Wants are good, to have more of what you can be made to want is good, but needs have to be bought before wants, so every marketer wants you to perceive their product as necessary for living the good life, the meaningful existence, the life that commercial stuff makes worth living, and which only shopping can provide. A person's life work is all about figuring out how to make the money needed to buy needed things. This involves doing what other people are willing to pay you to do. The message, never to be questioned, is that life otherwise lived is pointless.
The only antidote to being oversold is to doubt, to question everything you've been sold on, everything you've taken in since your mother's milk (if your mother wasn't oversold on the need to bottle feed). To not have enough of what is actually needed is a curse. To have/want more than is needed is also a curse. To avoid living the life of a consumer zombie, figure out the difference between your needs and your inculcated wants. You may or may not be conspiring with the purveyors of stuff to maximize your wants. Most people are, but you don't have to and absenting yourself from the hyper-consumer life is a start.
Solmads seek to live sustainably outside the Oversold Society. They consider doing things in life that others are not willing to pay them to do. They consider avoiding spending money to avoid the necessity of making it.
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
