Wants and Needs.

Sometimes what one wants isn’t what one needs, and wisdom is the ability to decern the difference.

Wants are most often personal desires. Things we don’t have and do not need, but desire to obtain. On the basis of personal desires, they can be essential or pleasurable. When they are essential, it falls in line with need, and when pleasurable, it falls in line with wants.

Needs are basic necessities, elements that are so crucial, that there absence creates imbalance in our lives. When emphasising needs, we relate to things we cannot do without, fragments of life that makes existence orderly and uniformed, blurring the line between social classes, superiority and inferiority, master and slave. When these needs are left unsatisfied and unmet, it most certainly breeds imbalance in life. This imbalance is a situation where only the strong survive, and is born from the survival instinct of every living organism, self preservation.

Self preservation mandates that in the absence of basic needs, one must steal, betray and kill if need be, to attain these needs of life. Only in the presence of morality, can an individual choose to neglect this notion. Morality is the bridge between right and wrong. It tends to redefine reason, placing order, dignity, and the sense of righness, first, before any other thing.

Desiring something doesn’t make it a necessity. It could be a craving, it could be born out of jealousy or insatiability, or the desire to just have, so as to add to a collection or for personal gratification. All these falls under the category of wants. Wants are pleasures and personal desires that do not necessarily satisfy anything crucial.

But in some situations, wants can become a necessity, making them a need. When an individual gets accustomed to something that at the onset, was unessential, gradually the unimportant becomes essential. It’s more like an addiction to something which seemed like nothing, but soon becomes an essential need. The line between wants and needs are often so blurry that sometimes one is mistaken for the other.

Emmanuel.