What are human needs and where do they come from?
Can you think of people who had positive lives without having some of
these needs satisfied?
The need is psychological and biological phenomena that arises with a
sense of absence and creates an urge for satisfaction. As a part of their
nature, human beings have needs and they need to get satisfied to live a happy
life. Food, shelter and security were the basic needs in early ages but through
all these years changing life conditions brought many other needs. The increase
in the number of human needs caused scholars to work on this issue and come up
with theories to classify and explain these needs, which go beyond the
essentials like food, water, shelter, etc.
Abraham Moslow developed his well-known study, hierarchy of needs
including both essential physical and non-physical elements required for human
growth and development and also those things humans are naturally driven to at
access. Moslow classified needs in a hierarchical order based on their order of
obtainment. In other words, Moslow put up a list starting with the first, which
deals with the most important needs for survival itself and going upwards with
latter needs. As human beings, we are only concerned about attaining higher
order needs, when we have lower order needs satisfied. If you think of it as a
pyramid, it starts with the basic items of breathing, food, water, and shelter.
These are followed by the needs of safety, than love or / belonging,
self-esteem and finally self-actualization.[i]
We can simply put needs into two groups; essential to survive needs and
non-essential ones. Essentials like breathing, food, and water are necessary
for a human to stay alive. On the other hand needs such as entertainment,
travelling and listening to music are not compulsory to live but we become
happy when those needs are satisfied. As long as the essential needs are
satisfied people might have positive lives without having some of these needs satisfied.
Besides the order of needs also depends on where you live, how old you are,
your gender, social status, career, etc. for instance if you are living in a
cold climate, then heating is higher order need compared to somebody living in
a hot climate. People living in a developed economy need a car to go to work,
do shopping, etc. but it is not so essential in a non-developed country with
small towns.
Jim Carrey once said "I wish everyone could experience being rich
and famous, so they would see it wasn't the answer to anything."
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