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Key points
- Everyone has needs that need to be met.
- An individual’s needs are individual.
- No one can meet someone else’s needs.
- Environments can be organised to enable rather than hinder people’s need-meeting activities.
Have you ever wondered what the world would be like if we met everyone’s needs all the time? Such a world is perhaps the ultimate impossible dream. It’s impossible not because we lack the resources and not even because we lack the desire. It’s impossible because no one can meet someone else’s needs.
People definitely have needs. No dispute there. And needs definitely get met. No argument there either. But, if we’re going to make need-meeting happen more of the time, we need to understand how it actually occurs.
Can we agree that a need could be thought of as a requirement or a necessity? Needs are something that we all have. We don’t necessarily all have the same needs, and we certainly don’t have the same amount of each need, but we all have needs. Sleep is a good example of a universal need. We all need a certain amount of sleep. What the “certain” amount is, however, varies from person to person and even within the same person from time to time.
Some people will have very similar needs in terms of sleep duration, and some will have very different needs. We can’t tell other people what their right amount of sleep is, and we can’t give them a particular serving of sleep to satisfy their needs.
We can provide comfortable environments that are easy to sleep in. But even here, we must keep in mind that what makes an environment comfortable will be individually determined. We can dim the lights and draw the curtains and tippy-toe around the house but we can’t inject sleep into someone who needs it. And some people find it easier to sleep with the lights on and noise in the background.
The need-meeting process can be contentious for some people. I remember quite a few years ago having a discussion with a colleague about this very topic. Up until our needs discussion, I thought we had similar views about many things. This exchange happened way back when I was still a schoolteacher.
My colleague and I often discussed different topics related to education and teaching, and we especially liked swapping ideas about behavior. Before I knew it, however, we were disagreeing about the way in which needs get met.
Without really realizing it, I had assumed that the idea that people met their own needs was fairly unremarkable. Mundane even. But my colleague was adamant that she met other people’s needs and seemed more than a little insulted that I was suggesting that this wasn’t the case.
In some ways, I could understand her point of view. She was a school counsellor and clearly liked helping people. I like helping people, too. I just think that, to be as helpful as possible, it’s advantageous to know how help occurs.
Perhaps she chose an extreme example to make a point but, towards the end of this particular conversation, she blurted out, “Oh, Tim! Don’t be so ridiculous. Of course we meet other people’s needs. I can tell you I regularly meet my husband’s need for sex.”
I distinctly remember thinking, “Well, technically, you allow him to use you to meet his own need for sex,” but, on this occasion, I decided it would probably not be helpful to our collegial relationship to continue the conversation, and I suggested we should agree to disagree.
Whether the topic is sex or any other aspect of daily living, we would achieve much greater levels of contentment and social cohesion if we recognized that people meet their own needs and arranged our social affairs to allow this to happen more easily. It is unquestionably the case that the environments within which we conduct our day-to-day living are essential to the need-meeting process, but the environment can’t do it for us.
We all need certain resources and opportunities from the environment to meet our needs, and, in this regard, I can see important roles for officials, policy-makers, other decision-makers, and helpers. What an awesome world it would be if things like health and education facilities were much more available and accessible.
How extraordinary would it be, for example, if societies provided environments so that people could meet their learning and education needs without incurring long-lasting financial hardship? A few countries already do something very much like this, but it could be far more widespread than it is. A community in which people had access to the resources they needed to keep themselves as healthy as they wanted to be would be phenomenal indeed.
And what about food? Our global crowd currently produces enough food for everyone. Yet, on a daily basis, enormous amounts of food are wasted in some places while, elsewhere, people starve.
So, here’s a quirky suggestion: How about we figure out how food could be supplied and distributed so that people can meet their own needs for daily sustenance?
There is no doubt that people have needs. Needs matter. An unmet need will demand your attention. Needs definitely need to be met. No one can do that meeting for you but others can certainly interfere with or otherwise disrupt need-meeting processes.
By understanding more completely how need-meeting happens, we might be able to ensure that more people, more of the time, find themselves in places where their need-meeting is helped rather than hindered.
