What We Want and What We Need Has Been Confused

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

I remember walking into my fifth-grade English classroom one day and seeing that we had a substitute teacher. Like all 11-year-olds, I thought that meant I could coast that day. I was profoundly wrong. Our substitute teacher was a young woman who was convinced that we were all eager to learn the lesson she would teach us that day. She was right, at least as far as I was concerned.

I don’t want to overemphasize the impact that day had on me. It did have an impact, but I don’t remember that teacher’s name, and no bolt from the blue turned me into an evangelist once I stepped outside that classroom. It did change how I thought from that point forward, which is a big deal. The teacher simply clearly articulated something that I already had experienced many times in my short life.  

We focused those 45 minutes of class on a very simple concept.

Wants versus needs.

For about 10 – 15 minutes our teacher walked through the class asking each student to tell the class something we wanted and something we needed. Your average fifth grader had a pretty good grasp of the concept, so it made for a lively discussion. We all appreciated the forty-five minutes in which an adult showed real interest in what we had to say, in what we thought.

After this introduction to the topic, she moved on to something that I still use to evaluate what I truly need versus something that would just make my life a little easier, just something I want.

She introduced me to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.

I can feel the disappointment of some of the readers already. Let me apologize in advance.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs refers to a theory proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”. Maslow’s theory is incredibly simple. It lays out the needs of an individual, with those at the bottom of the list forming our basest needs.

The hierarchy has historically been represented by a pyramid (see Figure 1) with the initial needs at the bottom, building to self-actualization at the top.

These needs as Maslow described them are as follows:

1.        Physiological – Things you need just to survive – Food, Water, Air

2.        Safety – Things you need to ensure you and your family are safe – Shelter, Security

3.        Love/Belonging – Feeling accepted as part of a group or tribe – Family, Friends, Other Associations

4.        Esteem/Accomplishment – A general sense of purpose and – A job, community, as a sense of belonging

5.        Self-Actualization/Achieving One’s Goals – Feeling that you have succeeded and achieved your goals.

When Maslow first came up with his hierarchy of needs, he thought that before advancing to the next stage, each prior stage must be satisfied completely. For example, if you didn’t have your physiological and safety met, you couldn’t move on to love and belonging. This of course doesn’t hold up in the real world, and there have been adjustments to the theory and debates about whether there are other needs that need to be included in the hierarchy. If you’re interested in diving down that professional psychology rabbit hole, have at it. The internet awaits you.

What appealed to me over the years about Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs was that it works in general – if not perfectly in all cases.

In general, individuals and the societies they are part of need their physiological needs met before they can worry too much about self-actualization and living their best lives. Chasing that accomplishment that will put the cherry on top of your life is irrelevant if you don’t have enough to eat or a place to stay. People need their basic needs taken care of before they concern themselves with mid-level needs, such as love and belonging, and so on. If someone doesn’t feel that they are loved or that they belong – they are less likely to have the self-esteem to accomplish what they consider success or fulfillment.

Focusing on the Top of the Pyramid is Destroying the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Those needs at the bottom of the hierarchy; clean air, food, water, shelter, and other basics are increasingly under threat due to climate change. Climate change is coming for you by threatening the fundamental basics you need to survive.

Clean air – According to the Environmental Protection Agency more than 100 million people in the United States live in areas with poor air quality. Changes in weather conditions due to climate change, including temperature and precipitation, can increase ground-level ozone or particulate matter (for example, ash from forest fires).  Increased exposure to such pollutants can lead to or worsen health problems, such as respiratory and heart diseases.

Clean water – The science of the water cycle is fascinating, and complex. Higher temperatures cause water to evaporate in larger amounts, and warm water carries more water (remember that warmed water solution holding more sugar from high-school chemistry class – same concept). This increased evaporation and higher water carrying capacity of the atmosphere leads to more frequent and heavier intense rainfall. Hundred-year floods become floods that happen every 10 – 20 years, or even more frequently.

The higher intensity and frequency of storms lead to more flooding. More flooding means more contaminants like fertilizer make their way into lakes and rivers, and eventually the ocean. These fertilizers and contaminants are things we don’t want in our drinking water, so that itself is a problem, but they eventually cause algae blooms where rivers meet the ocean. These algae blooms clog coasts, making it difficult for sunlight to get to vegetation underwater and diminish oxygen in the water. These blooms frequently cause dead zones around estuaries because of the increased level of toxins released from algae blooms. These toxins are often unsafe to humans and can cause entire industries on the coast to shut down for long periods.

There’s more. As glaciers melt due to a warming planet, freshwater from the glaciers makes its way into the ocean, causing oceans to rise. Higher sea levels can then more easily contaminate aquifers located near coastlines. Once these aquifers are contaminated by salt water, the water would need to be desalinated, an expensive process that will become a necessity for many coastal areas – lessening the availability of freshwater, while increasing its cost.

In many of the world’s largest rivers, winter snowpack accumulates during the winter and feeds rivers as they melt. Warmer temperatures mean less snowfall, which means less snowpack, which means less water available in local rivers and reservoirs for most communities.

Food – Increased heat stresses, increased flooding, and other impacts of climate change are forecast to lower the yields on staple crops of wheat, corn, rice, and soy by between 15 -25 percent by 2030 if current trends continue. Climate change puts about 60 percent of the world’s fish species at risk of extinction according to a 2020 report by the World Economic Forum.[1] Climate change is going to make it harder to eat.

Shelter – A 2022 report from Climate Central, estimated that 650,000 privately owned parcels of land covering over 4 million acres will be lost to rising sea levels in the United States over the next 30 years. Not a big deal you say? Well, if you live in a place threatened by climate change, that 30-year mortgage is a mighty risky investment, when in 30 years there may be no one in that area willing to get their 30-year mortgage.

Climate change is coming for you. It is already at your front door, if not in your house already. Net zero commitments by 2050 and temperature projections that go out to 2100 make the climate crisis seem very abstract and far away.

But it is already here. It’s coming for you and there is no place to hide, no place to go.

What we want and what we need has been confused.

We are currently using the Earth’s resources as though we had 1.6 planets to use. That number is nearly four earths for developed countries like the United States. This is unsustainable. The problem is an easy one to diagnose but a hard one to fix.

We consume too much.

I’m not a socialist telling people to get rid of everything they own and move to a farming commune. I grew up in the United States and have traveled the world. I am a capitalist like almost everyone reading this book. But the days of capitalism are numbered. I’m not cheering for that to happen, or sad that it will happen. It is just happening.

Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty and helped human civilization to advance by encouraging investment in the technologies that make our lives better, easier, and more enjoyable than people could have imagined 100, 50, or even 25 years ago. But capitalism has a dirty little secret. It depends on an ever-expanding population exploiting bountiful resources and assumes a planet that never runs out of those resources.

That is a fantasy. We live in reality.

We live on a planet with finite resources. There are no new continents to discover. A still-growing global population will demand more and more of these resources. Exploiting and using those resources will lead to increased use of fuel, in many cases that will be a fossil-based fuel.

The needs we want to be filled, whether to produce the food we eat, to heat the shelters we have, or to feel self-actualized, are using too much energy.

What we want, and what we need are not the same thing. We can’t keep living as though we are.

By overconsuming our resources, and telling ourselves that our wants are our needs, we are destroying our ability to provide for our own basic needs in the future.

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