Want Versus Need Redux

For those who know me well, they understand my feelings about excess. I don't have anything against excesses of an abstract nature or excesses of things that actually benefit most people. What draws my ire is the filthy personal excesses that some people feel reward their hard work or other facet of their lives.

Case in point: at work I came across a magazine used by some of my coworkers to give them ideas on how to best respresent the furniture my company sells in room settings. This magazine caters to more high-end furniture, quite the opposite from the furniture in my store. A full page advert bought by a small, privately owned bed manufacturer (from Sweden ironically enough) extolled the benefits of one of their beds. The price tag for the advertised bed: $49,500.

The fact that this company sells beds for nearly $50,000 was offensive enough. The copy of the advert justifying why it cost that much made bile rise in my throat. I showed the advert to one of my fellow coworkers and asked, "Who needs a $50,000 bed?" This coworker erroneously argued that some people do, based on the misperception that "want" equals "need".

In the most rudimentary "hunter-gatherer" sense of need, people only need three things: food, clean water, and shelter. A deficiency in any one of those things will subject anyone to a slow and painful death. If you don't get enough food, you will starve. Not enough water, your body will eventually poison itself with its own produced waste. No shelter (clothes are included) you will succumb to the elements of nature. Anything outside of those three basic needs I classify as a "want" in order to make aspects of the three needs more comfortable.

I wrote this about six months ago. While having lunch with a friend recently this came up in conversation and she made me think about a fourth need that I had not considered. She mentioned experiments done on children in orphanages and on rhesus monkeys in the mid twentieth century. The children and monkeys studies were given the above necessities: food, water, and shelter. However, the subjects of these experiments were denied any form of contact ranging from no (or limited) physical contact, no spoken contact, or in the case of the monkeys, complete isolation. The result is that many of the subjects (the monkeys more so than the orphaned children) suffered from debilitating developmental problems for all of the subjects. Some became feral since they had no social skills, others had no developed communication skills, and some actually died from their lack of brain development despite being fed, watered, and sheltered.

It made me consider how much most people take human contact, spoken, tactile, or otherwise for granted. I did not consider how important that basic need is since many of us are surrounded by it and if it disappears how damaging it can be.