Need

What is need?

Abraham Maslow came up with a hierarchy of needs. It suggests that the human mind prioritizes needs and that the "lowest" needs--the most basic ones, like food and shelter--will occupy our minds until they are met. When they are met, we "move on" to the higher level needs, like friendship and spirituality.

I always took this pyramid as essentially true.

I'm less and less convinced.

I'm learning that it's probably more true that the matrix of needs that any human being has is not characterized by a hierarchy... there's probably not much rhyme or reason at all in human neediness.

It's probably more likely that we choose the needs that come to define our lives. We choose our lacks, choose our deficiencies. Why might we do this? Aren't needs all bad, things that we should necessary want to "solve"?

Not necessarily.

Needs insinuate themselves into our psyches and we can actually come to long for a particular lack--we can learn to like the way a need defines us. There's not always an incentive in life to move to a "higher level" need. In some systems, like families, organizations, even societies, choosing a "lower level" need actually satisfies some other need.

I'm thinking about this stuff mostly because, as a pastor, I wonder what my role is in "solving" the needs that are presented to me. On any given day, I experience the needs of others for: love, purpose, shelter, friendship, approval, grief, forgiveness, permission, apologies, power.

Can we ever "solve" needs? Or, if people choose their own needs, is our role as helpers simply to help people see their own relationship to needs, and decide whether or not they want to break that relationship?

I know there are all kinds of problems with this post. Feel free to point them out. This is a thought in progress....