I have my basic needs met; food, shelter, clothing, transportation, reasonably good health etc. When I focus on the fact my basic needs are met, I find a sense of calm and happiness.
If I look at my basic needs and want more, I can almost immediately feel anxiety beginning to rise in my mind.
When I want more, then I must then focus on generating the resources to get more. Depending on what I want, it may be as simple as a few bucks or it could be thousands. It might be changing my diet or adding exercise for more health and fitness.
The level of anxiety rises in direct proportion to what it will take to get more.
I know people who spend a huge amount of energy searching for what will make them happy. Rarely do they pause long enough to appreciate what they have. They fail to enjoy not having to seek what they aready have.
Sometimes, if they looked just a bit closer, they’d find they aready have it.
Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t ever look beyond what I have and set goals of attaining something else. So far this year I’ve had need to replace several items I use regularly. I was grateful I had the resources to get the replacements.
Happiness can be found in our needs being met. There is a contentment with that.
When you’re not content and see ‘things’ to bring you happiness, you put yourself on a treadmill. No thing will bring you happiness or contentment. That has come from within you. When you can look inside and say, this is good, what I need is here, then you can experience happiness.
People often have difficulty distinguishing between a need and a want.
I’ve often heard it when people talk but it really showed up during the pandemic. I would see chats going on and noticed what people identified as needs and considered it a hardship if public health measures didn’t let them have it.
The unfortunate result was, the confusion of wants as needs led to a lot of anger and frustration. My initial thoughts when I saw it happening was how did past generations manage to identify the difference and current ones can’t?
Then I looked back at some of the public heath emergencies from the past hundred years. When I dug into the history some I found that a lot of the anger and frustration demonstrated during COVID was also present during the Spanish Flu and other public health emergencies of the 1900s.
Seems no matter how much our technology and knowledge advances, people don’t change a lot. Our reactions and how we cope tends to run along the same lines.
Doesn’t mean we can’t try individually to do better.
Shadowspub is a writer from Ontario, Canada. She writes on a variety of subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use like journals, notebooks, coloring books etc.
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