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Needs & Flourishing

The Prerequisites for Flourishing

If a living thing is to flourish, there are always certain prerequisites that must be met. We can think of these prerequisites as the organism’s needs.

Over the past hundred years, there have been many systematic attempts to map out human needs, from the psychological approach of Abraham Maslow to the economic approach of Manfred Max-Neef. The various classifications have a lot in common, unsurprisingly, and psychological research has filled out our understanding.

A good way to summarise the findings is to define three families of need:

  1. Physiological needs
  2. Social needs
  3. Other needs

Physiological Needs

The most obvious family of human needs is our physiological needs.

  • Oxygen. We need a constant supply of oxygen if our bodies are to process their energy supplies. As scuba divers all know, if we’re unable to get enough oxygen we feel an almost unbearable urge to fill our lungs with a fresh quantity of air.
  • Water. We need to maintain the water levels in our blood for the chemistry of our bodies to work properly.
  • Rest. If we don’t get sufficient sleep, our actions become gradually less and less efficient. We begin to feel tired and to look for an opportunity to rest.
  • Nutrition. We need to get enough energy from what we eat and there are specific foodstuffs (such as proteins, oils and vitamins) that play vital, specific roles in our bodies’ physiology. If we don’t get the food we need, we can feel hungry or crave a specific food.
  • Excreting Wastes. We regularly need to excrete waste products from our bladders and our bowels.

Social Needs

We are a species of social animals. Throughout our history people have hunted, foraged, defended themselves, and raised children in groups — always much more effectively than they could have as solitary individuals. As people’s survival and reproductive success were dependent on their place within their social group, a family of instincts evolved which can be thought of as our social needs.

Our strongest social need is probably the need to belong.1 This gets satisfied when we’re a part of an integrated social group in which other people in the group care what happens to us and we care about them. This could be a family, a circle of friends, or a group of people who work together, or pursue a special interest together. We need to feel accepted by them – to get attention from them and feel their concern for us – and we need to reciprocate with our own feelings of concern. Our sense of belonging can be a potent source of pleasure, while exclusion from a social group can bring about powerful feelings of distress that involve the same brain pathways as those involved in physical pain.2

We also have a need to have respect and status. Unlike the need to belong, which is established very early on (even infants need to feel loved by the adults who care for them), this need kicks in progressively as we develop and grow towards maturity. It can be seen in childhood tussles in the playground, but it is not normally until adolescence that people begin to strive to achieve significant status within their communities — perhaps by seeking fame, or wealth, or perhaps by working diligently towards a place in society where they will be held in high regard. It seems likely that, as well as a person’s status being instrumentally valuable in giving them access to society’s resources, it is also intrinsically rewarding. It feels good to be admired or to be powerful, while being at the bottom of a social hierarchy is inherently unpleasant.

It is a universal feature of human beings that we establish territories. It seems that people have an instinctive need to have a piece of territory in which they are dominant and where they can determine what takes place.3

We also seem to have an instinctive need to make a contribution to our social groups. Again, it feels good to do things for other people, and it feels bad to be unable to do so. When people are unemployed for extended periods of time, the feelings of uselessness that come from not being able to contribute to society can be as damaging to a person as the economic effects that come from the loss of income.

And we have a need for long-term intimacy which, though often satisfied by the same person that meets our sexual needs, is separate from those needs. The adolescent urge to find a sweetheart grows into an adult desire for a partner to share life’s journey with.

Other Needs

The landscape of our needs is exceptionally complex. It is made up of the physical and social realities where we must act in certain ways if we are to thrive, and reflected in the intricacies of the functioning of our hormones and neurones. It would be very strange indeed if our needs could be mapped out accurately by any simple schema.

So the best approach is probably not to try to shoehorn our needs into an idealised map of reality, but merely to pick out a few more of the major landmarks.

  • Sexual Needs. Our sexual needs are not physiological in the same sense as our needs for food and water — we don’t die if we don’t have sex — but, over the millennia, selection pressures have worked to sculpt the human mind and give us urges to have sex that are exactly analogous to our urges to drink and to eat.
  • Safety And Security. This starts out as the infant’s need for a stable and predictable environment and develops into the adult’s desire to have financial security and to live in a stable community where there’s no threat of violence.
  • Procreation. This need manifests when a person feels broody.
  • Leisure. We have a need for recreation — to laugh and have fun.
  • Aesthetic Pleasure. We have a deep-seated urge to live in an environment that satisfies us aesthetically, such as a well-decorated home, or a pleasant neighbourhood. For some people, their aesthetic needs drive them to spend time in nature, surrounded by qualities that are hard to find in urban environments. For others, their aesthetic needs impel them to dress well, or to surround themselves with beautiful music, paintings or exceptional food.
  • Knowledge And Understanding. Our need for knowledge and understanding first reveals itself through the curiosity of the young child. Later on, it becomes the adolescent’s urges to explore a wider world, then the adult’s pursuit of detailed knowledge of the things that interest them the most. Like our other needs, it is mediated by our feelings. A lack of understanding is not only perceived rationally, it is felt. It becomes like a blemish in the world — an ugliness, or a painfully untidy wrongness that needs to be removed.
  • Performance. We also have a need to feel capable that can be satisfied in a great variety of ways — from a musician playing intricate melodies or a businessman meeting commercial challenges, to a parent cooking tasty food for their children. Many people take on challenges just for the thrill of accomplishing something difficult. And when all a person’s other needs are met, and they’re physically comfortable and socially secure, their performance needs often remain. They will seek to leave a legacy through achieving something that nobody else has managed to do.4

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  1. See, for example, R F Baumeister and M R Leary, The Need To Belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation, Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497-529. After a brief review of relevant theory, they proposed that there are two main aspects to the need to belong. “First, people need frequent personal contacts or interaction with the other person. Ideally, these interaction would be affectively positive or pleasant, but it is mainly important that the majority be free from conflict and negative affect. Second, people need to perceive that there is an interpersonal bond or relationship marked by stability, affective concern, and continuation into the foreseeable future. This aspect provides a relational context to one’s interactions with the other person, and so the perception of the bond is essential for satisfying the need to belong.” They then reviewed empirical findings and found them broadly in agreement with their expectations. “Again and again, we found evidence of a basic desire to form social attachments. People form social bonds readily, even under seemingly adverse situations. People who have anything in common, who share common (even unpleasant) experiences, or who simply are exposed to each other frequently, tend to form friendships or other attachments. Moreover, people resist losing attachments and breaking social bonds, even if there is no material or pragmatic reason to maintain the bond and even if maintaining it would be difficult.”
  2. “A neuroimaging study examined the neural correlates of social exclusion and tested the hypothesis that the brain bases of social pain are similar to those of physical pain. Participants were scanned while playing a virtual ball-tossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results from physical pain studies, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during exclusion than during inclusion and correlated positively with self-reported distress. Right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC) was active during exclusion and correlated negatively with self-reported distress. ACC changes mediated the RVPFC-distress correlation, suggesting that RVPFC regulates the distress of social exclusion by disrupting ACC activity.” Naomi I Eisenberger, Matthew D Leiberman, Kipling D Williams, Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion, Science, vol. 302. no. 5643, 10 October 2003, pp. 290 – 292.
  3. “Man is a co-operative species, but he is also competitive, and his struggle for dominance has to be structured in some way if chaos is to be avoided. The establishment of territorial rights is one such strategy. It limits dominance geographically. I am dominant in my territory and you are dominant in yours. In other words, dominance is shared out spatially, and we all have some. Even if I am weak and unintelligent and you can dominate me when we meet on neutral ground, I can still enjoy a thoroughly dominant role as soon as I retreat to my private base.” Desmond Morris, Peoplewatching, London: Vintage, 2002, pp. 197-8. Morris identified three levels at which people are territorial – the tribal (social groups from the nation to the social clique), the family and the personal. At each level, territorial markers and behaviours are used to demarcate space.
  4. In classic studies (which undermined behaviourist psychology), it was found that both rats and people often acted not to gain rewards but simply to exert master over the environment. See, for example, Robert W White, Motivation Reconsidered: The Concept of Competence, Psychological Review, Vol. 66(5), Sep 1959, 297-333.