Learning The Difference Between Needs and Wants

A needy person’s lessons from her quarantine

I want, I want, I want.

I need, I need, I need.

They were always one and the same to me.

I needed what I wanted with a passion.

Pleeeeeeeeeze, Mommy.

Pleeeeeeeeeze, Santa.

Could I go a day in my younger life without wanting something desperately? A new dress or pair of shoes? An ice cream cone? A boyfriend? Relief from an asthma attack?

Apparently not.

In my thirties, I had no use for Eastern religions that taught non-attachment. What use would I have for a life that wouldn’t let me attach myself to the latest hairstyle, new car, the lip color that would make someone want my lips?

I had to have it all.

Of course, I never did.

And so, as the Eastern religions taught, I suffered from wanting and not having.

But that was my lifestyle.

It changed in time. It’s called growing up. Not completely. I’m not in heaven yet. Probably never will be, but I’m not as materialistic as I once was. Only by a hair, maybe, but progress is progress.

If a new car were offered to me, though, I wouldn’t turn it down. I just don’t cry myself to sleep because I’ll probably drive my old 1985 BMW all the way to my funeral.

So even though I thought I had pared my life down to the essentials, I realized I still wanted many things going into this pandemic. No surprise given that I make no bones about being a material girl. Gotta keep the wheels of the old economy running. But I also still talked as though wanting was the same as needing.

And that’s been the in-my-face lesson of my quarantine.

Of course, I’ve known the difference between needs and wants ever since I learned about Abe Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But I have never lived them or had them seared into my bones the way I have in the almost two months since I’ve been holed up, alone in my apartment fighting my solitary battle with the virus, wondering if I’m the only person left on the planet. If everyone else has taken off for greener pastures in another galaxy far, far away where people aren’t eating bush meat, or bats, or any other forbidden fruit or meat and letting loose pathogens dangerous to the human species.

Are the masked figures I see walking on the street in front of my building figments of my imagination because I can’t stand the reality that I’ve been deserted, left behind in my isolation while everyone else has taken the last helicopter out to safety? There’s a plot for a novel I’ll never write but sometimes fear I’m living.

These morbid thoughts came to me when I looked in the mirror this morning and thought, I need a haircut.

That realization should have made me bond with everyone else in my state stuck inside since our governor shut down all non-essential businesses and ordered us to stay in our homes to foil the spread of the coronavirus. And promptly deemed hair cutters, stylists, colorists, and any other estheticians non-essential.

But that kneejerk response to my unattractive coiffeur brought me up short. Of course, I don’t need a haircut. My hair could grow to the ground, and I wouldn’t need it cut. I could pile it on top of my head, braid it, or wrap it around me like a shawl, and I still wouldn’t need it cut.

I’d like it cut, of course. I want it trimmed out of my eyes for convience’s sake. I’d prefer to look more stylish when I get dressed in the morning and primp as though I have somewhere to go and someone to impress. Even though I don’t.

Short hair looks better on me at my age, especially with the several chins I’ve acquired in my recent decades. Vain as I still am, I like to pretend I look better than I do, and a neat trim always aids in my subterfuge.

But do I need a haircut?

You know where I’m going with this. Or, at least I hope you do. I hope I don’t have to sit you down and start lecturing you on the values you should have learned through the disaster that has confronted us all personally and changed our world in ways we can predict, and in ways we still can’t imagine.

Still don’t know what I’m talking about? Okay, I’ll consider you young and inexperienced instead of shallow and self-centered, because only those who look into the muddiest pond and fall in love with the reflection that stares back at them could come out of this nightmare without a few insights.

Let me explain.

Here’s me before the pandemic.

I needed haircuts.

I needed to see my daughter and son-in-law for our weekly dinners.

I needed to write articles every day.

I needed my neighbors upstairs to be quiet.

I needed my neighbors downstairs to be quiet.

I needed everyone in the building to make sure they didn’t disturb my peace and quiet.

Make that the world.

I needed more money.

I needed to lose a few pounds.

I needed people to pay more attention to me.

I needed all unpleasantness from life to disappear.

Here’s me now:

I need to survive this virus.

My list of wants? Like quiet neighbors, tons of readers and fans, a fat bank account, a new car, beautiful hair? What good will they be if I catch the virus and it kills me? My wants right now are irrelevant.

Here’s the future me:

I’ll remember this time.

For a time.

Do you remember why you stand in a security line and take off your shoes at the airport?

Or do you just factor in an extra half hour or 40 minutes depending on the airport and time of day when you fly, because 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden have faded from memory?

Because that’s way we do it.

So we’ll forget about handshaking and covering our noses when we sneeze and why we ever grumbled about working at home when it’s the only thing that makes sense for so many reasons.

Or, we’ll go back to work in our offices or other places of work, and in years when things seem normal again, we’ll eat the forbidden fruit of which we’ve been warned and do this dance again.

Okay, that’s what we do. We’ve heard about the Spanish Flu, but we didn’t actually live it, so how were we to know we should take all those people in the old fashioned photos wearing those masks seriously?

But one thing we shouldn’t do next time — whether that’s in the fall of this year or ten years from now — is confuse our needs and wants.

We shouldn’t say we need to eat in restaurants and frolic on beaches and hunker down in bars because it’s in the Constitution when that’s merely what we want to do.

It’s when we mix up what we need and want that gives the virus the edge. The virus that kills us.

And one thing I don’t need is to become a statistic.

So whether I waste my time in my solo quarantine watching the entire internet or scrub my apartment from stem to stern every day or write six novels or a hundred articles doesn’t matter. When I come out of hibernation, I can take care of what didn’t get done during this time, like cutting my hair.

But I can only do that if I survive.

And that’s my big lesson. If you don’t hear from me every day as you did in the before time, I’m still busy. I’m still here, learning the difference between want and need.

#Stayhomestaysafe.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. I’ll make sure you don’t miss a word. Thank you for reading.