Men's Memes: Make yourself happy: work out your true needs

Sunday, May 07, 2006

Make yourself happy: work out your true needs

Its important to have goals. They keep you focused and working towards a better life for yourself. However, before you formulate your goals you need to do a little bit of analysis to work out your true needs/desires.

What do I mean by this?

Well, we all have Human needs. We have the basic needs like food, drink, rest. Then some slightly more complex ones like entertainment, love and sex. Then some even more complex ones like recognition, social interaction and self-respect. Nevertheless they are all basic, in-built Human needs. We'll call them primary needs.

What would a secondary need be? Well, if food is a primary need, a secondary need would be a sandwich. A sandwich is just one of many ways of meeting your primary need for food.

Now, your primary needs are the only things that really matter. Secondary needs are optional, and flexible. Yes, you NEED food. But you don't necessarily need a sandwich, you could eat another form of food.

Hopefully that is blindingly obvious to you so far!

But even though its obvious with the basic need of food, most people forget this pattern when it comes to the other, slightly more complex primary needs. For instance, people often get caught in the trap of unneccesary desires when it comes to things like wanting a ferari, or wanting a particular girl to date them. People can convince themselves that they will be miserable unless they have that ferari (or any other particular material item), or unless Karen becomes their girlfriend.

But why do they REALLY want those things? If they thought about it, they would realise that they want a ferari because they have certain, more basic needs that it would satisfy: a need for transportation, freedom, admiration of others, etc. Incidentally, with any material item I would always recommend you think twice if your main reason for wanting it is to impress others in order to make them like and admire you. Often such luxury items have the OPPOSITE effect and merely make people jealous towards you. So, with our example of the Ferari, there are clearly other ways to meet those needs. For example, a more basic car would meet your needs for transportation. And any number of other things might impress others. The same goes for the example of feeling you NEED to have Karen as your girlfriend. Karen as a girlfriend would meet a number of your basic needs: companionship, sex, love etc. But she is only one of many ways you could meet those needs. While you may NEED companionship, love and sex, you do not NEED Karen. I hope the difference is starting to sink in?

This all may sound simple, but its a technique that can save you a lot of frustration in life. This is because we usually set ourselves large or impossible goals, then just give up on them because they are so unattainable. And because we give up on them we feel miserable as the needs that that goal would have satisfied are not being met. If, instead, we took the time to analyse WHY we wanted that goal, and then checked that there wasn't an alternative, simpler, or more practical way of meeting that need, we wouldn't end up so frustrated.

Heres an example. Say a young boy grows up with the goal of becomming an astronaut. But as he gets older he realises the odds are against him doing this, and after a number of years his dream is forgotten as he gives up all hope of persuing it. But one day he starts thinking a bit more deeply about this goal, and he realises that the desire to become an astronaut was actually driven by the more basic desires to (1) Travel, (2) experience weightlessness. He thinks to himself: is there a more simple, practical way to satisfy those needs? Yes: learn to SCUBA dive!

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Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."