Our primary needs as human beings:

Warmth, shelter, food.

and then:

Touch. The loving gaze of others.
Being welcomed by smiling faces, simply for being alive.
Community.
A way to express our feelings and experiences truthfully, and to be heard.
People with whom to celebrate, and with whom to grieve.
Intimacy with others, and with the world.
Nature.
A way to belong.
Being of service.
Art.
Beauty, wonder.
Encounters with the sacredness of things.

It is the nature of our primary needs that, when met, we feel filled, complete, connected. Nothing more is called for.

The consumer economy in which we live is dedicated to meeting secondary needs – which are a pale imitation of what is primary. Our secondary needs, even when met, can’t fill us. They leave us wanting more. And as such they are ripe for the sale, for the making of profit.

So it should be no wonder that our primary needs are marginalised, often ridiculed, in our education system, organisations, and politics. Why have real contact with others when there’s no money in it? Beauty, when it will satiate rather then create demand? Intimacy, when it interrupts our addiction to the latest products? Deep joy, or deep sorrow, and contact with what’s sacred, when it stops us from feeling like empty vessels that need continual filling? Why do anything if it can’t be linked to productivity, or profit, or economic growth? Why do anything that will have us stop our restless, rootless consumption?

You could say that it’s the systematic marginalisation of our primary needs, and the worship of the secondary, that keeps our whole economy going in its current form.

But it’s in meeting one another’s primary needs, needs that can never be met in the form of a transaction, that we are most fulfilled, and most able to take care of what really needs our care.

Photo Credit: Wayne Stadler Photography Flickr via Compfight cc