An unmet want will wither and disappear, while an unmet need will destroy you from the inside

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few weeks ago, we published a piece called “Save or Spend” in which we asked our readers to recount a specific financial decision they made. This was the prompt we sent out:

We’re looking to hear personal experiences of spending dictated by values.

Tell us about a time you could have spent X amount on something, but decided to go lower. Why? How did it play out? Would you do that again?

Tell us about a conscious decision you made to spend more on something — more than you’d previously budgeted, more than you think is right. What took you out of your comfort zone, why did you do it, and in hindsight, was it the right decision?

The responses that came in were interesting and very human. It was especially interesting when respondents took very different approaches to the same expense. Two readers wrote about car purchases. One wrote about the pull to upgrade to a higher-end car, which she and her husband resisted. They’re proud and happy they didn’t spring for the more expensive model. The other wrote about a persistent sense of otherness she felt as a child, and how the luxury car she now drives makes her feel healed and whole.

The same pattern came up when readers described their simchah spending. One reader wrote about a conscious decision to host a simple bris, unlike his neighbors, who make more lavish affairs. Another reader wrote about making very frugal simchahs — and then going “all out” for her last daughter’s wedding. In hindsight, she admitted, she hadn’t felt comfortable at those austere simchahs she’d previously made.

I had mixed feelings when I read the accounts of the people who found benefit in spending more. It would have been so much simpler and nicer if everyone wrote how hollow and meaningless their big expenditures were, how silly and shortsighted they found the whole exercise.

Then I remembered a saying I once heard (I wish I could remember the source): If you deny yourself a want, eventually it shrivels and disappears. But if you deny yourself a need, it festers and eats away at you and starts to corrode something inside.

The saying felt so true, so insightful. Because I was seeing it play out firsthand, learning that it doesn’t help anyone when we ignore our needs. No one enjoys dealing with a martyr, after all. The trick is to know what’s a need and what’s a want.

When a child says “but I neeeeed it,” we’re smart enough to counter, “Do you need it or do you want it?” It’s not as easy to subject ourselves to the same interrogation.

Too often, we shove our resources and energies toward our wants, feeding and feeding them in a frenetic attempt to soothe the very real hunger we’re feeling. It takes time and focus to realize (if we ever do realize) that our gnawing hunger stems from unacknowledged needs — needs that won’t be satiated by whatever we keep throwing at our bloated wants.

And then there are the times — maybe less often, but impactful all the same — when we dismiss some inner craving as a petty, shallow want, not acknowledging that really,  it’s a need we must satisfy in order to be able to give to others.

Needs often come from our inner wiring and upbringing — the nature we’re given or the nurture we’ve absorbed. There are some holy people who simply don’t need much of the material world, or unspoiled people who’ve grown up with very little, or practical people who can’t fathom why anyone would find pleasure in frills. These people are genuinely and fully happy with a simple space and lifestyle.

But some of us really do need a pleasant, attractive space to live in. It’s not helpful or realistic to deny it. Some of us really are wired with a need to get away more than every now and then. Some people have a deep and undeniable drive to create or consume — music, art, literature. Depending on your upbringing and cultural background or personality, you might need more or less household help, a different base level of food at a Shabbos or Yom Tov meal. And when those needs aren’t met, they can corrode and embitter.

I spent years thinking about that neat paradigm as a handy key: Identify and differentiate between wants and needs, then figure out how to meet the needs while triaging which wants could be filled and which ignored — because an unmet want will wither and disappear, while an unmet need will destroy you from the inside. Once I excitedly repeated the principle to a woman living in a smallish, unadorned apartment in Yerushalayim.

She was less excited, more thoughtful. “I like the idea,” she mused. “But it takes a lot of work to know what’s a want and a need. And sometimes, as you change, they change, too.

“We started out here on a temporary basis,” she went on. “I knew I could never live in Yerushalayim long-term because our housing budget was limited, and there were two things I absolutely needed in a house: a master suite with its own bathroom, and a backyard for the kids to play in. I made it clear to my husband that we shouldn’t even think about buying an apartment here, because those were my needs, and there was no way we could meet them. And like you said, it’s risky to deny a real need.

“But then…” She gave a half-laugh and gestured at the speckled tiles. “We had been living here for years, and the kids were happy playing in the lobby. They didn’t miss having a backyard, because they’d never had one. And then this apartment came up, at a price we could manage. I thought about those old conditions of mine, the non-negotiables I couldn’t live without. And I realized that I’d been living without them, and I could probably keep living without them. Maybe I didn’t really need them anymore.”

Like that woman, we all have our nonnegotiables. Some are products are our deepest, most immutable selves. But for all that we’re created with a certain internal wiring, and for all that our childhoods shape us in very lasting ways, it turns out that not only our wants, but also our needs, can shift and mutate as our external and internal landscapes undergo their own changes.

I’ve seen that needs can be a function of the neighborhoods we live in, the company we keep, the friends we spend time with, the standards and values we’ve absorbed without really giving much thought to. And in that case, they can be fungible.

Sometimes we can consciously choose the social pressures we will face. We can select the type of currency we value. We can surround ourselves with a standard of living that our children will come to see as normal. And in the process, we might find even our hardwired needs adapting and changing.

Yes, we all come from somewhere; we all have an internal makeup that we ignore at our own risk. But while we can’t deny the package we’ve been given, life is about the privilege and power of shaping who we become.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1096)