Desires, Wants, & Needs

Get ready for a thought dump, because that's ultimately what this is. Me and my thoughts spinning things around like a washer full of clothes. Everything is wet and soggy, needs to be dried and put to a purpose.

We live in 2025 (at least when I wrote this, and it will likely hold up) and our existence looks so different than it did 20 years ago. I was lucky enough (or unlucky depending on how you view it) to be born a millennial, so I got to watch the world shift right before my eyes, and sometimes to my detriment. All the advice of Gen X, Baby Boomers, and older millennials slowly began to become untrue. Not because they are liars, but because the world shifted on them, and as a whole they were not affected in the same way we were.

Socialization changed with social media. Entertainment changed when it became corporatized. Hard work is under appreciated, value is king. Barriers to entry flew up on careers. The economy crashed and bounced, making a start to an adult life more difficult than it was prior. Comfort is no longer standard, it's earned. Workers are disposable and replaceable. This has led the world to be a place of unending sacrifice and living from day to day. We lost the idea that what we do today affects us tomorrow, and we end up living in tiny vacuums of moments, voids rather that eat away at who we are.

This is where the topic at hand starts coming into play; our endless suffering ends up affecting us so negatively that we lose ourselves in the process. In prior generations, you could desire something, want to get somewhere, and need to get there, and everything was aligned. In our current situation, we end up having to separate those into categories to decide what to do next.

Let's setup the 3 basic ways I am defining the subjects -

1. Needs - Things that are required to live, to be what is considered successful, or is needed to be accepted in society.
2. Wants - Things that you would love to have, but aren't needs. They also may or may not serve a purpose. They might be convenience, or they might be temporary happiness.
3. Desires - Deep, long game type hopes and dreams. For example; you may desire to start a family. You may desire to be financially free. You may desire to live more simply, or live in a certain way.

Needs - What is Required?

Choices galore; yet, we're often told what we need. If you want a family, you need a house. If you want a career, you need sacrifice. If you need to eat, then it needs to be good. If you want a social life, you need to be on social media. If you desire a great life, you need to compare yourself.

So many of these things aren't needs. It was in prior generations standard affair, so the comfort, availability, and options were often abound. It didn't matter what you did, you could do what you wanted or desired to get what you needed. In reality though, life was just simpler back then - so the lines were blurred with those generations. There wasn't a difference between any of that, because no matter what you did, unless you were just straight lazy or ignorant, you could do something with a little bit of elbow grease and have it all.

In simpler terms, if you wanted to live any sort of way, all you needed to do was go for it. The more work you put in, the more you got returned. If you worked a basic warehouse job, that would support you and your family, and if you wanted to advance, make more money, become higher on the ladder, you just asked, put in some extra hours, and boom; you made it.

It doesn't work that way anymore. Instead of desires, wants, and needs being a conveyer belt, it's now three separate categories; which means you can't have all 3 in the majority of cases. If you desire something, you have to sacrifice your wants, and sometimes your needs to get there. If you want something, you have to determine whether you need it or not before you get it. If you need something, then those wants and desires go out the window.

But there's also another way we "grey area" our needs; which is the societal acceptance. If you live in a shack with 5 kids and don't have new anything, your kids get picked on, you can't go to potlucks because you can't afford it, you can't do all the cool things other families do. It just feels like you're left behind.

Let's also consider work conditions too. You obviously need to work in some capacity to live. Work itself is a need. However, the corporate natures and competitiveness of the world makes just "working a job" not sustainable in current society. One of the biggest industries in the US is tech (people who code, people who work on computers, make websites, etc.); millions of companies, jobs, and industries to go into, and there's plenty of opportunities to do a lot. Yes, I am also a part of this industry.

What some of the older generation doesn't realize though... is tech is basically the standard warehouse, construction, simple office job, etc. job of this generation, but it's not the same. There's really only one way to build a building. There's limited things to do in a warehouse. Managing a set of people with limited responsibilities wasn't really that terribly difficult.

In tech, there's so many ways to do the same thing. Not only that though, you may have worked in construction for many years, you're likely doing the EXACT same things you were doing 12 years ago that you are today. You just got better at the same thing. If I had to take construction as analogy, imagine being the guy who standup wood for a house, but every couple of years, the company changes wood to metal, metal to plastic, and while this large change is happening and you're learning how to build with it, they are also handing you weird tools and systems to use that you have no idea how to operate, but they expect you to figure it out and learn it. Oh yeah, and every say year, maybe two, they decide restructure the way they do blueprints, meetings, and checkpoint, and the third party inspections become more and more stringent, frequent, and harsh. And let's also put the cherry on top; every couple of years, they tighten the expectation on how fast the houses need to turn around; 10 years ago, you had 6 months to stand up wood. 5 years ago, you had 4 months. 2 years ago you had 90 days. Today they expect wood stood up in two weeks. All this fundamentally means the way you work changes every couple of years, and you constantly have to work overtime, use personal time, and neglect other things to make sure you keep up.

I took time on that because work is a need. Businesses however don't allow you to sit comfortably though. They expect passion. They expect improvement. They expect a ton of goals and progress. That's the standard now. At least in tech, you can no longer learn a skill and be set for life. You have to learn new skills every couple of years or your current skills become outdated, because no one uses them anymore.

Which means, for you to meet your basic job needs, the expectation is that you have to really focus on it all the time. The alternative is that you'll never advance, or potentially lose your job. This makes life extraordinarily more difficult. You can't just work and go home. You have to constantly be in your game.

Wants - Simplicity & Joy

Remember QVC? Remember infomercials? Remember picking out your favorite snacks at the store, even as a poor family? These all represent something very specific; which is they played on what people wanted. Oftentimes, they were successful at it to. They often aimed to improve your quality of life, and the fruits of your labor were often how you could do that.

AKA - it's the comfort of prior generations. You could want something and just get it. You could decide and set goals to achieve with ease. Again, like a broken record; it ain't the same anymore. Different reasons though than our needs.

Life has become ever so more convenient. Which also means those quick purchases, dopamine hits, and easy access to cool things are just absolutely everywhere now. It puts us in a wheel - where we don't make decisions anymore, we end up building habits based on impulse purchases. Coffee is a great example. You can't go to a coffee shop anymore and expect to spend less than like 3-5$ for a cup of coffee, unless you're getting gas station coffee. Okay, so why not be responsible and get gas station coffee? Well, it's not really what you want. Why would you spend money on something you don't really like, have to get out of the car to get it, and then neglect yourself of something that would give you a temporary moment of happiness?

We're conditioned as a society to increase our quality of life through these things, both by prior generations and by the changes of convenience. The problem then becomes that we grow dependent on these improvements in quality, that they practically become a need for our brain. "My day doesn't start right without my fancy coffee." You forgot your wallet and you somehow don't have the app, you can't get your coffee, now your whole day is off. Take that and multiply it across the board; funny moments on social media, talking to folks via text, playing a shooting game for the thrill.

We've ultimately lost the ability in our generation to distinguish a want from a need. It's sad, but I get it. I live it as well. Our quality of life should be determined by the fruits of our labors and beliefs, not on the temporal happiness hits through the day. We've gone completely insane at this point.

This is where I have to give it to the prior generations - there is one thing they were better at, not because of choice, but because of the way society ran; playing the long game. They didn't have all the convenience and struggles of "instant entitlement" we have today, and because of that, they well understood concepts like suffering now for a bigger reward later, taking moments of life and holding memories, and taking "you only live once" a little more seriously than the "yolo" we shout today.

Desires - Who are you really?

I'll describe this again, since we're like 1800 words into the article. Desires are something deep within you. They aren't just "I want to play guitar" or "I want a cup of coffee." These are things that you naturally lean towards, like a calling. It's the things when you lay down at night and stare at the ceiling, you dream about, you hope for, you live to see one day. Maybe that's starting a family. Maybe that's building a future for your kids. Maybe it's freedom from the 9-5. Maybe it's chasing that career you never did because you thought there was no money there. Maybe it's something bothering in life that you want to change. These are things that often are things that fulfill you, that give you purpose, hope, and give you the long game you don't get with a want or need.

So that begs the question, what do you get with wants and needs?

• Needs - you get a foundation. It feels more like a "to do" task list than anything else. Just do it so you can get it out of the way.
• Wants - these are quality of life. They give you some spice on life, some sort of temporary enjoyment on this earth that just maybe help you sustain.

Desires give your heart and spirit the love it needs. Not all desires are good, but you can let your moral compass decide on that. When you have a good desire, it shapes the way you live. Let's say you are in a pretty serious relationship, and you and your partner want to have a family. That is a deep desire for love, care, and quite the responsibility. That desire creates a fire within you - and now you live differently to make sure you give your future family the life you want them to have. You decide that marriage is the next step, so you start planning and saving for those thing. You buy less new tech, instead save that money for a down payment on a house. You need more money for stability, so you put some focus on your career to advance and make more.

All sounds good no? Here's where the struggle came in for me. When I see those who came before me, sure there's sacrifice and all that jazz you have to go through, but it was more about a plan and execution. Pretty simple at it's core. Let's say the family desire here again, since I already talked about it. We are now shaping our lives to prepare for a future family. Yay!

Except... that long game is even longer, and more arduous now. Let's just use one example; getting that house for your family. Follow this logic with me for a couple of minutes. This is the reality for our generation and upcoming generations just hitting their adult life.

A down payment for a house isn't just "don't buy new tech" and save for a couple of months. Your average US house cost is 400k or something like that. If you want 20% down, that's 80k (not including closing costs, it's probably closer to 90k). If you get an FHA, 3.5% is 14k (add another 6-8k for closing costs, so it's over 20k), plus mortgage insurance, which adds another 200-300$ to your house payment.

Oh yeah, the house payment. So at 400k, 3.5% down, and likely an HOA (because that's nearly impossible to escape nowadays), you're looking at somewhere between 3100-3500$ a month before you include utilities and basic needs. You have to afford that first. In order to afford that, you need a pretty decent income, or you both have to work.

Let's say you both work, you both make 60k a year, total income of 120k. Seems pretty good yeah? Well let's think about the desire here; to start a family. With a kid, your health insurance is going to shoot up. Instead of 150-200$ a check, they will start ripping out 400-600$ a check. You lose income with that child. Also, if you both work, who takes care of the baby? Childcare is just about as expensive as a house payment, especially for an infant. Even if you happen to work that out and make the sacrifice, someone else is raising your kid most of the time, not you, so your desire is now tainted.

Okay, so dual income isn't the route you want to take. You need to make the money, let's say you're the husband here. Well, your job happens to pay for overtime, lucky you. However, you need to try to at least double your income to make this work. So you have two choices - build a career, or rely on overtime work. The problem here is... if you want to build that career, you also have to put in the overtime work, just likely for the long game, which means tons of sacrifice to get there.

So for example, I took the career route. Put myself in debt going to trade school, started a career in tech. Great. Except, I am having to work all the time and I have to pay back my debt (more monthly cost). And in tech, nearly all of my jobs are salary, so I could work 60 hours a week, or 30 hours a week, I get paid the same. The stability is nice, but it often feels like businesses take advantage of that. Even without that thought, you're trying to make money. You can't live or have a family without it. So you bust your little butt. You learn all the things, you dance around all your coworkers at every job you're at, but every job caps your promotions at 10%, so not only are you not making the money and putting in the extra work, but you have to spend any spare time you have looking for another job until you land something that pays well. Sweet. Finally made it.

Young child, you have not actually made it. You've got to a point now where you need to maintain it. All the while, taxes on your house are going up, your grocery bill has nearly doubled in the last 5 years, you had to sacrifice eating out and quality of life items, but it's still not enough. Your job is constantly changing, always putting you learning new things and having to put in extra hours, and you're hanging on running on freaking fumes... and you still have yet to have a child, and that house is looking less and less achievable. Not only that, but all the advancement and technology puts you at constant risk of losing your job, so you have no choice but to continue.

You're now 10 years into a career. Let's say you did all the right things; got the house, have some kids, cars, etc. - however your hope has pretty much died. You're now stuck in a survival loop, dependent on moments of happiness, working 60+ hours a week at some unfulfilling corporate job, and wondering what in the world comes next. It's either that, or you and your partner are miserable and overworked trying to make ends meet and get the desire you want for the family.

Thing is... the last set of millennials and the next couple of generations are watching us. They see our struggles. They see our defeat. They see us compromising our entire lives for them. They see our dead dreams in the garage. They see the dark bags under your eyes, barely holding back tears. They hear you and your wife talking about how you're missing their lives because of work. They see the struggle of keeping up with the house, the emergencies, the events, and all of it, through being dead tired, exhausted, and generally unhappy.

Final Thoughts

So what's next y'all? What has to change? How can we usher it? How much more can we actually take?

Businesses make everything about money. They make the grind, they control the grind, and they decide what you get for the grind. They serve shareholders. Shareholders want returns on their investments. Because of this, they make lives so much more difficult for your average US citizen.

Your needs are not a natural cadence of life anymore. They are a comfort if you can get there. Your wants have become escapes. Your desires often require so much sacrifice that you don't even have the fire anymore to attempt to achieve them.

Gone now are the days of simply getting a job, start a family, and live life.

I don't know what to do. The idea of humanity living for each other seems to be a thing of the past. We're all just living for businesses. Our existence is that of a resource. If you aren't a resource, you are an entrepreneur, which I didn't touch, but you know that isn't as simple as it sounds. To be a good resource you have be used, worn, and constantly providing value. Businesses get far more out of you than you get in return for your effort.

There is hope. We just have to find it.