4 levels of experiencing your needs

Not all needs are the same. Your need for water exists at a more primal level than the city’s need for you to pay your water bill. The latter is socially constructed. The former preexists any human culture. The latter can be altered. The former remains fixed in stone. Likewise your need for safety, for self-determination, for support, for companionship, and so forth.

Which would you think is more likely?

Failure to resolve your needs is personally your own fault.

OR

Resolving needs depends largely on others respecting their impact on your needs, as well as you respecting your impact on their needs.

We live in a time when it's increasingly more socially acceptable to react to feelings than to respond to needs. The more I focus on the needs churning those feelings, the more reactions I tend to get—ignored, blamed, snubbed, dismissed.

In this era of Trumpian crudeness, and leftist public denunciations of forgivable slights, we appear to given up on the principles of discipline that arguably made America great. As Tocqueville ostensibly warned us back in the early 1800s, when America ceases to be good, it will cease to be great.

Mainstream culture appears to be racing to the bottom. Social media seems to reward and incentivize feel-reactive norms over need-responsive love. Meanwhile, many wonder why so many problems persist. Anankelogy provides many helpful tools to get to the underserved needs at the center of all of these stubborn problems.

That includes this tool to help you better understand how you experience your needs. And to appreciate all that can get in the way of resolving those needs. For starters, anankelogy distinguishes between different elements in your experience of needs. It illustrates these elements in what it calls the need experience funnel.

You NEED This introduces you to the need-experience funnel (3.1.). You routinely experience your needs in a flash through a funnel of need-experience.

The "need experience funnel" in brief

1. Your core needs - core homeostatic balance, essential to functioning.

2. Your referent needs - something necessary to restore core balance.

3. Your access needs - how to get the necessary resource, or any substitutes.

4. Your psychosocial needs - who is to access it, yourself or someone else.

Oh, CRAP!

The "need experience funnel" in-depth

1. Your core needs in-depth

2. Your referent needs in-depth

3. Your access needs in-depth

4. Your psychosocial needs in-depth

Anankelogical uses of "need"

• Need versus preference

• Core need as a “natural need” or “organic need”

• Institutional versus natural needs

• Vulnerable need versus exposed need

• Affected needs versus impacted needs

• Now versus later

The "need experience funnel" in brief

1. Your core needs

Every need starts as some kind of homeostatic disequilibrium. Your ability to continue to function seeks something, typically outside of yourself, to bring you back to optimal balance. The longer you stay imbalanced, the less you can function. And then the more pain you will feel as your body warns you of this threat to your ability to function.

DIAGRAM: homeostasis illustrated with core need for fluid equilibrium

You never require any water until your body warns you that it cannot adequately function until fluid or temperature equilibrium is restored. You never need any time with a friend until your body warns you that it cannot fully function until optimal balance is restored between you and others.

This core of your experience of needs is the most inflexible. You never choose to be thirsty. You never choose to be lonely. You never choose to require solitude. While your actions can result in these conditions, each condition itself results from the natural phenomenon of disequilibrium. Each condition exists as an objective fact. Each condition occurs independent of your subjective experience of it.

2. Your referent needs

Each need prompts you to do something to ease it. The academic anankelogy term for this is “referent”. Your need refers you to what it is apparently required to restore functioning, or at least to ease the discomfort of the unresolved need.

Most often, you will find this referred to by its accessible anankelogy term: resource. Most every prompted need compels you to get something that your experience teaches you will ease that discomfort.

If suddenly feeling thirsty, fluid and temperature equilibrium is best restored by drinking some water. If feeling lonely, social equilibrium is best restored by connecting with a trustworthy friend. Our vernacular talks of needing water and needing a friend, but these actually point to what we trust to satisfy the core needs.

Here is where some flexibility can creep in. You can choose to quench your thirst by drinking water or coffee or soda pop or whiskey or prune juice. Our bodies evolved to utilize water as the best resource for restoring us to full functionality.

3. Your access needs

Each time you experience a need, you typically consider how you will access the necessary resource. You can get the resource of water from a faucet or from a store-bought bottle, or from a glass given to you by the waitress.

Or you can get coffee at the grocery store, or from a coffee shop, or local café, or at the gas station. While you do not choose to be thirsty, you have many choices how to satisfy your cravings. With so many options and flavors and ways to serve it, access needs points to a growing array of flexibility.

If you cannot readily access the best resource, you may have to settle for a less than optimal choice. Instead of hot coffee, you settle for sweetened iced tea. Instead of being able to access a friend online, you settle for vetting your frustrations online in the comments section.

The less you can access what your life specifically requires, the less you can fully function. Your body will persist in warning you of its limited capacity to function. That’s what the pain is for. The more you can fully access what you optimally require, the less pain you suffer in life.

4. Your psychosocial needs

Who is to access what your life requires—you or someone else? You naturally prefer to do as much for yourself as you can. You also naturally count on others to do what you cannot do for yourself.

You cannot dig your own well in the city, so you count on others to provide drinkable pure water. Trusting others is one of your social needs. Of course, you can dig your own well if living in a remote rural region. Self-sufficiency is one of your self-needs.

Each need you experience affects your self-needs and your social needs—or collectively known as your psychosocial needs. The term psychosocial could be inclusive of biological needs and spiritual needs. Again, this comes down to how much you can access the resource for restoring your inner equilibrium, and how much must you vulnerably rely on others.

This level introduces a complex array of flexible choices. You can access some of a resource on your own while having to depend on others to provide the rest of it. You can pour the water from the fountain yourself, after getting a bottle from someone or somewhere else.

Now let’s dig a little deeper into each of these need experience elements.

Oh, CRAP!

I first presented this need experience funnel in my Udemy eCourse for depolarizing politics. One of the students asked me if I realized the acronym it spelled. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about it.

At first, I considered changing it. Then I thought to myself, now we all can admit that life and politics is full of CRAP!

back-to-top

The "need experience funnel" in-depth

1. Your core needs in-depth

In the language of accessible anankelogy, a core need is a natural need or organic need. As such, it exists as an inflexible objective fact.

The more we keep core needs distinct from the resource needs we use to respond to them, the more we can steer clear of pointless conflicts. We speak of these as “inflexible needs” to drive home the point that no one can be persuaded to literally need other than what they already require.

Can anyone convince you to no longer require eating any food? Change what you eat, that’s flexible, not requiring food itself remains inflexible.

Likewise, no one can persuade you to experience a priority of needs different from what you naturally experience right now. If your life requires you to be alone to sit in solitude for a while, no amount of arguing that you need a friend at your side can change that.

Divisive politics gets fueled by pointlessly expecting others to have the same priority of needs. Your core need for equilibrium shapes your experience of needs far more than your beliefs.

2. Your referent needs in-depth

Not all referents, or resources, are equal. While some can fully resolve your needs, others cannot.

Anankelogy recognizes three levels of referents, or resources:

1) Primary resource – what our body has evolved to utilize to restore optimal balance. E.g., water for thirst, interpersonal connection for loneliness, professional police interdicting acts of violence.

2) Alternate resource – what can allow a need to at least partially resolve. E.g., sweetened juice, casual friends, vigilante groups.

3) Substitute resource – what can only provide relief from the pain of the unresolved need. E.g., alcohol, social media “friends”, revenge killings.

A proper amount of a primary resource allows you to return to optimal functioning. Once function gets restored, there is no cause for your body to warn you with any further pain nor desire.

An imperfect amount of a primary resource, or alternate resource, can allow you to restore some functioning. Your body will know it must have more to restore full functioning, so it warns you in the form of some pain.

A substitute resource can only relieve your pain of unresolved needs. They do little to nothing to help you return to optimal functioning. Indeed, substitutes like too much alcohol or relying exclusively on social media contacts can actually reduce your overall functioning. The more you rely on substitute resources to relieve your pain, resulting in less functioning, the more pain you ultimately suffer.

An easily overlooked contributor to our problems and pain is how resources tend to remain unevenly accessible.

3. Your access needs in-depth

The more you must rely on others to access a resource you need, the more likely you’re coerced into accepting the given terms to make it available to you. Modern life has left us more and more vulnerable to the provisions of others.

Anankelogy recognizes accessibility of necessary resources fit into of three qualitative categories.

1) Reliable access (reliably accessible) – you can count on it being steadily available.

2) Viable access (viably accessible) – you can trust it will be there most of the time.

3) Inadequate access (inadequately accessible) – you can be sure it will be mostly unavailable.

Consider how that intersects with the quality levels of resources, as illustrated in this chart. Also consider how need-responders can provides this deeper level of critique that you will never find anywhere else.

The more you can reliably access primary resources, the better your life will be. It will then be much easier for you to reach your life’s full potential. Meanwhile, the more substitute resources are inadequately accessible to you, like not being able to find any beer when your thirsty and miserable, the better off you will be.

DOSE OF REALITY

Unfortunately, we often experience situations where alternate or substitute resources tend to be more reliably accessible than primary resources. I can find a lot more “friends” on social media than in the real world. It’s generally easier to vent my anger at others than to reflect on what I cannot accept and do something productive about it.

That’s when symfunctional strain sets in. At first, you tolerate the mild discomfort of your partially resolved needs. But your body persists on warning of this growing threat to your ability to function. This once mild pain tends to spill over into agonizing alarm bells. This creeping normality of a slow buildup of pain can serve as a gateway to agonizing dysfunctions.

SICK OF GETTING SICK

Picture a situation where an alternate resource like junk food is reliably accessible day after day, while the primary resource of healthy meals remains inadequately accessible. Even if you can cook a good meal by somehow making the time and effort in your busy schedule—viable access—you likely get pulled into the reliable access of the alternate resource of processed foods.

Once built into your daily routine, such a poor diet robs you of the full energy you will require to live life fully. You increasingly seek medical help to deal with the consequences. Your healthcare likely presents the viable or even reliable access to the alternate resource of symptom relief. You can easily find yourself trapped serving your feelings instead of your feelings serving you.

GATEWAY TO ADDICTION

Your situation grows worse as you find the best way to cope with the pounding pain of your growing list of unresolved needs is the reliable access of pain-relieving substitute resources. Many are totally legal—alcohol, pornography, binge watching, overeating, doomscrolling. You can find yourself sinking into such unhealthy routines of pain coping mechanisms.

As you find these help you to cope with the daily pain of intolerable anxiety and depression, you experience these substitute resources as downright addicting. Any addiction can be part of a structural problem and not merely a personal problem.

REINFORCING ADDICTIONS

It’s popular to denounce any addict who resists taking full responsibility for their behavior. Sure, if totally blaming others or blaming society then they deny their own personal agency to make choices for themselves. But we risk swinging to the opposite and damaging extreme of hyper-individualism when denying any role of these external constraints on a reliable access of primary resources.

Before we interpret these as only personal failings, mix in the problem of coerced poor options dependence (CoPOD). Without denying personal agency, social structures can limit your scope of choices. The addict blaming society is decrying their personal sense of powerlessness to these larger forces ultimately limiting access to primary resources.

Many institutions tend to provide easier access to less-than-optimal choices. They often ensure you have reliable access to alternate resources. They expect you to pursue the easier path in life that creates problems they can charge you later to try to fix.

Modern conveniences perform wonders for easing your pain, but not so well on fully resolving your needs so you won’t have to suffer that pain. Absent of reliable access to primary resources, you easily can get comfortable with the next best thing.

PERPETUATING IMBALANCE

When generalizing for relief, we may shift to extremes of totally blaming others or blaming society, or fully blaming ourselves. We risk sliding further into psychosocial imbalance (covered below). The more we react to these feelings and overlook responding to the overlooked needs, we tend to reinforce the problem we ostensibly oppose.

When able to face reality, we can recognize access to resources almost always involves both others and ourselves. With almost everyone struggling with a load of unresolved needs, the mounting pain tends to distort our psychosocial needs.

4. Your psychosocial needs in-depth

The more our needs resolve, the more we value what we learned is working. We hold dear to what keeps us functioning well, what removes pain, and helps us reach more of our potential.

The less our needs resolve, the more we tend to generalize for relief. We worry less about specifics as we look around for any broad statement offering some hope for relief. We avoid specifics that could risk undermining our coalitions. We trust ideas without testing them first.

The more we seek relief for our unresolved needs, the more we generalize or overgeneralize for relief. The more we generalize or overgeneralize, the more psychosocial imbalance emerges.

We either gravitate towards generalizing group interest over generalizing in favor of self-interest. Or we gravitate towards generalizing self-interest over generalizing in favor of group interest. Or we overgeneralize in favor of collectivist ideals over the selfish claims of the other side. Or we overgeneralize in favor of selfish ideals over the collectivist claims of the other side.

psychosocial imbalance to psychosocial balance

Or instead of generalizing, we get to the specifics of our many needs. We gravitate toward resolving our needs over merely relieving the pain of our underserved needs. We move from psychosocial imbalance toward psychosocial balance. We intentionally seek to resolve each of our self-needs on par with our social needs.

• Self-need: A set way to access some resource on your own.

• Social need: A set way to access resources with support from others.

Life requires a healthy balance of both sides. The more your self-needs resolve more than your self-needs, or the more your self-needs resolve more than your social needs, you start to experience psychosocial imbalance. If self-needs routinely resolve more than social needs, or social needs routinely resolve more than self-needs, this creates what anankelogy recognizes as a psychosocial orientation.

If you like to dig deeper into this, then let’s unpack politics with the lens of anankelogy. Too much of what gets said about politics misses the boat because it overlooks the central role of needs.

The better you can understand your experience of needs with this need experience funnel, the easier to find solutions to our many stubborn and painful problems. Anankelogy offers a fresh paradigm with a new vocabulary to finally understand our stubborn problems.

back-to-top

Anankelogical uses of "need"

While we’re talking about needs from an anankelogical perspective, let’s clear up some potential confusion with this new vocabulary. You will find many qualified uses of the term “need” to cover different constructs. Here are some helpful distinctions.

Need versus preference

• A need: unchosen and inflexible requirement for something specific for functioning.

• A preference: chosen and flexible item to meet some requirement for functioning.

You literally do not “need” a bottle to hold your water. If there are different ways to access a resource you require, then it’s more of a preference than an actual need. You may prefer tea over coffee, but you literally need the water from which both are made.

Many items we refer to as a “need” actually refer to a trusted response to a core need. Sometimes that response is merely a wish, a want, a desire, a craving, or a longing. The more you prioritize fully resolving your needs, the more you understandably prefer to access the primary resource for it.

Anankelogy distinguishes between different types of preferences. As illustrated in the chart below, three kinds of preferences emerge.

1) Reliable preference.

2) Viable preference.

3) Unviable preference.

A reliable preference is a primary resource or access to a primary resource that can fully resolve a core need. It results in removing cause for pain. And should lead to peakfunction.

A viable preference is a alternative resource or access that adequately restores one to sufficient functioning. It results in moderating pain to a manageable level of tolerable discomfort. It typically leads to symfunction.

A unviable preference is a substitute resource or any access that does not restore functioning but merely relieves your pain of unresolved need. It results in constraining your capacity to fully function. And it can help you to escape some or all current pain. But that easily leads to more pain, as your unmet needs prompt your body to keep warning you of threats to your ability to fully function. This tends to lead to dysfunction and even misfunction.

Core need as a “natural need” or “organic need”

• A core need: disequilibrium to the point of limiting ability to adequately function.

• An organic or natural need: disequilibrium and the primary resource to fully restore balance.

Where academic anankelogy speaks of core needs and referent needs, the simpler language of accessible anankelogy speaks of natural needs or organic needs, and resource needs. There is some overlap to consider.

When using the simpler language of accessible anankelogy, you can speak of the “natural need” for some water. As the primary resource for quenching a thirst to restore fluid and temperature equilibrium in your body, there is little to any flexibility involved. You don’t really prefer water if it’s the only thing that will fully restore your ability to function.

You could prefer some coffee, a diarrhetic with caffeine. As a viable preference, with other impacts on your wellbeing, accessible anankelogy recognizes this as an arbitrary preference. The better option of pure water clearly exists to restore you to full function without side effects, if only you can access them and choose it over other arbitrary options.

Much of these terms are interchangeable.

• Primary resource and reliable preference. It reliably restores you to full functioning.

• Alternate resource and viable preferences. It viably eases your pressing need.

• Substitute resource and unviable preference. It remains unviable to restore you to functioning, but only practical for relieving some pain for a while.

Institutional versus natural needs

• A natural need: an unchosen requirement necessary to function with few satisfactory options.

• An institutional need: a chosen requirement for an entity to function with many potential options.

When Karl Marx asserted “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” many rightly asked, “Whose needs should we publicly serve?” If we build an overarching system (i.e., government, market) to address our public needs, is there a risk for such institutional needs to emerge as more important than our particular needs?

Anankelogy points out how natural needs existed long before human culture evolved into a mass culture that created institutions to address some of these public needs. The institutions then present their own needs, which arguably must be satisfied in order to fulfill its mission to serve public needs. Unlike natural needs, institutions have a tendency to use its might to shift from primarily serving the needs of its founding purpose to primarily serving its own needs.

But need-response, as applied anankelogy, regards any institutional need as socially constructed and therefore relatively arbitrary compared to any natural need of an individual vulnerable personal. Without our natural needs, there would be no institutional needs, no organizational needs, no governmental needs.

Vulnerable need versus exposed need

• A vulnerable need: a requirement to function susceptible to power dynamics.

• An exposed need: a requirement to function susceptible to social structures.

Accessible anankelogy may use the terms “vulnerable need” and “exposed need” interchangeably. But there is a slight difference that matters when we get to specific situations.

A “vulnerable need” is any need or preference easily impacted by someone in a position of social power. And it’s easily reinforced or privileged by undisciplined social structures. In the specific language of academic anankelogy, a power problem impacts vulnerable needs.

An “exposed need” is any need or preference easily impacted by external factors. This includes institutions, social structures and the natural or human engineered environment. In the specific language of academic anankelogy, a structural problem impacts exposed needs.

In the everyday language of accessible anankelogy, this subtle distinction may hardly matter. Need-response addresses both vulnerable needs and exposed needs in a similar manner.

Affected needs versus impacted needs

• An impacted need: formal terminology for resulting need, shaping function capability.

• An affected need: less formal terminology for resulting need, evoking a feeling.

Both refer to how a person or entity shapes the results of another individual’s experience of needs. Both speak to vulnerable and exposed needs, from a slightly different angle. Both apply to how institutional needs can impose on those relying on the institution.

Need-response emphasizes the “impact” of power relations and social structures on your vulnerable/exposed needs. This focus can be more useful when addressing power problems and structural problems during a wellness campaign.

When speaking in general, “affected need” covers basically the same thing. The more others or situations impact your needs, the more they evoke a feeling. Affect refers to emotion. This emphasis can help to draw attention between a commonly privileged feel-reaction and a more disciplined need-response.

Now versus later

Usage of these terms apply for now, but could change in the near future. Much of these new terms have yet to be tested in actual situations. Even newer terms could emerge. Some of these current ones could be replaced.

Perhaps your situations can bring something to light we’re missing here. Anankelogy can learn from you. You could call attention to something essential overlooked here. What is your response to this new need-responsive vocabulary?

back-to-top

Your responsiveness to these human need levels

Your turn. Consider one or more of these options to respond to this need-responsive content.

• Check our Engaging Forum to FOLLOW discussions on this post and others. JOIN us as a site member to interact with others and to create your own forum comments.

• Explore similar content by clicking on the tags below. Find similar content under this anankelogy category.

• Share this content with others on social media. Share the link to share the love.

• Check out recent posts of interest to you.

• Add a rating below to let others know how much of a good read this was for you.

• Write a comment below to give others an independent perspective on this content.

• Recommend this on Facebook. Introduce anankelogy to your social media contacts.

• Lastly, support us in building this new love-nurturing alternative to our hate-enabling institutions. You can help us spread some love.

back-to-top