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What is a need and what is merely a desire?

Desires are reducible to a root desire, and needs are context-dependent, particularly as they relate to those same root desires. We cannot need anything without first having a desire; after all, without desire, without something to orient our spirit towards, what are we but atoms floating around in this universe? We only need things as they pertain to what we desire to see in the world, in others, or in ourselves.

The truth is most of us merely desire to belong, to be part of a community where we can make a difference, all while having our basic needs for food, water, and shelter; far less important to us is how that all exactly looks like, so as long as those conditions are met. We tack on so many abstractions—so many layers of semantics, and so many arbitrary goals, so many fabricated inadequacies and so many solutions to problems that we created in the first place—that we so easily forget just how little we need, as Marcus Aurelius puts it, to live a satisfying and reverent life.