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What do you want? What do you need?

Does your brain get in the way of your life?
Marilyn

Gandhi is supposed to have said that the world has enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.

Around 2005 we began to wonder whether this was really true – whether the world still had enough for everyone’s need. But a more pressing question was how to distinguish between needs and ’wants’. There were plenty of studies of ’human needs’ (cf Max-Neef), but still most of us in the then-affluent world lived as though we ’needed’ a whole lot more. And as long as we are driven by our wants, 'sustainable lifestyle' tends to look and feel like sacrifice, so it’s unattractive except for masochists.

A big step forward was when schools all over the world began introducing lessons in awareness. It had been going on for a long time in special schools, of course, but around 2010 it really took hold. Hard to imagine that before then, most people got NO education in how to handle their emotions – or even, in fact, how to distance themselves from their brains; on the contrary, most of us who grew up in ’the bad old days’ were actually trained to identify with our thoughts and feelings. Amazing, isn’t it?!

So we’ve made a lot of progress, as children begin to educate their parents (and grandparents). There are still plenty of people who are so unaware that they allow themselves to be driven by their wants, but now they’re no longer in a position to dominate our cultures. In the nick of time, you could say.

Oct 19
awareness,education,dis-identify,greed


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  • drpeppa
    Oct 20
    hmm very very interesting indeed! I do think living in an only-bottom-of-the-maslow-pyramid world is very very sad
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