PLEASURE, DESIRE, AND STATUS: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NEEDS AND WANTS
“Inner peace is more important than all the riches in the world.”
-Babuji
Most of you have probably heard of the reward center of our brain — the striatum and ventral tegmental area. The structures in this area are involved in craving things that are pleasurable to us (sex, alcohol, food, gambling, shopping, etc.) and avoiding things that are painful or unpleasant (homework, conflict, chores, etc.). It is the most important part of our brain when it comes to driving our actions and behaviors, which shape our habits. Over time, these habits determine who we are and how we live our lives on a regular basis. All of this happens through the regulation of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is sometimes referred to as the incentive/motivation chemical of the brain. The reward center is a very old part of our brain located right in the middle where our emotions are processed. This is part of the problem, which advertising and marketing firms are keenly aware of and manipulate to get us to do what they want.
It is becoming increasingly difficult in our modern world to figure out the difference between “needs” and “wants.” In addition to the constant manipulation we are exposed to by marketers and advertisers, an even bigger challenge is not falling prey to another deeply human instinct — the desire for attachment. One of the greatest human needs is the desire to belong to a larger community, of which we can be a part and derive closeness, intimacy, and connection. It can be anything from a golf club, book club, car club, religious or academic institution, street gang, or secret society. The problem, once more, is that marketers and advertisers know this and try to use our insecurities to their advantage. They play on our fears of not being good, smart, beautiful, or rich enough to find secure attachment within the group we want to join. Ultimately, they attempt to manipulate our emotions, thereby driving our choices, actions, and behaviors.
Furthermore, marketing companies and high-end brands are constantly trying to define what these new groups of successful, rich, and beautiful people look like, who they engage with and what they do on a regular basis — that way, they can create whole markets, products, and experiences to sell to us. All the while, we are being played like fools to the point that even the richest and most successful rarely feel satisfied. They feel impelled to keep playing the game of life, running endlessly on the hedonic treadmill, unable to relax and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
You see, everything we do and experience in life is linked back to dopamine in our brain. Some things like food, sex, drugs, and alcohol inherently have a much higher dopamine release rate than things like shopping, video games, social media use, and making money. However, over time, the addictive behaviors in the latter group can rewire one’s brain, making us think we need those behaviors as much as we need things like food and shelter to survive. Furthermore, the more we engage with these activities, the more desensitized our brains become to them and their pleasurable rewards, requiring greater frequency, intensity, duration, and novelty to get the same dopamine high. If this sounds similar to developing a tolerance to alcohol or drugs, that’s because it is. Once this happens, addiction to whatever is providing the pleasurable boost in our brains is only a small step away.
What was originally designed by nature as a survival mechanism to help us find food and mates is now being targeted and hijacked by providers of overly processed foods with tons of fat, sugar, and sodium; pharmaceutical companies and their addictive drugs; sales and marketing companies promoting instant gratification from their products and services; and artificial intelligence algorithms collecting immense amounts of data on us and feeding us more of what they know we like. If we are not careful, we can fall subject to a reality in which our wants are reprogrammed as needs.
One particularly concerning piece of this pleasure puzzle is the role of mate selection and status within a group. Mate selection and courtship rituals run very deep in evolutionary biology for all animals. Whether it’s male primates howling, banging on their chests, and fighting with other males to show their strength and virility to females; or male birds displaying their beautiful colors and craftsmanship skills through courtship dances and nest building, every animal species has its preferred method for mate selection. Animals have something that they instinctively seek out, which is often related to the likelihood of their mate being the best genetic fit for their offspring’s survival. The problem with humans, however, is that whatever innate biological predispositions for mate selection that initially existed have been drowned out by our culture’s obsession with money, status and materialism — things that do not even have a biological basis to them! This has progressed to the point where people will often choose partners based on a false sense of biological necessity (money/status/materialism), overlooking critical factors such as emotional and social intelligence, compassion, emotional intimacy, shared meaning and values, effective communication skills, and general levels of happiness and life satisfaction.
Additionally, the evolutionary biological predispositions that were there to begin with have all been made into billion-dollar industries. Think about the businesses surrounding size, strength, beauty, pheromones, intelligence, food gathering, and the ability to provide shelter. All of these factors have become “buyable,” confusing things even further and creating conditions where individuals feel pressured to be perfect in many different areas at once. This pressure is exacerbated by never-ending advertisements, pitching unattainable ideals of beauty and success and making us feel even more insecure. The goal, of course, is to make us feel desperate to purchase the product or service that a given company is trying to sell us. By tying status to materialism and financial success, we have inadvertently created an economic monster that affects us all — a bottom-less pit of needing and wanting more. If we are not careful, this monster will destroy us and our ability to find real happiness and peace of mind.
So what is the cure to this? As with everything else, it starts with simple awareness of the constant comparison and competition we are inadvertently experiencing on a daily basis. Secondly, we need to start cultivating more moments of silent reflection, reminding ourselves that we are all infinite consciousness, temporarily trapped in this multi-layered bio-body suit, having a human experience. And with that experience comes the fun of remembering the true nature of our power and potential — learning how to control this human, animalistic body we have been given, which itself is driven by very powerful forces such as pleasure-seeking and pain-avoidance.