Needs vs Wants - You Know the Difference, But Do You Use the Wrong Word Anyway?

How often have you heard someone say "I need a coffee."? Do you say it yourself? How about "I need a smoke" or "I need a beer" or....  well, you know where I'm going with this.

When someone says something like this to me, I respond with "Really? Do you really NEED that?" which usually results in them rolling their eyes or other responses that brush off my dumb sense of humour. I'm not joking though.

Usually the response is "it's just an expression" but so is "if you say something enough times, you start to believe it." Even if you know you don't really need that coffee, you've been saying it out loud to yourself and to anyone that will listen every single morning for years, even decades! And what happens if you wake up one day and the coffee maker isn't working? Or the coffee shop is too busy to stop in and you're running late??

Your whole day is ruined isn't it? You can account all kinds of terrible things that happen that day all to that missed cup of coffee that you told yourself you needed.

If I was to ask at that point "Do you really NEED that?" I bet there would be no more rolled eyes, no more brushing it off. The answer would be an undeniable "yes!"

It's because you've convinced yourself so completely that you really need that coffee every morning. Now, I'm not a doctor but I'm fairly certain a daily 12oz cup of coffee is not a daily requirement for our existence.

I hear it all the time from the funniest things like "I need to have bread with my eggs" to "I need to pierce my eyebrow." And people don't even realize they're saying it wrong because it's become such a normal part of every day speech (not the eyebrow piercing part but the 'need' part).

But even if you and I know the difference and think it's so very obvious that "need" isn't really what we meant when we said it.... we still said it, and our mind still believed it. And we still fell apart because we didn't get it.

You don't need a team of scientists on this to prove that it's true. We convince ourselves so deeply that we need something that eventually, we do need it. Like a drug, we can't cope without it.

You could argue that it's simply the act of drinking coffee every day that makes us feel terrible when we don't, and you wouldn't be entirely wrong but would you have had that coffee every single morning for so many years if it was just something you wanted, rather than needed?

Think about all the things in your life that you want to have and ask yourself if you've made those things a daily event. When you convince yourself that you need it, you prioritize it. And you make it happen until eventually, you have to keep having it even when you don't want it anymore... all because you once said "I need a coffee."