Satisfiers (PP27)
Here’s sequel 27 of my Epicurean Happiness Guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” (from Chapter 4: SATISFIERS)
Satisfiers
You may not need a review of the preceding two sections (Needs and Desires), but I do:
- We have fundamental needs, including nutrition, oxygen, affection, sex, and sleep.
- We have the no-less important needs for shelter and safety, love and belonging, and respect.
- We have desires that by themselves are neither good nor bad. Rather, their “goodness” or “badness” is judged by the consequences of the method we choose to fulfill them.
Satisfaction of needs and desires is necessary for our quality of life, including our need to achieve our potential as healthy and self-reliant human beings.
We will define satisfier as:
Any agent capable of fulfilling a need or desire; the agent can be a material object, a situation, a service, a fantasy, an action or an event
We won’t distinguish between needs and desires in our exploration of satisfiers. Whether they are one or the other isn’t relevant for this discussion.
Remember the Epi-test in the Desires section, the “Are-You-Really-Sure-You-Want-to-Do-This” test with its three questions?
- What shall I gain by gratifying this desire?
- What shall I lose by suppressing it?
- Will indulging this desire cause pain and discomfort or anxiety for me or others?
None of us wants to apply Epicurus’s criteria to every decision we want to make. It would grow mighty tiresome to pull over to the side of the road so we can consider the effect of saturated fats on our arteries or the possibility of staining a nice shirt with a drip of Chunky Monkey if we occasionally want to satisfy a desire for ice cream on a hot day.
Likewise, even if you know you always wake up with a bad headache after drinking red wine, you may decide to throw caution to the wind and have a glass or two on a special occasion if your need for belonging overtakes your conscience. (I think I hear Epicurus saying, “Suit yourself, pal. At least you have aspirin. We never did.”)
To read my complete Epicurean Happiness Guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” go to http://stressfreedomguide.com/
When Desires Seem Like Needs (PP24)
Here’s sequel 24 of my Epicurean Happiness Guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” (from Chapter 3: DESIRES)
When Desires Seem Like Needs
It can be difficult to tell the difference between wants and needs, because sometimes the difference seems very small, even nonexistent. Everything gets mooshy. Let’s talk about a 13-year-old girl. Because her father, who grew up in a different culture, believes that girls should have long hair tied up on top of their heads, Heidi is not allowed to style her hair the way the other junior high school girls can. The mean girls taunt her because her hairdo is so old-fashioned and uncool. She’s becoming more withdrawn and less willing to participate in any social activities outside of school. She is willing to keep her hair no shorter than shoulder length — definitely no mohawks — if she can persuade her father to meet her halfway.
Does Heidi need to fit in with the other girls, or does she just desire to? Some of you will say it’s a need, while others will say it is a strong desire. The best answer is: It doesn’t make any difference. The situation brings Heidi much pain. The best thing she can do is negotiate with her father. If he won’t come around and she decides to cut her own hair in spite of it, then there could be consequences, but Heidi would likely compare those consequences with the discomfort of her current situation to reach a decision.
If I have great difficulty falling asleep without my iPod playing my relaxing music, do I need it or do I just want it very much? Again, it doesn’t matter. I won’t worry about it (unless my mate decides to sleep in another room — not a positive outcome, in my humble opinion).
To read my complete Epicurean Happiness Guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” go to http://stressfreedomguide.com/
A TASK FOR YOU (PP15)
Here’s sequel 15 of my Epicurean Happiness Guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” (from Chapter 2: NEEDS)
> With Max-Neef’s table in hand, list several of the ways you satisfy your daily needs, emphasizing those you think might be unique or different from others’. You can skip the needs in the subsistence category; they are no-brainers (unless you have a need for oatmeal every morning because your mother told you every day of your life that God would love you more). Plus some of them aren’t, uh, meant to be shared.
> Give a little thought to your childhood and beyond, such as your first marriage that “failed,” to see if doing so gives you insights into why you may have particular needs at this point in time.
> See how many you can plug into one of the categories on Max-Neef’s matrix. Do you have a need in at least three or more categories?
It’s interesting to note (or maybe it’s not all that interesting) that we don’t always want what we need. For example, most kids don’t want three daily servings of vegetables. Sun-lovers don’t want to wear hats and sunscreen. Sufferers of kidney disease don’t want daily dialysis. Cancer patients don’t want needles stuck in the back of their hand every Wednesday. And most of us don’t take a shine to examining our own lives.
To read my complete Epicurean Happiness Guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” go to http://stressfreedomguide.com/
The Pathway from Needs to Satisfiers:-)
I and my son have just produced my first (and probably last, with all the technical hassle:) video as an illustration of the difficulties everybody might encounter on their pathway if they want to find congruent satisfiers for their needs;-))
Starring our 8 months old cat: Buddy >>>>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNUJmPcB1_Q
how to satisfy your needs in ways that are congruent with your values
It’s such a simple principle – in principle:
satisfy your needs in ways that are congruent with your values.
In practice, however, it is not so simple at all.
‘I can grasp why the fact that my values and the way I satisfy my needs reduce the causes of stress and add to my well being’, said one of my coachees. (To protect his identity I will call him Peter.) He went on: ’My problem is that I just don’t know how to harmonize one of my cherished values with my actions. ‘
It turned out that the value he cherished so much was one of humanity’s core values: honesty. And his dilemma was also one of the the most common ones: how to be honest without hurting the feelings of his friend.
How to strike a viable balance between tactfulness and honesty? We are confronted almost daily with this problem in out interactions with our friends, family, coworkers. The need to belong is one of our other basic needs while to be honest is another one.
Peter’s problem was how to tell his friend that he did not feel like playing chess with him every Thursday afternoon any more. His friend was disabled and could not leave his house and the weekly chess parties were a very important element of his social life.
We all tend to use a “white lie” in such cases and we often do, since we do not have the knowledge and/or the skills to do any better. Peter’s first thought was to say that he had to work on a new project and that he was too busy at other times with his family. But at the same time he felt that he respected his friend too much to tell him a lie.
I told Peter openly and honestly that there were no simple answers and no quick fixes but it would be a good start is to ask himself how he could express his respect for his friend and only then tackle the thorny issue.
After only two coaching sessions he had both the knowledge and the skills to navigate safely between the rock of honesty and the hard place of tactfulness and save both his self-respect and his friendship. We also worked out another way to satisfy his own and his friend’s needs for belonging and honesty.
He said that it was well worth to work on himself for something very valuable to him: friendship.
For Living the Good Life Stress-Free: Orientation
We all need orientation to guide us from pain to pleasure, from stress to happiness, from confusion to clarity. Who gives us what kind of orientation today in which form with what intent?
We learn very early which way to turn our face to get milk from mother’s breast or avoid a slap from mother’s hand, where to go for food, comfort, company and when to stop touching a hot stove. Our senses and our physical environment teach us what is good and healthy for us by producing a feeling of pleasure. What is bad for our health produces disgust. Pleasure and pain are the basic stop-and-go signals for our individual survival.
This would be enough if we weren’t so very social. But humans cannot survive on their own and therefore the social group will also teach us what is good and bad for the survival of the group. The group’s teachings might differ from what we learned through our direct sense feedback. Your senses tell you to devour all the food but if you don’t share it with (some of) your group members they might punish you and not share with you their food the next time.
So you learn to work out your survival strategies balancing your individual needs as felt by your drives and tastes with the group values as experienced through daily practice, learning conflict and expectation management. This is hard enough and it takes years to find your place in the group in such a way that you can still live also according to your personal drives and tastes.
Your job to find orientation will get even more difficult or even impossible if your social environment keeps on sending you ambiguous messages by, e.g., commanding you not to lie but at the same time everybody lying to you about a life after death.
As a consequence you will be disoriented and will try to work out strategies to get along within this system. You can choose to conform to the system and pretend to follow its rules, being incongruent with your own inner beliefs. Or you can choose “to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing” become incongruent with the value system and acceptable behavior patterns of your social environment. In both cases you will ruin your mental and possibly also your physical health. You will perceive the most widespread incongruities mostly as conscience conflicts and stress.
What can you do if you don’t wish stress to ruin your health and happiness ? What other options can you have?
You could find a value system linked to behavior patterns and corresponding lifestyles in a congruent manner. In other words you might seek and find people who walk their talk and their thoughts, words and acts are congruent not only among themselves but they resonate with your own deepest needs as well.
I have good news for you: There is such a proven and viable model of pragmatic and easy to follow values system. It is the 2300-years-old practical Epicurean philosophy. It makes it easy to be honest and happy at the same time. It has been hushed up and defamed by the competing philosophies and worldviews of the Platonist, Stoic, Skeptic as well as Christian theoreticians and theologians but it never stopped giving simple practical orientation to reasonable, rational and honest people. For an enormously long period of 800 years, from 300 BCE till 500 CE (almost four times longer than the existence of the US!), it was even the most widespread worldview and lifestyle of the non-fanatical, pragmatic middle class of the Greek and Roman world.
Professional philosophers mostly know how relevant Epicurean attitudes, worldview and life conduct are today and how many of our stress-related and ecological problems would be solved if we only adopted and applied them. Unfortunately they don’t know how to say all this in simple language that is understandable also for everybody. The overwhelming majority of psychologists and sociologists, educators and life coaches has either never heard about Epicureanism or if they did, they erroneously believe that it is about eating and drinking. Anyway they are churning out ever “new” happiness recipes, as if re-inventing the wheel every week.
I will endeavour to make the practical Epicurean happiness guidance available for everyone who needs orientation but cannot accept childish myths or spiritual hocus-pocus supplied by organizations, groups or individuals with the aim of turning you into a docile instrument for their profit/power increasing machinery. Re-discovering the Epicurean system of values, attitudes and behaviour patterns might make you feel reborn in a friendly and sustainable world, enabling you to live in harmony with yourself and with your social and natural environment.
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