Not all is lost, though. One of the ways to ensure smoother
sailing is to understand the difference between wants and needs.
Untangling Wants and Needs
When I first started getting an allowance—we called it “pocket
money” in Australia—it came with a parental conversation about
saving, and the difference between wants and needs. It’s a useful
distinction, and I’d guess that a few seconds’ reflection on the
difference between wants and needs brings these descriptions to
mind:
Want: I’d like to have this.
Need: I must have this.That distinction makes plenty of sense in theory. In practice,
it’s hard to stop everything from just getting the upgrade to needs,
which means that the distinction collapses in on itself. Marshall
Rosenberg is the creator of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a
communication process that “helps people to exchange the
information necessary to resolve conflicts and differences
peacefully.” In the NVC model, he gives the differences between
wants and needs a more practical and sustainable twist.
In Rosenberg’s model, wants are the surface requests, the
tactical outcomes we’d like from a situation. A want could be
anything from getting a report done by a certain date to