How Does Non-Needyness Really Work?

[Salvijus]

10 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Do you understand neediness is a different thing from a need? It's an attitude, a behavior. Having a need might simply mean having a goal, so you do certain things to achieve that goal, but there are many behaviors conducive to achieving that goal, and neediness is just one specific behavior.

Yes, if you didn't have that need, you'd not pursue that goal. If you truly had no need for women, you'd not pursue them. We agree. 

Edited Tuesday at 06:29 PM by Salvijus

[Salvijus]

The word need means different things in different context. I'm using the word need as a synonym for desire just to be clear. 

So my statement follows: unless you have a desire for something, you're not going to pursue it. Basic sense if you ask me. 

[Joshe]

Also, how one deals with "uncertainty" is near the root as well. 

Neediness = fear-driven attempts to eliminate uncertainty and to secure safety.

So, maybe part of the solution is courage has to be cultivated. And/or you have to cultivate groundedness in the absence of guarantees.

[Hojo]

The mechanics are you think you need people for survival when its actually God giving you the people when you are in need. We are taught to beleive that the people are giving us things and we need them for shelter and other things but GODS DOING IT. When you see that God is doing it you no longer need the people to help you you need to realize that God will take care of you.

Edited Tuesday at 06:43 PM by Hojo

[Joshe]

5 minutes ago, Salvijus said:

The word need means different things in different context. I'm using the word need as a synonym for desire just to be clear. 

So my statement follows: unless you have a desire for something, you're not going to pursue it. Basic sense if you ask me. 

Engage with the nuance bro. You don't get to flatten all distinctions and then tell everyone your flattened frame is basic common sense. lol. Nice try. 

[Salvijus]

5 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Also, how one deals with "uncertainty" is near the root as well. 

Neediness = fear-driven attempts to eliminate uncertainty and to secure safety.

So, maybe part of the solution is courage has to be cultivated. And/or you have to cultivate groundedness in the absence of guarantees.

This is what I was pointing to by distinguishing a desperate pursuit of desire and gracious pursuit of desire. 

Edited Tuesday at 06:44 PM by Salvijus

[Salvijus]

1 minute ago, Joshe said:

Engage with the nuance bro. 

I'm with you. 

[Joshe]

Just now, Salvijus said:

I'm with you. 

True dat

[Joshe]

19 minutes ago, Hojo said:

The mechanics are you think you need people for survival when its actually God giving you the people when you are in need. We are taught to beleive that the people are giving us things and we need them for shelter and other things but GODS DOING IT. When you see that God is doing it you no longer need the people to help you you need to realize that God will take care of you.

I could see how these metaphysical mechanics would usually serve to spiritually bypass the underlying fragility. For most, it would be a coping mechanism and a magic pill solution to avoid the work becoming antifragile.

[UnbornTao]

15 hours ago, Salvijus said:

In this context it means the same thing. 

Not really - hence the "make a distinction" part. You can want (or desire) something without strictly needing it.

15 hours ago, Salvijus said:

But you could make a distinction between a desperate way of pursuing a desire and a gracious way of pursuing a desire. One comes from a position of weakness and ego, another from a position of strength and God's wisdom. 

This sounds reasonable, yes, although it would still occur within the domain of want and would therefore be different from needing the pursuit.

I'm not saying the distinction in real life can't be blurry, or that want and need can't overlap or occur at the same time. Sometimes, our motivations to pursue anything may well involve both need and want, to different degrees. If it's done desperately, as you mentioned above, there might be some sort of need involved there - emotional or otherwise. But this is still different from simply wanting something to come about, so it's useful to get clear on what wanting and need each are.

Generate a desire for ice cream. Now you want it. Do you need it (as in "real" necessity)? Not really. You may be bored out of your mind and thus looking for instant gratification - a distraction from your mundane state. In that case, we might say you "need" it (in the sense of emotional dependence, or addiction).

[UnbornTao]

15 hours ago, Joshe said:

@UnbornTao Totally agree. In my first reply I had something like "it's helpful to distinguish between want and need", but I removed it after I started thinking about the complexity it invokes. It feels like "want" becomes a need at a certain point, so I started thinking of "desire" as the base phenomenon on a spectrum of intensity, but then couldn't figure out the rest of the framework. 

Also, it's not so simple because you can have both an intense want and an intense need.

Where things become unstable is when not getting an intense want is mistaken as some sort of existential threat. So neediness seems to have to do with your relation to the desire - how high you believe the stakes are or thinking your safety will be compromised if you don't get it. 

At the end of the day, I think neediness is a symptom of a fragile self. Find what is fragile and make it not fragile. 

"We wants it. We needs it."

It seems to me that if the distinction is experientially made, then that should settle what is what. To be clear, I wouldn't say they're necessarily mutually exclusive or that they can't overlap. But it is possible to want something without needing it. You could test this by creating a desire for something - ideally a simple thing - that you don't need. If that's possible, the difference should become clear.

One assumption we could fall into is that not needing something means that pursuing it is bound to fail - something along those lines. Yet the reason something is pursued in the first place is that, to some degree, we want that result to come about. I'd categorize desire as a weaker term - more about imagining something you want, without necessarily intending to make it real.

What it feels like is being pointed to here is the possibility of generating results and creating things without needing them. Commitment is another distinction to introduce here. Being committed to something simply demands consistently taking action toward the actualization of the promise made. No need for need.

This approach seems to greatly simplify how you pursue things. It helps to get yourself out of the picture, so to speak, so that what needs to be done becomes the priority - not one's own needs or wants. Perhaps this is more aligned with the aspect of non-neediness: to stop taking "yourself" so seriously all the time and instead focus on what is appropriate - or demanded - by the circumstance or event in front of you. What is appropriate is determined by the purpose of your undertaking - the reason why you took it up in the first place.

[Joshe]

Neediness happens when wanting gets mixed with a lack of self-respect, self-trust, or inner stability.

The outcome gets psychologically attached to something deeper, like safety, identity, self-worth, etc.