Two “need” and “want” terms are seemly referred to a lot in the economic realm. In this realm, they are easy to distinguish because of only based on the purchasing motivation of a person to determine. However, these words become more complicated when I consider them in different situations. I must say that it will be perilous if I use these rashly
LOVE
In the perspective of love, these two words are sensitive above all cases. Specifically, you should be careful whenever you say “I want you” unless you want your girl/boyfriend to misunderstand that you are just taking advantage of her/him for your physiology demand, and you should be serious whenever you say “I need you” if you don’t have the intention to maintain a long-time relationship with her/him. In my point of view, in love, “want” is more about sex and pleasure, while “need” is more about being ahead of the limitation of sex. Hence, I define true love which stems from the dependency on each other and each side leans on (or needs) each other to maintain and develop the relationship. Reversely, pragmatic love is when each side expects (or wants) each other as a tool to meet, serve, and satisfy the normal demand. Thus, when a person says that “I need you”, which means that he/she respects you and nurtures a sustainable future dream with you. In converse, when a person says that “I want you”, which means that he/she is only exploiting you; once he/she can possess you, he/she does not need to keep you. You are the only one to someone who feels deprived without you and needs you to fill up that person’s space in the heart. Otherwise, you do not play an important role in someone’s life if that person wants you because other countless people can be willing to satisfy that person’s demand apart from you. Conclude: In the love aspect, “I need you” is positive, “I want you” is negative
Marriage
In the marriage context, in most of the cases that love gradually turns into overshadowed, responsibility comes to the throne instead; as a result, both sides tie to each other. The evaluation of the two terms “want” and “need” in this family aspect is permuted, which means that “need” is negative, while “want” is positive. I think that, normally, in the family relationship, the partners often chafe that their wife/husband does not totally understand about their daily works. They slowly birth the negative thoughts of each other and repute their spouse as dependents. They think that their spouse cannot live without them as the penetrability becomes exhausted. Ultimately, they consider themselves the needed persons. However, the couples may needn’t each other because both of them are adults. In family life, the insiders have to share the sundry duties relating to house works, which arises the dependent psychology. Consequently, the spouse thinks that their life will not be perfect without the other. Albeit, in fact, a wife can live without her husband’s support, and reverse; of course, people undergoing a broken marriage understand this fact most. For instance, Lisa Arends – an author of Lesson from the End of a Marriage blogs shared that she mistakenly thought that she actually needed the attachment from her husband until she realized she could survive well after saying goodbye to him. Previously, she had never navigated adulthood without him because he could support her in work, maintain and upgrade their home on the cheap by his impressive carpentry, or soothe her when she felt stressed. However, she was wrong. That is a great lesson she could learn from her first marriage. Sometimes, being needed can feel good because it gives you purpose and duty in the marriage life. It awakes self-confidence and helps reduce the feelings of being alone because if someone needs you, he/she is unlikely to leave you. Nevertheless, if being needed is too much, it makes you feel burdened and seemly stuck in a prison. As a result, in the marriage context, you may desire to be wanted than to be needed because being wanted makes you still valuable and attractive in the eyes of your partner. “Need” is the basic thing, while “want” is beyond that basis. Conclude, in the marriage aspect, “I need you” is negative, “I want you” is positive
FRIENDSHIP
In friendship, people often use “need” or “don’t need” than “want” or “don’t want” because the “want” term implies a possession that seemly less appears. Unlike in marriage life or work environment, friendship is intrinsically equal. Once the equality is destroyed, that relationship is ruined. In friendship, when people need someone who also needs them, it symbols a reciprocal relationship. To be more specific, you and your close friend always need mutually when you would like to share something relating to life, work, family, study, etc., and expect support and help from the other. In this case, both of you are beneficial, so both are equal. The more equal reciprocity is maintained, the more the friendship is nurtured and developed. For instance, you may want a friend to go to the movie with you, but you need that friend to be punctual. So, “want” only describes an offer while “need” plays the coequal standard allowing the relationship to be healthy, trust, and respectful. In addition, the state of “want” in friendship is easy to lead to exploitation. It means that when someone wants you, they tend to want to take something from you. They are taking advantage of you to benefit themselves. Conclude: In the friendship aspect, “I need you” is positive, “I want you” is negative
WorkING environment
You can evaluate whether your seniors are good leaders or not by paying attention to the attitude when they transmit information or a requirement. There is a difference between a boss and a leader. A boss uses power to dominate the workplace and force the subordinates to do regarding his/her requirement. Thus, a boss often uses “I want you” more than “I need you”. Whereas, a leader uses power to help you be better. A leader normally is positive, empowering, inspiring, and acting for the development of all collective. Hence, a leader often says “I need you” more than “I want you”. For example, a boss will say “I want you to give me a marketing idea within this afternoon”, and a leader will slap your back and say “I need you to propose to me a marketing idea as soon as possible so that we can catch up with the process of project”. If you work with a boss, you are less respected because you are tied by his/her authority, then you are forced to do according to his/her commands without speaking up. In some cases, you may have a chance to speak up, but your idea will not be easy to accept. It is because your boss had the decision in the head, and listening to your idea just ensures the process is obeyed or hides the monopoly of the boss. Consequently, he/she only wants you to serve his/her decisions. Reversely, if you work with a leader, you have many opportunities to voice your ideas and those ideas will be respected, absorbed, and considered. The work environment is operated basing on the team mechanism than hierarchy. Therefore, you are needed to contribute to any project of the whole team. The leader is responsible for leading you and the team to the joint objective. Conclude: In the workplace, “I need you” is positive, “I want you” is negative
This blog is my personal view, i hope you read it in an open-hearted state!
You seem to have a lot of guts — I am speechless. Amazing! 😀 But also foolish? 😯
What makes you think you have such a level of sensitivity of these sorts of concepts — are you a native speaker of English? Do you study the English language? Are you an academic? Or do you simply feel confident enough to share your own insights this way?
New Media Works
6:09 pm on April 24, 2021 Tags: accomodation, apprehensive, campus, ideal, life ( 4 ), lifestyle, living, living quarters, nervous, quarters, room, rooms, together, work ( 4 )
I’m apprehensive. I have yet to be alloted accomodation since I want to stay in the campus itself. Lets see how things turn out. I’ll apparently be allotted a quarter with 2 bedrooms. For me, that would be ideal as long as I get someone to work with me.
Keywords: SHORT STORIES, THOUGHTS, TRUTHS, ADULTHOOD, CHANGE, DEALING, FEAR, HEALING, LIFE, WORDS
Years of playing it safe and controlled, and nothing to show for it. I still experienced loss. I still missed out on people and opportunities. I still got judged. I still faced challenges. So why not just be carefree, fearless, and daring? Why not just take life by the horns and see how long I can hold on before I am thrown off?
Another test case of NEW + IMPROVED alternative formats! 😀
I just wrote a comment on Bahiyaa’s mom’s blog. The way I know that is that Bahiyaa’s mom wrote a post about Bahiyaa a little over half a year ago (when she started the blog, I think — the featured photo for this post is from that blog post).
Here’s my comment:
Hi Nicole 🙂
I bet few people interact much with this website BECAUSE you’re not making it easy to navigate.
You need to pay more attention to making it easier for people to find not only YOUR NEWEST POST (which will also not be easy to find if you don’t ‘MAKE* it easy to find), but also the MANY POSTS YOU’VE ALREADY WRITTEN.
I suggest you ask someone with more experience in using WP to help you out. You could also check out videos on wordpress.tv (if you’re not too bandwidth challenged). Use widgets in your sidebar (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, learn!) — for example: recent posts, archives, comments (maybe this one will show up 😉 )…. Use tags and categories. Include pictures.
And if you want, feel free to sign up at wants.blog 😀
I remember well over a decade ago when I participated in a community many affectionately referred to as “o.net” I had this slogan: “I hate to wait“. At the time I made (and often repeated) that remark I was referring to response times of web-pages (saying I wouldn’t wait long than about a second for a web-page to load). Here I wish to use it again — but here I want to point out that I don’t want to run the risk of waiting 3 years for a noob to discover that my comment ought to be published.
At this very moment, as I sit at my desk and write this article, my phone is adjacent to my computer, sitting on the counter. I know that whenever I want, I can pick it up, and in a couple of seconds, click on an app and see what my friends are doing. After that, I can go see what celebrities are doing, then check if anyone followed me, then watch a video of a person cutting a banana-shaped cake. I feel the temptation to go down this path; I know that as soon as I do, I will be rewarded with a hit of dopamine. But, I know myself—I know if I start, I will want to keep scrolling, scrolling, and scrolling.
I wonder if this cycle is bad. I wonder if, maybe, life would be better without it. When I watched The Social Dilemma, a documentary on Netflix about the problems with social media, I became convinced that maybe this cycle is kind of bad, yet I wasn’t sure what to do about it.
The documentary consists primarily of interviews with tech insiders, social psychologists, and academics. Together, they make a compelling case that technology companies manipulate their users, but it was one simple statistic that a social psychologist cited that convinced me that there is a problem. The psychologist’s name is Johnathan Haidt, and he works for the NYU Stern School of Business. He explained that the number of teenage girls who were admitted to a hospital because they cut or otherwise harmed themselves “was pretty stable until around 2010-2011, and then it [began] going way up.” Since 2009, this number is up 62% for older teen girls and 189% for preteen girls. But this isn’t even the worst of the statistics. The number of older teen girls committing suicide is up 70% in the last decade and up 151% for preteen girls.
“Gen Z, those kids are the first generation in history that got on social media in middle school,” Haidt said. “A whole generation is more anxious, more fragile, more depressed.”
This is my generation he’s talking about. Me, my friends—we are the people who are supposed to be uniquely more anxious, fragile, and depressed than any past generation, and I’m sure a pandemic isn’t helping us with any of those. Yet the worst part is that we know what causes this widespread depression and anxiety. It doesn’t come out of thin air; it comes out of social media.
After watching the documentary, I knew that social media had affected me in ways that probably weren’t good, but I wanted to find out if I was alone or if the people around me—Haverford students—have had similar experiences with social media.
Over the course of a week, I interviewed five Haverford students, all Fourth Formers, about their social media use. Because of the small sample size, this article can’t speak for Haverford as a whole, or even the upper school students as a whole, but it does represent the true feelings of the students I spoke to—feelings that I hope will resonate with people throughout our community.
The first thing I noticed was the sheer amount of time spent on social media, especially TikTok.
“Basically, when I’m bored, I go on TikTok and just waste all my time,” Student A said (names have been changed to protect students’ identities). “I wish it was gone. I hate it so much. It’s so addicting,” he said in a kind-of-a-joke tone of voice. When I asked him if he was considering deleting TikTok, he said he wouldn’t because he’ll “probably just redownload it later on.”
It is for this reason that deleting social media seems like a near-impossible feat to many people, yet there was one student, Student B, who deleted both TikTok and Snapchat because of the high amount of time he spent on those platforms.
When Student B did this, he faced social repercussions. He kept in touch with his friends from his old school primarily through Snapchat, and the moment he deleted his account, he lost some connections with these friends.
“I can see why kids wouldn’t want to delete Snapchat ’cause that’s kind of how you keep your connections nowadays,” Student B said.
Student B was not alone in feeling like he was spending too much time on social media, but he was alone in thinking that deleting the apps would solve that problem.
As it turns out, most people who use social media feel like they have a hard time controlling their time on it. In The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris, a computer scientist who left Google to start a nonprofit, tried to explain why we are so vulnerable to social media algorithms.
“Realistically speaking, you’re living inside of hardware, a brain, that is millions of years old,” Harris said. “And then there’s this screen, and on the opposite side of the screen, there are these thousands of engineers and supercomputers that have goals that are different than your goals. And so, who’s going to win in that game?”
Student C, a fourth former, said that he gets his work done on time and his social media usage is not a big problem, yet he still maintained that, at least on TikTok, “you watch it, and you just go, you keep going, and you can lose track.”
When you “lose track,” it doesn’t just happen—technology companies intentionally design platforms so that psychologically, it’s nearly impossible not to “lose track.”
The former president of Facebook, Sean Parker (you may know him from 2010’s The Social Network, played by Justin Timberlake), acknowledges that Facebook is “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” He says, “I think that the inventors—me, Mark [Zuckerberg], Kevin Systrom at Instagram—understood this consciously, and we did it anyway.”
“Exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” is, contrary to what some people think, not a win-win situation. I talked to one Fourth Former, Student D, who said, “I’m getting that sweet, sweet dopamine rush from scrolling on that feed, and they’re just getting my personal data. It’s not bad.”
He said this with a fair bit of irony, but, often, this argument is not a joke. How often do you hear people say they don’t really care how much data tech companies have about them?
The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t represent the relationship that social media companies have with their users. These companies aren’t stalkers who pay for your “data” simply because they are interested in you.
“A lot of people have the misconception that it’s our data being sold. It’s not in Facebook’s business interest to give up the data,” said Sandy Parakilas, the former Operations Manager at Facebook. “They build models that predict our actions, and whoever has the best model wins.”
What results is that Facebook and other tech companies can predict what will keep us scrolling, watching, and liking. The Center for Humane Technology, the nonprofit that Tristan Harris co-founded, made an alarming analogy to describe how social media companies keep you engaged.
“Just like a tree is worth more as lumber and a whale is worth more dead than alive—in the attention extraction economy a human is worth more when we are depressed, outraged, polarized, and addicted,” Harris said.
Thus, it would make sense that social media algorithms recommend polarizing, unfactual content, thereby leading unsuspecting people to become entrenched in fake news.
Student D said that in middle school, he fell down a rabbit hole of polarizing content on social media. Content that, as he described it, “radicalizes people.”
“I would watch commentary YouTubers, and a lot of them at the time we’re really on the right side of the spectrum,” Student D said. “I would slowly dip farther to the right, more radical, worse, and worse until it got to the point where I realized where I was going, and I turned around.”
He would see content that was “blatantly anti-Semitic or racist” getting upwards of 50,000 likes, and he would see comments agreeing with the post.
“Before, I really didn’t think there were that many people who believed in this stuff, but then you see how many people like it,” Student D said. “It’s really weird to think that that many people believe that [antisemitic and racist content].”
Eventually, Student D realized the malice behind the content he was watching and managed to escape the rabbit hole, yet many people never get to this point—they descend further into the false content that social media platforms recommend to them, falsely believing they are finding the truth. So what did Student D do to get out of the rabbit hole and find the truth?
“I kind of just stepped back from social media in general and looked at the real world and observed that [the radical content] doesn’t make sense. Like, it’s stupid,” Student D said.
It was necessary to step back from social media for Student D to free himself from misinformation. For Student B, it was necessary to delete some social media accounts to limit the time he spent on his phone. I wonder whether the rest of us should follow in their footsteps, freeing ourselves from the constant advertising, misinformation, and addiction to social media.
I want to say yes. I want to declare, as I reach the end of this article, that everyone “get off of social media right now!” I want to remind you that our generation is more depressed than any other, that we are addicted, that we are polarized.
While all of this is true, it is also true that people will continue to use social media whether I like it or not, and they will do this because there are some truly positive sides to these platforms. And, in all honesty, I don’t plan on deleting my Instagram or Snapchat accounts in the near future either—the fear of being “left out” once I delete them is too great for me to seriously consider it.
I can’t tell you to delete your social media accounts (without being a hypocrite), but I will tell you to do something else: question social media. Question how meaningful it is. Question how it makes you feel.
Note: I’ve decided to revive this website — but I think I will have to rethink the approach. I’m not certain how I will configure it, and remain open to suggestions. This post is one example of many possibilities.
The author (“Joey Kauffman ’23”) does not provide any way of commenting at all, so I decided to comment here.
Joey, I quit reading your survey of students as soon as it became clear that you were not going to define you you refer to as “social media”. Without a clear definition, this is simply a complete waste of time. I hope you do it again, and please provide us with an update if you feel like it.
Jacks News 