About meaning - the six fundamental human needs ( Mastery ep.02)

   There are six human needs - fundamental drives within each of us - that compel us forward in our effort to experience a life of meaning. There is no conscious effort, our will to satisfy these primal needs is automatic. 

   Four of them are so-called primal needs: certainty, uncertainty, significance and connection. The last two are spiritual needs: growth and contribution. 

   Certainty - everybody want stability about their basic necessities: food, shelter and material resources. When people cannot control their psychical circumstances, they may seek certainty through a state of mind (such as religious faith). 

   Uncertainty - people need to change their state, to exercise their body and emotions. Therefore they seek variety through a number of means: stimuli, change of scene, physical activity, mood swings, food etc.

   Significance - everybody needs to feel special and important in some way. People will seek significance through obtaining recognition from others or from themselves. When people feel insignificant, they make themselves feel significant by getting angry. 

   Connection - humans need to feel connected with someone or something: a person, an ideal, a value, a habit or a sense of identity. Connection may take form of love, or merely intense engagement, for instance one can feel connected by means of an aggressive interaction. 

   Growth - everything in the universe is either growing or dying, there is no third alternative. People are not spiritually satisfied unless their capacities are expanding.

   Contribution - Just as people cannot survive without others contributing in some way to their welfare (no baby grew up on its own), they cannot be spiritually fulfilled unless they are contributing to others as well. 

  People find ways to meet these needs in positive, negative or neutral ways, but every person finds a way to meet them in some way. Any activity, action or emotion that fulfill at least three needs at a high level becomes, in effect, an addiction. Likewise, people have positive, negative or neutral addictions. There is always a way to fulfill a need, the skill lies in finding a sustainable way to fulfill it, and in a way that gives us more pleasure than pain.