I’ve been thinking about needs and where they come from, of late.

In particular, how needs and wants differ, but also how that distinction doesn’t necessarily take us as far as it might in terms of helping us determine what actually matters to us.

There’s an Austrian philosopher named Ivan Illich who wrote about this subject back in the 1970s in a pair of books entitled Deschooling Society and Medical Nemesis, both of which propose that we’re taught that we need certain things, and those learned needs are eventually perceived to be actual needs. This, in turn, influences our sense of importance and priority.

A contemporary thinker named Michael Sacasas—whose work I enjoy, and who often writes about Illich—had this to say about the matter in a recent piece published in The Convivial Society:

“In the opening of Deschooling Society, Illich claims that the “hidden curriculum” of schooling is dependency on the institution of the school. “The pupil,” Illich writes, “is thereby ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” The student’s imagination, Illich continued, “is ‘schooled’ to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.”

He goes on to say:

Interestingly, for our purposes, Illich goes on to write about how this process of degradation is “accelerated when nonmaterial needs are transformed into demands for commodities; when health, education, personal mobility, welfare, or psychological healing are defined as the result of services or ‘treatments.’”

What he seems to be arguing is that institutions present us with boxes labeled “learning” and “health,” and confines of those boxes come to represent everything related to these concepts, societally, despite there being plenty to explore beyond what those boxes contain.

We thus eventually replace our own sense of blurry, intangible needs like safety and happiness and health with products and services.

Security is about more than policing, but we adopt a mental model in which the two are conflated, just as happiness is about more than having a drink with a friend—a specific, highly marketed activity in which we might engage—but over time the two concepts merge.

Think about work, about school, about our relationships, our clothing, our gadgets, our homes: many of our biases and preferences related to these aspects of our lives are not inherent or as personal as we think. They’re provided to us by entities that recognize it’s in their best financial interest to frame these facets of life so that we believe our needs will only be sated by what they have to offer.

Importantly, I’m not saying we shouldn’t seek out healthcare from professionals, go to school, buy clothes, or have a drink with a friend. We should not ignore the advice of doctors, keep ourselves ignorant, or avoid products or activities just because they’re embedded within a larger, consumption-oriented system—that system is impossible to completely avoid at this moment in time, even if we wanted to.

I am saying, however, that we might benefit from being more aware of where our perception of our needs originates and what that means for how we perceive and respond to those needs.

We are capable of learning anything we want, all day, every day, throughout the course of our lives. And there are countless ways to learn beyond sitting in a classroom (or logging in to a digital classroom), taking tests, and turning in papers.

That learning is so strongly associated with a single framework and setting, then, is massively limiting. We can make use of the default, societal solution to the problem of ignorance, then, but we can also address the issue in countless other ways—some of which may be more custom-fitted for us and our specific, non-inherited needs.

The same is true of how we approach our health, our hobbies and social activities, what we buy, what we consume, how we think about ourselves and how we spend our time.

We can, in other words, adopt prefabricated definitions and solutions for our needs when it makes sense to do so—and it often will—but we are also capable of defining our needs so that they’re more expansive, flexible, and ethical, according to our unique, personal standards for each.

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