Here you are, looking straight into the screen. Your eyes are focused, they keep moving, following this string of little black symbols that another person has arranged; at the same time, your mind is making lightning-fast connections in order to allow you to experience the emerging of new images and ideas into the area of your consciousness. Isn’t that fascinating?

You keep doing this day by day: you thirst for these new experiences, ideas, images. It’s like food for your soul. You need it; you need meaning, that is the significant connection between different facts, in order to better understand yourself and the world around you. In order to live a better life.

• I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone before.
• God created pudding, and then he rested.
• I’m thinking of two circus clowns dancing. You?

What is the fuel of your actions?

There was a time when a problem kept coming to my mind: what is the fuel of human action? Why do we do what we do? Apart from being a reasonably good tongue-twister, that question was a fairly generative one. I was aware that its answer may have led me to some very good insight into how to live our lives fully.

As a particularly high-level introvert, in my teenage years I was strongly inclined to spend my days doing “nothing”, just sitting anywhere comfortable and thinking about all sorts of things.

I often struggled to understand what was it that kept some other people pushing and pushing and pushing in order to achieve goal, after goal, after goal. I was fairly puzzled, astonished by the sheer quantity of energy these other people spent doing more and more things everyday; while all I could do was just sit quietly and think.

A fresh perspective on life

I was indeed able to fully appreciate the fulfillment that comes from creating something you believe in; but at the same time, since I was trying to find out general answers to wide questions such as “what it means to act?”, “why do we act?”, “where does our motivation to act come from?”, I struggled to reconcile that sort of hyper-energetic lifestyle with other, very different experiences of life… for instance, the life of a tree.

So I’m neither man nor beast. I’m something new entirely. With my own set of rules. I’m Dexter. Boo.I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone before.

• Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs;
• Manfred Max-Neef’s Fundamental Human Needs;
• Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC).

From here on, we will explore the point of view of what I see as the most influential, complete and practically useful approach to human needs that’s out there: Marshall Rosenberg’s NVC.

Our social and emotional life can be seen as the endless exchange of time, words, emotions, thoughts, attention and acts of affection, care, provocation, animosity, seduction… This game can develop to the point of creating bonds such as committed, long-lasting relationships, where we symbolically donate our very self to the other person.

Do you see that now? The boundless number of exchanges that unceasingly happen every day between human beings throughout the entire planet?

Life as the process of fulfilling needs

For Rosenberg, needs are the life force that animates life. Whenever we are truly alive, we are connected to our emotions and needs, and to other people’s emotions and needs.

In contrast, sometimes we happen to disconnect from the truth of how we feel and what we need; in such cases, our actions can become confuseder.

Every action we do is aimed at fulfilling one or more needs, for example:

• you may go to work to fulfill a set of different needs, such as the need for food, shelter, connection, challenge, contribution, to matter, …;
• you may get in a romantic relationship in order to meet your needs for connection, expression, intimacy, closeness, sex, affection, …;
• sometimes you can choose a specific activity to fulfill just one or two specific needs, for instance you can sleep to meet your need for rest, or you may say a difficult truth to somebody even if it goes against your interests because you want to meet your need for authenticity and integrity.

This simple question may help you connect with the most authentic parts of yourself, the ones that can show you what you truly value in life, and provide you with the most spontaneous, delightful, refreshing energy to fulfill your dreams.