Wants V Needs

How good are you at differentiating what you need from what you want? Anyone who's ever had to deal with disappointments in life knows there's a difference. We all want a lot of things and we all need a lot. Just how do you decide which is best for you. You can easily say you as a person (grown or otherwise) know what you want, but very rarely do we know what we need.

Have you ever had something go wrong but meant that you got something you actually needed? Does missing the bus and have to walk meant that you met an old friend who presents you with an opportunity that ends you being what you need. Maybe getting dumped and going on holiday alone, lead you to a place where so many opportunities awaited you?

We all have an ideal, a picture in our head that we are trying to replicate in real life. We go through so much to make that picture whole. Work 9-5 jobs, put money in our pension pot, have savings, start college funds for our kids and so on. However sometimes, regardless of how hard we try, we just never seem to be able to portray the exact same picture.
You would expect this would mean the final drawing would come out skewed; I mean if things haven’t gone the way you planned, surely the end point will be completely different from what you envisioned. And life would cease to be what you know it to be. Only that doesn’t seem to be the case, in spite of getting something different from what we expected, we end up getting what we needed. In comparing our ideal to what life has presented us, we end up at exactly where we needed to be.

At what point do we stop striving for what we want and start aiming for what we need. When through all of this do we stop drawing our ideal picture and start drawing a realistic one? Can you tell the difference between what you want and what you need? Do you know what you need? Is it different from what you want? Are you striving for what you what or what you need?

I personally find, that sometimes I can answer this question with confidence and other times I’m confused as to which is which.

Death to Chain Mail

Do you ever get those annoying chain mails that are well written or has some supposedly powerful message and at the end of it, says of you don’t send it to 99.9 people you will see worms in your food or some crap like that.  

I really wonder if anyone believes messages like that, I mean think about it. It says if you don’t send it to your whole inbox you don’t get a blessing or you have 3.5 years of bad luck (I just divided the years of breaking a mirror bad luck by 2, surely that’s much worse?), if you send it to only half of you inbox you get a wish but it comes true in less years, however if you send it to your full inbox you get your wish in 10mins. How is the number of bad luck years calculated? Does the email have spyware attached to calculate the percentage of your inbox you sent it too? How long do you think it took for the average person to figure out there is no correlation?

Seriously can you tell me that in the list of 62 emails you have to read, if you don’t drop everything and send this threatening email to all your contacts so that they too can forward the threatening email to their contacts your left pinkie toe will grow a fungal nail. And what are the rules if you get the mail more than once, if you don’t send it again does the previous good luck cease to be or will you get a pardon? 

I really try not to take my frustration out on the people that send me emails like that; I just block any future emails from them. Sometimes I forward it to only that person just to see if they’ll send it back to all their contacts (only happens on the rare occasion I have time).  Other times I just send them an imaginary middle finger (doesn’t hurt them but makes me feel better). 

What dim-witted horrific person sat down and came up with this stupid concept. I really would like to meet them, I could write at the end of this what I would to do the person, but I unlike them believe in the surprises, however I can say whatever it is will not be the threat of a fungal nails (will probably involve a baseball bat and their computer making a physical connection).