Simple Needs

When we buy a bird from the bird-seller, that good man tells us briefly what our new boarder requires, and all of it, hygiene, food, and the rest, fits into a few words. In the same way, a few summary directions would be enough to sum up the essential needs of most living creatures. Their regimen is generally extremely simple, and as long as they keep to it they thrive, like obedient children of Mother Nature. Let them stray from it, and complications set in, health declines, cheerfulness departs. Only a simple and natural life can keep an organism in full vigor. For want of remembering this elementary principle, we fall into the strangest aberrations.

What does a person need in order to live, materially, in the best possible conditions? Wholesome food, simple clothing, a healthy dwelling, air, and exercise. I am not going to go into details of hygiene, compose menus, or recommend models of houses and cuts of clothing. My aim is to point out a direction and to say what advantage there would be for everyone in ordering their life in a spirit of simplicity. To assure ourselves that this spirit does not reign enough in our society, we need only watch how people of all classes live. Put this question to different individuals from very different backgrounds: What do you need to live?... You will see what they answer. There is nothing so instructive.

For some, natives of the Parisian asphalt, no life is possible outside a certain district bounded by a few boulevards. There alone is breathable air, proper light, normal temperature, classic cooking, and, in unlimited supply, so many other things without which it would not be worth the trouble of strolling about on the round machine of this world.

On the various rungs of middle-class life, people answer the question of what one needs to live with a figure, which varies with the degree of ambition or of education; and by education they most often mean the outward habits of life, the way one is housed, dressed, and fed, an education that is altogether skin-deep. From a certain figure of private income, profit, or salary upward, life becomes possible. Below it, life is impossible. People have been known to kill themselves because their means had fallen below a certain minimum. They preferred to disappear rather than cut back. Note that this minimum, the cause of their despair, would no doubt still have been acceptable to others with less exacting needs, and enviable to people of modest tastes.

In high mountains the flora changes with altitude. There is the zone of ordinary crops, the zone of forests, the zone of pastures, and the zone of bare rock and glaciers. Above a certain zone wheat no longer grows, but the vine still thrives; the oak stops at a fairly low level, while the fir delights in considerable heights. Human life, with its needs, recalls these phenomena of vegetation.

At a certain altitude of fortune we see thriving the financier, the clubman, the grand ladies of society, and in short all those for whom the bare necessities include a certain number of servants and carriages, as well as several residences in town and in the country. Further on blooms the wealthy bourgeois with his own customs and manners. In other regions we see flourishing ample, middling, or modest comfort, with demands of very unequal degree. Then come the humble folk, the artisans, the workers, the peasants, the masses, in a word, who live thick and close together like the fine grass on the mountain summits, where the large plants no longer find enough to feed on. In all these different provinces of society people live, and those who grow there are human beings, every bit as much. It seems strange that among beings of one kind there should be such prodigious differences in needs. And here the analogies of our comparison abandon us. Plants and animals of the same families have identical needs. Human life leads us to the opposite observation. What conclusion can we draw, if not that there is a considerable elasticity in the nature and number of our needs!

Is it useful, is it favorable to the development and happiness of the individual, and to the development and happiness of society, that man should have a multitude of needs and devote himself to satisfying them? First let us return to our comparison with the lower creatures. Provided their essential needs are satisfied, they live content. Is it the same in human society? No. At every level we meet discontent. Here I entirely set aside those who lack the necessities. It would be unjust to count among the discontented those from whom cold, hunger, and destitution wring complaints. I wish to concern myself only with that multitude of people who live in conditions that are, after all, bearable. Where does their discontent come from? Why is it found not only among people of modest though sufficient means, but also, in ever more refined shades, even in opulence and at the summit of the social scale! People talk of the sated bourgeois. Who talks of them? Those who, judging them from outside, think that after indulging themselves for so long they must really have had their fill. But do they themselves feel satisfied? Not in the least. If there are people who are rich and content, you may be sure they are not content because they are rich, but because they know how to be content. An animal is sated because it has eaten; it lies down and sleeps. A man too may lie down and sleep for a while; but it never lasts: he grows used to his comfort, tires of it, and demands more. In man, appetite is not appeased by food; it comes with eating. That may seem absurd; it is the plain truth.

And the fact that those who complain most are almost always those who would have the most reason to declare themselves satisfied clearly proves that happiness is not bound up with the number of our needs and the eagerness with which we cultivate them. It is in everyone's interest to take this truth to heart. Whoever fails to do so, whoever does not manage by a vigorous act of will to limit their demands, runs the risk of starting, without noticing it, down the slope of desire.

The man who lives to eat, drink, sleep, dress, take his walks, in short, to give himself everything he can give himself, be it the parasite lying in the sun, the workman who drinks, the bourgeois who serves his belly, the woman absorbed in her wardrobe, the pleasure-seeker of low degree or the pleasure-seeker of high standing, or simply the common epicurean, a good fellow but too obedient to material needs, that man, we say, has started down the slope of desire, and that slope is fatal. Those who go down it obey the same laws as bodies rolling down an inclined plane. Prey to an illusion that is forever reborn, they say to themselves: "A few more steps, the last ones, toward that object over there which draws our craving... Then we shall stop." But the momentum they have gathered carries them on. The further they go, the less they can resist it.

That is the secret of the agitation, the frenzy, of many of our contemporaries. Having condemned their will to be the slave of their appetites, they reap the punishment of their own deeds. They are given over to savage desires, implacable as wild beasts, which eat their flesh, grind their bones, drink their blood, and are never sated. I am not indulging in lofty moralizing here; I am listening to life speak and noting in passing a few of the truths whose echo every crossroads repeats to us.

Has drunkenness, for all its inventiveness in new drinks, found a way to quench thirst? No; one could rather call it the art of keeping thirst alive and making it unquenchable. Does debauchery blunt the sting of the senses? No; it inflames it, and turns natural desire into a morbid obsession, a fixed idea. Let your needs rule and keep feeding them, and you will see them multiply like insects in the sun. The more you have given them, the more they demand. He is a fool who seeks happiness in material comfort alone. He might as well undertake to fill the barrel of the Danaids. Those who have millions lack millions; those who have thousands lack thousands. Others lack twenty-franc pieces or hundred-sou coins. When they have a chicken in the pot, they ask for a goose; when they have the goose, they would like a turkey, and so on. No one will ever know how disastrous this tendency is. There are too many humble people who want to imitate the great, too many workmen who ape the bourgeois, too many girls of the people who play the young lady, too many petty clerks who play at being clubmen and sportsmen, and, in the comfortable and wealthy classes, too many people who forget that what they possess could serve a better purpose than granting themselves every sort of pleasure, only to find afterward that one never has enough. Our needs, which ought to be our servants, have become a turbulent, undisciplined crowd, a legion of petty tyrants. Someone enslaved to their needs can best be compared to a bear with a ring through its nose, led about and made to dance at will. The comparison is not flattering, but admit that it is true. It is by their needs that so many people are dragged along, people who bustle about, shout, and talk of freedom, of progress, and of who knows what else. They cannot take a single step in life without asking themselves whether it might displease their masters. How many men and women have gone, little by little, as far as dishonesty, for the sole reason that they had too many needs and could not resign themselves to living simply! In the cells of Mazas there are a good many boarders who could tell us a great deal about the danger of overly demanding needs.

Let me tell you the story of a good man I knew. He loved his wife and children tenderly, and he lived in France on his work in pleasant comfort, which was far from enough, however, for his wife's luxurious needs. Always short of money, when with a little simplicity he could have lived amply, he ended by expatriating himself to a distant colony, where he earns a great deal of money, leaving his family behind in the mother country. I do not know what the poor man must think out there; but his family have a finer apartment, finer clothes, and a semblance of a carriage. And for the moment their contentment is extreme. But they will soon be used to this luxury, which is, after all, rudimentary. Before long Madame will find her furniture shabby and her carriage a poor affair. If this man loves his wife, as there is no reason to doubt, he will emigrate to the moon for a bigger salary. Elsewhere the roles are reversed: it is the wife and children who are sacrificed to the voracious needs of the head of the family, whose irregular life, gambling, and so many other costly follies make him forget his duties. Between his appetites and his role as a father, he has decided for the former, and slowly he is drifting toward the basest selfishness.

This forgetting of all dignity, this gradual numbing of noble feelings, is not seen only among the pleasure-seekers of the comfortable classes. The man of the people is affected too. I know many a small household where happiness could reign, but where you would see a poor mother who has nothing but toil and grief day and night, children without shoes, and often grave worries about bread. Why? Because the father needs too much money. To speak only of spending on alcohol, everyone knows the proportions it has reached over the past twenty years. The sums swallowed up by this abyss are fabulous: twice the ransom of the war of 1870. How many legitimate needs could have been satisfied with what has been thrown as fodder to artificial needs? The reign of needs is not the reign of solidarity; quite the contrary. The more things a man needs for himself, the less he can do for his neighbor, even for those bound to him by ties of blood.

Less happiness, less independence, less moral delicacy, and even weaker feelings of solidarity: such is the result of the reign of needs. One could add a multitude of other drawbacks, not the least of which is the undermining of the public fortune and the public health. Societies with excessive needs become absorbed in the present; they sacrifice to it the conquests of the past and offer up the future on its altar. After us, the deluge! To raze the forests for money, to eat one's wheat while it is still green, to destroy in a day the fruit of long labor, to burn one's furniture to keep warm, to burden the future with debts to make the present moment pleasant, to live by expedients and sow for tomorrow difficulties, sickness, ruin, envy, and rancor... one would never finish if one tried to list all the misdeeds of this disastrous regime.

If, on the contrary, we keep to simple needs, we avoid all these drawbacks and replace them with a multitude of advantages. It is an old story that sobriety and temperance are the best guardians of health. They spare those who practice them many of the miseries that sadden existence; they ensure them health, a love of action, and intellectual balance. Whether it is a matter of food, clothing, or housing, simplicity of taste is, moreover, a source of independence and security. The more simply you live, the better you safeguard your future. You are less at the mercy of surprises and of adverse turns of luck. An illness or a period without work is not enough to throw you out on the street. A change of situation, even a considerable one, does not unseat you. Having simple needs, you find it less painful to adapt to the chances of fortune. You will remain a man even if you lose your position or your income, because the foundation on which your life rests is neither your table, nor your cellar, nor your stable, nor your furniture, nor your money. You will not behave in adversity like a baby whose rattle or bottle has been taken away. Stronger, better armed for the struggle, offering your adversary's hands less to grip, like those who wear their hair cropped short, you will also be more useful to your neighbor. You will not arouse his jealousy, his base appetites, or his censure by the display of your luxury, the iniquity of your spending, or the spectacle of a parasitic existence; and, being less demanding about your own well-being, you will keep the means to work for that of others.

Translator's notes

The Danaids: in Greek myth, the daughters of Danaus, condemned to fill a leaking vessel forever. Mazas: a prison in Paris.

The war of 1870: the Franco-Prussian War, after which France paid Germany an indemnity of five billion francs.