Basic Needs and Quality of Life: What Impacts Well-being?
The notions of basic human needs and quality of life are interrelated: both are rooted in culture and cannot be understood without reference to the culture of a given society.
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| Basic Needs and Quality of Life |
The basic needs of early human beings were relatively few and simple: after many centuries of organic and cultural evolution, they have increased and acquired infinite complexity.
Basic needs are often understood as nutrition, shelter, and clothing.
This is a gross over-simplification. The Australian aborigines -- one of the most primitive surviving groups -- eke out their nutrition from nature, have only notional shelter, and can even do without clothing, but they also have a social organization and rituals emerging from their belief system... Human life is possible only within the framework of a society.
Thus, apart from the survival needs of nutrition, shelter, and clothing we also have to think of societal needs such as units that raise newborns and provide for their socialization, viable communities, consensus-building and conflict-resolving mechanisms, and sub-systems that exercise social control.
If you withdraw these you will find that social life will collapse and survival will become difficult. Culture enables humankind to adapt, to innovate, and to evolve new patterns of life.
But culture also creates new wants: even expectations regarding forms and variety in nutrition, shelter, and clothing are radically altered. Add to these psychic wants and aesthetic urges created by culture.
Human beings want a distinctive identity, they want opportunities for self-development and self-expression. Consider also the welfare needs. Can we leave the weak, the disabled, the handicapped, and the vulnerable to their fate? Even most primitive societies make some provisions for them; the expectations from modern civilized societies are greater.
The physical, social, and cultural environment undergoes continuous change.
Human individuals, groups, and societies must adapt to them. This gives rise to adaptive needs. Finally, mankind must find new ways of handling old and new problems; they have, thus, progress needs.
Let us briefly turn to the question of quality of life. As society developed, differences between the rich and the poor began to emerge. There were appreciable differences between the lifestyles and consumption levels of these classes. But how rich was the rich class, and how poor was the poor class?
Today there are the super-rich for whose consumption levels the sky is the limit, and the poor of the poor who find minimum needs for survival unobtainable. Relative affluence or poverty does make a difference in quality of life, but wealth should not be confused with happiness as it does not necessarily add to the richness of life.
A variety of factors may enter into the determination of the quality of life. How adequate and varied is the nutrition?
Is housing sufficient and does it meet the maximum standards of sanitation, ventilation, and sunshine? Does clothing offer the necessary protection and satisfaction for the craving for variety?
Even minimum needs now list access to preventive and curative medicine and to education. The supply of potable running water is considered essential. So is an efficient system of public transport, and leisure and entertainment needs have multiplied. Society has to undertake the responsibility of providing for gainful employment.
People must have reasonable freedom -- the absence of undue restraints and scope for the articulation of their individual and collective selves. All these attributes add up to a sizeable inventory of the attributes of quality of life.
But how do we define it? According to UNESCO 'Quality of Life' is an inclusive concept that covers all aspects of living including material satisfaction of vital needs as well as more transcendental aspects of life such as personal development, self-realization, and a healthy eco-system.
A more sophisticated definition is offered by Mallmann, who says:
It is a concept that refers to individuals but is determined, like aspirations, by the dynamic interaction between a given individual, his society, and his habitat.
Since it is determined by the satisfaction of aspirations, it ought to be analyzed by at least the same number of dimensions as those which make up the human space The number of dimensions of human space is determined by the minimum number of independent needs with which the particular set of aspirations of any individual may be explained.
Quality of life requirements and human needs, need to be considered together as they represent two sides of the same coin. In fact, quality of life requirements and human needs need to be considered together.
Adapted from "Basic Needs and Quality of Life", from Developmental Problems of Third World, 1988
The questions of basic human needs and quality of life cannot be separated from each other.. Basic human needs are nutrition, clothing, and shelter. But for quality of life, many more things have to be taken into consideration. Some of these are aesthetic urges, opportunities for self-development and self-expression. Then, for quality of life welfare and well-being needs have also to be taken into account.
Important Words:
notions: ideas or beliefs
inter-related: to be connected very closely to have an effect on each other
rooted: fixed
acquired: got, received
infinite: innumerable
nutrition: the process of providing and receiving food necessary for growth and development
aborigine: an inhabitant of a place, especially Australia, from a very early period.
primitive: uncultured, uncouth, uncivilized; of or relating to the earliest age or period.
eke out: to make a small supply of something last longer by adding something else.
rituals: actions that are always done at a fixed time
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