No such thing as need.

[devonin]

As for the topic itself, it's just petty semantics.

This is the correct statement of the thread.

Your hair-splitting with the claim that everything is a want because even something like "I need to breathe" isn't true because you could choose to instead not breathe and thus die is semantically correct, so congratulations on that?

However, if you've therefore classified absolutely everything as a "want" and not a "need" then we no longer have a method of distinguishing between things that we want in order to perpetuate our existance and things that we want in order to improve the quality of that existance.

Necesseties (of life) and Luxuries (for life) are the categories to which we attach the terms 'need' and 'want' and that is a very helpful and useful distinction even if you could semantically suggest that even needs are just a certain type of stronger want.

I mean if anything, one thing you do NEED to do in the sense of showing you that there are needs even if you classify everything as a want instead: For wants whose negative consequence is the cessation of your existance, you NEED to determine whether not fulfilling that want is worth the cessation of your existance. This is a process that absolutely must happen with 100% certainly, thus is a need.