What are the basic human needs according to psychology? What are the consequences of not meeting these needs?

Intellectual growth will always come from exploration and trying. We can all grow intellectually and we are driven to make the effort. You can, of course, avoid it and become despondent, or you can accept the reality that seeking intellectual growth is a fundamental need then work toward experiencing the positive feedback loop that will then be self-perpetuating.

As soon as we have habits in place to manage our survival needs, we find ourselves unable to actually relax. Instead, we find that we are bored. And boredom is the prime signal for the other set of drives we all experience as soon as our basic survival needs are met with some ease. This other set of drives are our intellectual drives.

Curiosity, for example, is how our mind tells us what we might enjoy something intellectually. If you feel like you might want to learn to play a musical instrument, that is equivalent to the positive aroma of foods you love, suggesting something you will almost certainly enjoy experiencing more intensely. Likewise, if you enjoy mathematics, philosophy, psychology, physics - or building things, or dancing, or snowboarding. These things, even when they are seemingly physical, have intellectual components that are connected to the intellectual drive within all of us.

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But freeing it for what purpose?

If all that was not enough, another significant hurdle exists.

Moreover, make no mistake, the mind wants to help us to both recognize and understand our intellectual drive, if we pay attention.

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Your query used the word “needs” but I would expand that to the term motivations. Motivations are not just your innate drives - as will be seen below. You can think of these motivations as forces within you, simultaneously existing, fluctuating, and competing within you at all times, tugging you into sometimes opposing directions to encourage you to act in various ways.

Of course, it is always your life, your choices; to each their own. :) As Eddie Vedder so appropriately wrote and sang:

As an aside, while we cannot change the coding elements of our DNA, the regulatory elements of our DNA are changed by our actions. For men, at least, those regulatory DNA are also passed to on to our children. You won’t find me quoting the Bible often, but “the sins of the father” actually may be true as male sperm is constantly being replenished, allowing the DNA of those sperm to reflect regulatory changes in our DNA throughout our lives. Somewhat curiously, women are born with all their eggs formed, such that changes to regulatory DNA throughout their lives would not be passed to their children through regulatory DNA. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering why this would be true….

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Drinking is a big one, smoking pot, other recreational drugs as well, but there are many more ways of muting this growing frustration (zanax anyone?), even though the mind is constantly trying to avoid having itself muted. However, we clever humans are good at creating and consuming more and more new mute buttons in support of our distractions.

However, unlike survival drives, you have to go through more effort before intellectual explorations lead to significant rewards the intellectual drive is willing to impart. Creating poetry isn’t like sex, or eating food, both of which are almost immediately physiologically gratifying. It is an entirely different category of joy.

So, just like the unconscious mind tells us which foods we should eat through cravings (the conscious mind tells us what we want; the unconscious tells us what we need - know the difference), it also tells us which things we should explore intellectually, through the experience of curiosity. Of course, as already mentioned, some of those things will take lots of time and effort to explore. You may have to wait years for developmental changes to arise and re-stimulate your mind in an area you were curious about as a child. You may love physics, but that may mean you have to develop your mathematical abilities to experience the joy exploring physics can provide, or you mind just needs to grow in complexity over time, so you are able to explore…somewhere down the road. Always pay attention to your curiosity; do not let yourself forget. Curiosity is a signpost of one possible future.

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While there are certainly dangers and pitfalls to not meeting your survival needs - your basic needs - there are plenty of obstacles in the way even after your survival needs are met.

Ultimately, you have to learn to pay attention to what is happening within yourself and figure it out on your own. I am not saying there is no value to considering the thoughts of another, but ultimately, you have to compare what others suggest to what you observe within yourself and see if it rings true for you. Every person is unique in their needs, so another’s assertions about these things will not apply with equal weight to everyone.

And hey, we have nothing but time (until it is gone), so why not spend it doing what will eventually snowball into a rewarding experience of life.

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Oh - and now let me suggest to you why, what I just described concerning the experience and enhancement of intellectual drives almost never happens for most people in their lives. Because if you do observe humanity generally there are relatively few people feeling, much less satisfying, their intellectual drive. What I just described is not what most people are doing with their lives. People do not meet their foundational survival needs, then immediately explore their intellectual needs - do they?

Why does the mind need to be free of these persistent worries associated with survival needs? Why are we driven to create habits than meet our needs without conscious effort. The seemingly obvious reason is that then we can then relax and worry less, but that isn’t actually what happens.

This is why the author/poet Bukowski said he didn’t know if a poem he had written was good for 18 days. Of course, 18 was just an arbitrary number he picked to sound clever, but the reality is it takes a while to get past the euphoria of creating, where you can be objective about your efforts. This objective analysis period, when you are still building the foundations, is when most people give up. This happens, in part, because a lot of idiots out there, including many masquerading as teachers, only want innately talented students because a naturally talented student allows a teacher think they have done good work - despite that student never needing the teacher at all.

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So, habits. We eat regular meals, we rent a home, we go to work to earn money so we can buy food, we enter long term friendships and romantic relationships - all of which are habits that help us meet these persistent survival needs, freeing consciousness from constant worry. Of course, we are changing developmentally, so our needs are changing and sometimes our old habits are no longer serving our changing needs. This is something one should consider over time. Still, the point is to free the conscious mind.

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Anyway, these persons, motivated almost exclusively by ego, ignorance, and desires for power, are telling most everyone they should just lead a banal existence as beasts of burden for those in Power. They will use various arguments that encourage the average person to accept being a no-name employee at some soul-sucking company for fifty years; a company or career that rarely provides anything of genuine value in return. Until your mind begins to decline, making intellectual explorations much more difficult and finally, you are shipped off to a nursing home given the absolute minimum care to move you to the grave. Well, fuck that. Better to burn out, then to fade away.

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Eating is a need we have to satisfy, whether it makes money is beside the point. Intellectual growth is also a need and while we might not die if we don’t, we will become depressed, despondent, and feel as if our life has been wasted, often without knowing why we feel that way. Money is beside the point.

Notably, if you are not instantly talented at something about which you are curious, it doesn’t mean anything negative. It just requires a bit more work. Interestingly, your unconscious will give you positive feedback rather quickly, for these initial efforts, even when those efforts are objectively poor.

Still, I will give my two cents. Do with it what you will.

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But, just like we tend to immediately seek distractions from boredom, we have learned how to mute the growing frustration we experience from years of not responding properly to the intellectual drive. We have so many mute buttons.

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Now, distractions will not satisfy the needs boredom signals, so frustration from unsatisfied intellectual needs are still building up in the background. This frustration builds slowly over years, not immediately like hunger or thirst; primarily because our bodies place survival over the needs of the intellect. The intellectual drive is working the long game, giving us time to realize our errors, but also allowing frustration to build, and we do feel it. The mid-life crisis most people experience, is the first indication that building frustration.

I mean, if I said to you, “Damn, I’m hungry. I need to eat something.” Would you say - “Well, there’s no money in that.” Of course, you wouldn’t.

However, there are a lot of survival drives that more consistently press upon us, sometimes multiple times a day, and these are the ones that most of us think of as our survival drives - or our basic needs. These include a need to eat, to drink fluids, to eliminate waste, to obtain shelter from the elements and other similar dangers, a need for intimacy, which includes a need for different levels of intimacy, such as friendship, platonic forms of love, such as the love for our parents, children, friends, and then also, the need for more intimate forms of love we have within sexual or romantic relationships. When any of these survival needs are unsatisfied, we tend to feel a push to take relatively specific actions to obtain very specific things. We know these various specific needs will press upon us throughout life, occupying our time, so we tend to arrange our lives to meet these needs without too much effort, freeing us for other things. In other words, we form habits.

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Capitalism has thrived by providing distractions from the intellectual drive that boredom signals, and then muting the rising frustration that comes when the intellectual drive is ignored over time.

So, as posed, the query I sort of answer here, didn’t exactly get to the heart of the problem. Sometimes, we only have an inkling of the question that needs to be asked, but we are barking up the right tree.

It takes some intellectual work to obtain substantially consistent rewards from your intellectual efforts. Of course, you may have some area of particular talent associated with your intellectual curiosity. You may be able to just pick up a musical instrument and play it - or pick up a paint brush and paint something compelling, without going through the foundational steps others must push through. Nonetheless, there is a actually a danger in these natural talents, in that they will often get you immediate attention from others, and if you find yourself wanting that attention (a survival related drive, not an intellectual drive) soon you will be doing things for attention and not listening to where your mind wants you to go intellectually.

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So many students are abased by their teachers and give up before realizing their teachers were just idiots. Don’t let idiots deter you. If you are genuinely curious about something intellectual, then put in the work and the talent will almost always come eventually. True, it may take time for you mind to build the foundational connections needed for creative expression to flow, but it is worth the effort.

The consistency of these categories of persistent survival needs leads to us forming habits that meet these needs without occupying too much conscious thought. More generally, however, we seem to be trying to free our minds. Consider this…it is important.

Instead, most people, as soon as boredom hits them, look for a distraction from boredom, to make it go away, rather than feeding boredom’s hunger with what it really needs. This happens for many reasons. First, psychology hasn’t explained what I just explained because the field of psychology, frankly, is a mess. So everyone has to figure these things out for themselves, and those who do, aren’t always keen on finding the language to express their discovery to others, knowing others probably wouldn’t listen anyway.

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Interestingly, Capitalism actually started by providing us mostly with things that satisfy our survival needs, but once these were being met with relative ease, Capitalism had to find other ways to expand. So it expanded into the providing “distractions” and “mute buttons” business. Distractions prevent people from ever working on satisfying boredom in the ways needed to experience the positive feedback loop that comes with the joy of intellectual growth, and mute buttons dampen the effects of the frustration this creates.

Second, let’s say we overcome the initial hurdles. We are meeting our survival needs consistently, with habits that are responsive to our present state. And we realize the folly of just letting ourselves be distracted from our intellectual drive by all the things capitalism drives us toward.

With Capitalism constantly supplying new distractions and mute buttons, few people get past the gauntlet Capitalism lays down. For most people, the positive feedback loop never happens. They never realize the value to feeding boredom what it needs, instead avoiding it and muting their frustration at avoiding it.

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In addition to the ease of obtaining distractions from boredom, there are parents, teachers, professors, bosses, psychologists, philosophers, even friends, shitting on us all the time killing our confidence in ourselves.

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First, it isn’t important what psychology (psychology doesn’t actually think at all) or psychologists think. However, I do think it is important to understand one’s needs, but you cannot really understand those simply by being told what they might be by someone else, particularly when most people are clueless about the complexity of their needs so they will just give you bad information.

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However, what makes intellectual joys unique, and so positively reinforcing, for those who allow themselves to sink into them, is that there is almost no end to the joy they can provide. It is like a drug with no side effects, and no internal governor blocking the potential joy one can obtain. But it is also a drug that takes a much longer time and different kind of effort to create and experience within your own mind.

We normally think of survival needs as our basic drives. Survival drives are relatively easy to recognize because they almost always have some compelling physiological component related to them pushing us to take relatively specific actions. For example, we have a drive to breathe. This may not seem particularly obvious because most of the time we breathe without any effort, but find yourself in a room filled with smoke, or in the ocean with waves threatening to drown you and you will feel the impact of this drive rapidly and palpably. In both cases you will be internally pushed to escape (the room or the water) so the ease of breathing returns. These are the types of specific actions that survival drives push us toward. There are many survival drives similar in form to the need to breathe; things we only think about them when they haphazardly present themselves due to uncommon circumstances. Encounter a grizzly bear on a hike, and you will experience the need to flee or otherwise act to preserve your life.

These persons are often unwittingly telling us how incapable we are, encouraging us not to explore intellectually in response to boredom under the belief that only certain persons are capable of growth, and relatedly so focused on moneymaking they don’t realize they are encouraging intellectual starvation. There are entire philosophies, which have shockingly persisted, about the general ineptitude of humanity - thanks Plato and Nietzsche. Well, they are all wrong.

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Boredom is the mind’s hunger pushing each of us to explore our world for intellectual stimulation which will then impart a different kind of joy than our survival drives. Intellectual joy is less physiological, less physically palpable, and less specifically directed. Intellectual joys do not rise to the level of an orgasm, obviously, or even a really good slice of cake when we are hungry. However, once experienced with a bit of consistency, intellectual joys have the potential to create a positive feedback loop that overtakes the basic physiological rewards associated with survival drives, because all of our survival needs have governors - limitations. We cannot fuck or eat forever and still obtain the same joy experienced when we were horny or hungry. However, there is no practical limit to the exploration of music, mathematics, philosophy, physics, psychology, medicine, engineering, etc.

You might well feel elated at writing your first poem, or your first song, short story, or completing your first sketch. But a few days later, when the intellectual euphoria wears off, it is often followed by an objective analysis where you realize your efforts weren’t all that good after all. Then, you may wonder why it gave you such joy. Also, others might come in, and being more objective, they suggest that what you created isn’t all that good, which can be painfully deflating. Don’t let that get to you.

Well, we are still prone to seeking those distractions, even if we realize we shouldn’t. The physiological joy we get from satisfying survival needs is easier and more immediately palpable than the initial inklings of intellectual joy possible when one puts the time and effort into experiencing it. In other words, I can read a really interesting book, a novel, a book on physics or mathematics or…I could just fuck, masturbate, or eat a pie, or even watch a scary movie that gives me the thrill of escaping with my life (without actually having to go through the survival risks).

Imagine that you are in a room of people and they are all trying to get you to do various things, some more urgently than others, some even working together to gang up on you. Your motivations are like that, and there are relatively distinct categories of motivations. This brings us to the “basic human needs” you inquired about. This is the category I would describe as your survival needs.