Nobody Needs This

• Introduction
• Need is not an Objective and Uniform Quantity
• Preferences do not Require External Justification
• Time, Effort and Comfort are Parts of Life
• Unnecessary Things are Often Where New Things Begin
• The private laboratory is still a laboratory
• The Argument is Applied Selectively
• Harm is a Legitimate Question; Need is Usually not
• You Can Still Live Without It is Too Low a Standard
• Other Peoples Lives are not Optimisation Problems
• A Society Should Provide Room, not a Single Approved Life

Introduction

One of the stranger arguments used in favour of restrictions is the claim that the restricted object, activity or service is not important anyways because “nobody needs it”. It appears in discussions about everything from vehicles and tools to communication systems, entertainment, travel, clothing, food, privacy and access to information. Sometimes the proposed restriction is only a tax or an additional administrative burden, sometimes it is a licensing requirement and sometimes it approaches an outright prohibition. In all these cases the same reassuring sentence can be heard: the restriction is not a serious problem because nobody really needs the affected thing anyway.

This argument may initially sound reasonable because it presents the restriction as harmless. Something indispensable is not being taken away, or so the argument goes; only an unnecessary luxury, an eccentric hobby or some obscure technical possibility is affected. Yet this reasoning contains a much larger and more dangerous assumption: somebody has appointed themselves to decide which parts of other people’s lives are necessary, and therefore worthy of being available, and which parts may be made expensive, difficult or impossible without anything meaningful being lost.

The problem begins with the word “need”. Human beings have remarkably few strict material needs. We need some amount of food, water, protection from lethal environmental conditions. Even many things commonly regarded as necessities are not necessities in the narrowest possible sense. Nobody needs a bed because a sleeping bag or a pile of blankets can prevent death during the night. Nobody needs a house because a sufficiently good tent can provide shelter. Nobody needs a varied diet because some inexpensive combination of staple foods can provide enough calories and nutrients to survive. Nobody needs a chair because sitting on the floor is possible, nobody needs a washing machine because clothes can be washed by hand and nobody needs heating in every room if enough warm clothing is available.

Nobody needs a bicycle because it is possible to walk. Nobody needs a car because one could walk, cycle, wait for public transport or simply refrain from travelling to places that are difficult to reach. Nobody needs a train when a bus could perform approximately the same task and nobody needs a bus when sufficiently determined people could travel on foot. Nobody needs a smartphone because fixed telephone lines, letters and public notice boards existed before it. Nobody needs a computer because calculations can be performed on paper and nobody needs paper because information was once transmitted orally. Nobody needs books because stories can be remembered, nobody needs musical instruments because people can sing, and nobody needs recorded music because silence is not fatal.

The same reduction can be applied to practically every pleasant, useful or culturally significant part of life. There is no need for food beyond a nutritionally sufficient selection of cheap ingredients. There is no need for coffee, tea, chocolate, spices, cakes, restaurants or the cultivation of hundreds of varieties of fruit and vegetables. There is no need for beautiful clothes when a few durable and shapeless garments would provide sufficient protection from the weather. There is no need for jewellery, paintings, gardens, toys, cameras, telescopes, aquariums, model railways, sports equipment or musical recordings. There is no need to travel for pleasure, to decorate a room, to own more than one cup or to choose between different colours of paint.

Once “need” is interpreted as physical necessity, nearly the whole of civilisation turns out to be unnecessary.

This is not a useful discovery about civilisation. It is evidence that mere necessity is the wrong criterion by which to judge it. Civilisation consists to a considerable extent of things that are not strictly required for survival. The purpose of social and technological development has never been merely to keep human organisms alive with the smallest possible expenditure of resources. It has been to give people more possibilities: to reduce effort, increase comfort, overcome distance, communicate more freely, explore interests, express themselves, care for one another and build lives that differ from those of their neighbours.

A bed is not valuable because sleeping on the floor would otherwise be impossible. It is valuable because comfort matters. A bicycle is not valuable because walking is impossible. It is valuable because time and range matter. A smartphone is not valuable because communication without it is impossible. It is valuable because convenient access to people and information matters. Spices do not have to prevent starvation to enrich a meal and a garden does not have to produce the maximum possible number of calories to be worth cultivating.

Need is not an Objective and Uniform Quantity

Even if one wanted to distinguish needs from mere preferences, the distinction would not be as simple as its casual use suggests. People have different bodies, abilities, professions, responsibilities, environments and interests. Something that appears redundant from the outside may solve a very real problem for the person using it.

A car may look unnecessary to somebody living beside an underground station, working in an office and buying groceries at a nearby supermarket. It may be essential in practice to a person living in a rural area, transporting equipment, working irregular hours or caring for relatives in several locations. A smartphone may appear to be a luxury until it is used as an accessibility device, a navigation aid, a medical interface or the only practical connection to a distant family. An unusually specialised tool may be pointless to almost everybody and still be indispensable to the few people who repair a particular machine. A powerful computer may be entertainment equipment in one household and a scientific instrument in another.

It is rarely possible to infer the value of an object from its appearance, and it is even less possible to infer its value from the fact that most people would not personally buy it. Majorities naturally regard many minority interests as unnecessary because a minority interest is, by definition, something most people do not share. Most people do not need laboratory equipment, amateur-radio transmitters, climbing gear, weaving looms, large-format cameras, specialist software, obscure books or replacement components for thirty-year-old machines. The people who do need or value them are nevertheless real people, and their interests do not become meaningless merely because they are statistically uncommon.

The sentence “nobody needs this” therefore very often means something quite different: “I do not need this, and I cannot immediately imagine the life of somebody who does”. That is not a factual assessment of necessity. It is a failure of imagination converted into a political argument.

Preferences do not Require External Justification

There is also no reason why a person should have to demonstrate that something is necessary before being allowed to obtain or use it. If an activity does not impose an unacceptable burden on others, personal preference is already a sufficient reason. A person may prefer a bicycle even though walking is possible. They may prefer a fountain pen even though a cheap ballpoint pen writes. They may want a particular computer because experimenting with it is enjoyable, wear elaborate clothes because they like their appearance or cultivate flowers that cannot be eaten.

The demand for an objectively valid need reverses the proper relationship between individuals and institutions. A free person does not normally have to submit an application explaining why a harmless choice should be permitted. Restrictions require justification; ordinary choices do not. The person proposing a prohibition, a discriminatory tax or an administrative obstacle should have to identify the concrete harm being prevented. The affected person should not have to prove that their interest is serious enough to survive somebody else’s inspection.

This distinction matters because “need” is an almost infinitely flexible criterion. If the possibility of an inferior substitute is enough to show that something is unnecessary, then nearly everything can be restricted. A person does not need private transport because public transport exists. They do not need private communication because they can speak in public. They do not need encryption because they have nothing that must be secret. They do not need a particular book because other books remain available. They do not need to visit a distant country because photographs exist. They do not need a large home because a smaller one contains enough physical space to survive.

The argument never reaches a natural stopping point. Every human activity can be replaced by a less convenient, less comfortable, less expressive or less capable alternative until only bare subsistence remains. If this reasoning is accepted, the remaining question is not whether arbitrary restrictions are legitimate but merely who is permitted to impose their preferred definition of an adequate life upon everybody else.

Time, Effort and Comfort are Parts of Life

The “nobody needs it” argument also treats inconvenience as though it had no cost. A person can walk instead of cycling, wash clothes by hand, cook every ingredient from its raw state, repair everything with primitive tools and travel for hours to avoid using a nearby service that has been restricted. None of these alternatives necessarily makes survival impossible. They merely consume time and effort.

But a human life consists of a finite amount of time and effort. Saving an hour is not an irrelevant luxury simply because losing that hour would not kill anybody. A tool that reduces a repetitive task from two hours to ten minutes gives its user part of their life back. A vehicle that makes a distant place reachable creates practical possibilities that theoretically being able to walk there does not. A comfortable bed may improve sleep, health and the ability to work during the following day even though an uncomfortable bed would also prevent death.

Convenience is sometimes discussed as if it were a morally suspicious desire. In reality, much of technological progress is organised convenience. Running water is more convenient than carrying buckets. Refrigeration is more convenient than purchasing food every day. Electric lighting is more convenient than arranging all activity around daylight. Computers are more convenient than performing calculations manually. Each convenience releases time, attention and physical energy for something else.

The fact that people managed without something in the past does not show that they should be made to manage without it now. Earlier generations also managed with higher infant mortality, exhausting manual labour, slower communication and much more limited access to knowledge. Human adaptability proves that people can endure deprivation; it does not transform deprivation into a desirable policy.

Unnecessary Things are Often Where New Things Begin

Many useful developments begin as unnecessary experiments. Early computers were not needed by ordinary households. The first cameras, aircraft, radio transmitters, 3D printers and personal computers were expensive curiosities with limited immediate applications. A person judging them only by established needs could easily have concluded that society already had adequate ways to calculate, communicate, travel and manufacture objects.

New applications are discovered because people are allowed to experiment before they can prove the final utility of what they are doing. Hobbyists learn technologies that later become professionally relevant. Artists misuse technical equipment in ways its designers did not anticipate. Researchers combine instruments intended for unrelated purposes. Small communities preserve knowledge and equipment that larger organisations have abandoned. Repairs, adaptations and inventions are often performed with objects that would look unnecessary to an administrator evaluating only their most common use.

Demanding a recognised need before permitting access therefore favours the existing world over every possible future world. Established uses can defend themselves because their value is already known. Experiments cannot do so because their purpose is to discover value that is not known yet. A society that permits only what can already be justified by conventional needs may remain functional for some time, but it gradually loses the conditions under which unusual ideas and new practices emerge.

This does not mean that every eccentric product will become important. Most will not. That is precisely why no central authority can reliably select the successful ones in advance. Exploration requires the freedom to try things that may turn out to be useless. The possibility of failure is not an unfortunate defect of innovation; it is an unavoidable property of searching through possibilities whose value is not yet known.

The Private Laboratory is Still a Laboratory

The claim that nobody needs this becomes particularly troublesome when it is applied to scientific and technical equipment. Laser diodes, optical filters, vacuum pumps, photodetectors, high-voltage supplies, methanol, sulfuric acid, laboratory glassware, radio-frequency components and countless other specialist products are unnecessary to most people. That is hardly surprising. Most people are not building spectrometers, repairing optical instruments, testing vacuum systems, preparing chemical samples or developing unconventional measurement techniques in their spare time.

But “most people do not need it” is not the same statement as “nobody needs it”. A laser diode may be a meaningless little component to one person and the central light source of another persons interferometer, fluorescence experiment, optical communication system, leak detector or home-built microscope. Methanol may be merely a toxic liquid to somebody who has never entered a laboratory, while somebody else uses it as a solvent, fuel, cleaning agent, reference material or part of a chemical process. Sulfuric acid may be associated primarily with dramatic accident reports, but it is also used in batteries, electrochemistry, etching, sample preparation, chemical synthesis and numerous perfectly ordinary technical procedures.

The fact that these materials can be dangerous is a legitimate reason for suitable packaging, labelling, storage rules and restrictions of buyable amounts proportionate to their actual risks. It is also perfectly legitimate to ask what a person needs it for and check for plausibility where an item poses a substantial intrinsic hazard to a third party. It is not a reason to pretend that they have no legitimate private use. Risk and need are separate questions. A substance does not become harmless because an officially recognised profession needs it, and it does not become illegitimate because a private person needs it for an experiment rather than for commercial production. A litre in a home laboratory, a tanker load at an industrial plant and an unrestricted sale to children are not the same situation and should not be discussed as though they were.

When somebody says that private individuals do not need laser diodes, laboratory chemicals or vacuum equipment, what they often mean is that private individuals are not expected to perform experiments requiring them. This turns into circular reasoning remarkably quickly. Private experimentation is declared unrealistic because individuals supposedly have no legitimate reason to obtain laboratory equipment, and their inability to obtain laboratory equipment is then presented as evidence that serious experimentation belongs exclusively inside established institutions.

This view ignores a substantial and valuable population of hobby scientists, amateur astronomers, radio amateurs, electronics developers, independent researchers, instrument builders, restorers and simply curious people. Some are highly qualified professionals pursuing a different subject outside their employment. Some are students learning through projects that no course has assigned to them. Some are retired engineers or scientists who have not lost their knowledge merely because they no longer have an institutional purchasing department. Others begin without formal credentials and acquire considerable expertise precisely because components and materials are available to experiment with.

The boundary between professional and amateur science is not a boundary between real and imaginary science. It usually describes employment and institutional affiliation, not the quality of a person’s reasoning or measurements. A badly planned experiment does not become good because it is performed at a university, while a carefully constructed instrument does not become a toy because it stands in a cellar, garage or living room.

A particularly striking example is the development of photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM). Eric Betzig and Harald Hess built the first PALM microscope in Hess’s living room in La Jolla. Both were unemployed at the time, and Hess still possessed some equipment from his earlier work at Bell Laboratories. Their improvised private laboratory nevertheless produced an important super-resolution microscopy technique. Betzig later shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. In his Nobel biography he describes the arrangement quite plainly: the first PALM microscope was built in Harald Hess’s living room. The account is available in Betzig’s official Nobel Prize biography.

This example should not be misunderstood as an argument that every private experiment will produce Nobel Prize-winning work. Of course it will not, just as almost no experiment performed in an institutional laboratory will receive a Nobel Prize. Its relevance is that the value of an experiment cannot be inferred from the postal address at which it is performed. Had somebody examined two unemployed researchers buying laser components and asked whether they really needed them, the honest answer would have depended entirely on whether that person understood an experiment that did not yet exist.

Nor should access to scientific equipment be defended only by searching for exceptional success stories. A home-built spectrometer does not have to transform microscopy to justify its existence. An experiment may be worthwhile because its builder learns something, verifies a published result, repairs an old instrument, teaches other people, develops a useful technique or simply experiences the pleasure of understanding a physical phenomenon directly. We do not demand that every privately owned musical instrument produce a famous composer, and we should not demand that every privately owned laser or vacuum chamber produce a Nobel laureate.

There is a broader social value in retaining scientific and technical capability outside large institutions. Knowledge is more resilient when it is distributed. Old techniques survive because somebody continues to use them after commercial and academic attention has moved elsewhere. Instruments that manufacturers no longer support remain operable because independent people investigate them. Unusual ideas can be tested without first convincing a funding agency, employer or committee that the outcome will be useful. Students can learn by actually constructing something rather than merely observing equipment that they are not permitted to touch.

Many experiments require materials that appear unrelated when viewed individually. A person building an optical instrument may need lasers, solvents, adhesives, precision mechanics, electronic components, optical glass, vacuum fittings and chemicals for cleaning or sample preparation. An administrator considering each purchase in isolation may find every item unnecessary because the purpose lies in the combination. This is another reason why outsiders are poorly positioned to evaluate need: they see a bottle, diode or pump, while the experimenter sees a measurement chain.

It is reasonable to regulate genuine hazards according to concentration, quantity, storage conditions, competence where this is actually relevant (though the formal requirements should not be set too high or hard to achieve), and the credible consequences of misuse. It is not reasonable to replace risk assessment with social classification, under which industrial users are assumed to possess legitimate purposes while private users are assumed to have none. Companies can be careless, institutions can make mistakes, and private experimenters can be highly competent. The name printed on the delivery address is not a physical safety property.

A society that regards scientific equipment as something ordinary people should neither possess nor understand gradually turns science into a spectator activity. Citizens are then encouraged to admire technology, purchase finished products and trust authorised experts, but not to investigate, reproduce, modify or build anything themselves. This may create tidy administrative categories, but it weakens the technical culture on which science, engineering, repair and informed public discussion depend.

Nobody needs a laser diode in the same sense that nobody needs a telescope, a musical instrument or a box of electronic components. Yet somebody may need that particular diode to measure a spectrum, transmit information, capture particles, build a microscope or test an idea that nobody else has considered. The person dismissing it as unnecessary usually does not know which of these things is being attempted. More importantly, it is not their experiment and not their decision to make.

The Argument is Applied Selectively

It is also noticeable that calls to restrict unnecessary things are rarely based on a consistent commitment to austere living. The people making them usually own many things that are not strictly needed. They may live in houses larger than the minimum required for shelter, eat food selected for flavour, travel for pleasure, purchase decorative objects, use entertainment devices and replace functioning products with newer ones. Their own preferences are experienced as ordinary parts of life, while unfamiliar preferences are more readily classified as dispensable luxuries.

This asymmetry is understandable at a psychological level. We know the small practical and emotional reasons for our own choices, while somebody else’s choice is visible only as an object. We know why our particular chair, vehicle, computer, holiday or hobby matters to us. When looking at another person’s equipment, we may see only unnecessary consumption. The appropriate conclusion is not that everybody should become better at judging strangers needs. It is that such judgements should carry little authority.

A society containing many different ways of living will necessarily contain activities that each individual considers pointless. One person sees no purpose in sports cars, another in gaming computers, another in expensive kitchens, another in musical instruments, another in travel, another in football stadiums, another in private gardens and another in collecting old machines. If the absence of personal understanding were enough to justify restrictions, everybody could construct a convincing list of things that other people should lose. The combined result would not be a rational society stripped of waste. It would be a society in which nearly every interest is suppressed by the indifference of those who do not share it.

Tolerance does not mean approving of every preference. It means accepting that other people do not require our approval for harmless choices.

Harm is a Legitimate Question; Need is Usually not

Of course, rejecting the “nobody needs it” argument does not imply that every object or activity must be allowed without any conditions. Some activities create substantial risks or impose costs on other people. Heavier vehicles require rules because collisions can injure others. Industrial processes may release pollutants. Weapons, some hazardous chemicals (please not the basics like sulfric acid or methanole) can create risks beyond the owners property. Scarce public space may have to be allocated and infrastructure has to be financed somehow.

But these are arguments about harm, risk, external costs and the use of shared resources. They should be stated and examined as such. If a vehicle creates dangerous emissions, the relevant questions concern the magnitude of those emissions, the resulting harm and the effectiveness and proportionality of possible remedies. If a device interferes with communication systems, the relevant matter is interference. If an activity consumes a scarce communal resource, the discussion concerns allocation and cost.

“Nobody needs it” contributes nothing to this analysis. An unnecessary activity can be harmless, while a necessary activity can be extremely harmful. Food production is necessary and still requires environmental and safety rules. Decorative painting is unnecessary and usually requires little public concern. Necessity neither proves innocence nor establishes guilt.

Keeping these questions separate improves regulation. It forces restrictions to address an identifiable problem and makes it possible to ask whether a less intrusive solution exists. Perhaps emissions can be limited without banning a whole class of machines. Perhaps users can pay for a genuinely measurable infrastructure cost without being discouraged merely because their activity is unpopular. Perhaps safety can be improved through technical standards rather than a licensing procedure that effectively excludes private users. Once the discussion is framed around a concrete harm, evidence and proportionality become possible. Once it is framed around supposed need, the discussion becomes a contest over whose life choices deserve recognition.

There may be exceptional situations in which essential uses deserve priority. During a severe shortage, medicine may reasonably receive resources before decorative manufacturing. Emergency vehicles may receive priority on roads. Basic household energy consumption may be protected differently from extremely large discretionary consumption during a supply crisis. But priority for urgent needs is not the same as a general authority to suppress everything considered nonessential. An exceptional allocation problem should not be converted into a permanent philosophy of everyday life.

You Can Still Live Without It is Too Low a Standard

Restrictions are often defended by pointing out that the affected people can continue living without the restricted option. This establishes very little. People can remain alive under a great many unpleasant, limiting and humiliating conditions. The standard for a decent society cannot be that every interference is acceptable unless it directly prevents biological survival.

A restriction can be serious because it eliminates a hobby around which somebody has built a community. It can be serious because it makes an independent life impractical for a person with unusual circumstances. It can be serious because it removes access to information, prevents experimentation, consumes limited income through compliance costs or forces people to request permission for ordinary conduct. None of these consequences has to be fatal to be relevant.

Small restrictions also accumulate. One fee may appear negligible, one permit may appear easy to obtain, one prohibited product may appear obscure and one discontinued service may affect only a few people. But a life is composed of many such details. If each restriction is assessed only in isolation and dismissed because nobody absolutely needs the affected choice, it becomes possible to construct an extremely narrow society through thousands of individually “minor” limitations.

The same reasoning particularly disadvantages people with little money, little institutional influence or unusual requirements. Wealthy people can often substitute another product, hire assistance, travel to another jurisdiction or absorb a new fee. Others cannot. A regulation described as harmless because alternatives technically exist may in practice reserve the activity for those able to navigate its obstacles.

Other Peoples Lives are not Optimisation Problems

Behind the language of necessity there is often an image of society as an optimisation problem. Resources should be directed toward useful purposes, unnecessary consumption should be removed and everyone should use the most efficient adequate solution. This may be appropriate when designing a tightly specified technical system. It is a poor model for human life.

There is no single objective function shared by everybody. One person wants more free time, another a larger workshop, another a quiet home, another the ability to travel, another an elaborate garden and another access to every obscure piece of information they can find. These goals cannot be reduced to a universal ranking without somebodys preferences being treated as authoritative.

Efficiency itself depends on the chosen objective. A small apartment may be efficient as shelter and unsuitable as a workshop, library, social space or home for several animals. A bus may be efficient in energy per passenger and inefficient for a journey involving several remote destinations and heavy equipment. Basic food may be efficient in calories per euro and a miserable basis for hospitality, culture or enjoyment. Objects cannot be classified as efficient or wasteful independently of the life in which they are used.

This is one reason decentralised choice is so important. Individuals possess detailed knowledge of their own circumstances that no distant observer has: which inconveniences matter, which risks they accept, which interests sustain them, which tools might help and which pleasures make expenditure worthwhile. They may make mistakes, as everybody does, but the possibility of error does not give strangers superior knowledge or a general claim to command them.

A Society Should Provide Room, not a Single Approved Life

The strongest objection to the “nobody needs this” argument is ultimately not about any particular product. It is about the kind of society implied by the argument.

A pluralistic society does not exist merely because people hold different opinions. It exists because people are permitted to construct materially different lives. They read different books, use different tools, travel in different ways, build different homes, pursue obscure interests, communicate through different systems and spend their resources on things that others might never choose. Diversity requires practical room. It cannot survive if every uncommon choice must first pass a test of necessity administered according to majority preferences.

This does not create an unlimited entitlement to harm others or consume shared resources without restraint. It creates a presumption that peaceful choices belong to the people making them. When intervention is proposed, its justification should identify a real conflict with the rights, safety or resources of others. Disapproval, unfamiliarity and the existence of a more primitive substitute are not enough.

Nobody needs a painting. Nobody needs a telescope. Nobody needs a garden containing flowers rather than potatoes. Nobody needs a fast computer, a soft bed, an elegant coat, a collection of old radios or a journey taken only to see what lies elsewhere. Nobody needs to write a novel, climb a mountain, restore an obsolete machine or prepare a meal that takes three hours when something edible could be heated in ten minutes.

And yet these unnecessary things are not marginal leftovers surrounding the serious business of human existence. Taken together, they are much of what human existence is for.

The question should therefore not be whether somebody else needs the things they value. The question should be whether there is a concrete and sufficient reason to interfere with them. If there is no such reason, their preference does not require our understanding, our approval or our certification of necessity.

They want it. That is reason enough.

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