Kate Barber

The Need to be Needed grew out of years of conversations between me and my dad.

We kept circling the same question: why do so many people feel disconnected, unmotivated, or quietly empty in a world that is safer, easier, and more comfortable than ever before? My dad, Jerry Barber, had been thinking about this for a long time—about evolution, culture, and the ways modern life has stripped people of meaningful roles. He kept coming back to one simple idea: human beings don’t just want to belong. We want to be needed.

I started writing to make sense of that idea—first in notes, then in long conversations, then in late-night drafts that tried to connect science to real life. What began as his insight slowly became a framework shaped by my own experience. This book is the result of that shared thinking, filtered through my life and grounded in biology, psychology, and observation.

I didn’t write The Need to Be Needed as a self-help book. I wrote it because the explanation most of us are given—try harder, be more independent, focus on yourself—never fully matched what I saw in real people. Meaning doesn’t come from standing alone. It comes from responsibility, from being relied on, from knowing that what you do actually matters to someone else.

The places I’ve lived this most clearly are ordinary ones.

I’m a middle school science teacher in South Carolina, where I watch students change when they’re trusted with real responsibility—and shut down when they feel irrelevant. I’m a mother of two, which has taught me that purpose isn’t abstract; it’s built through showing up, again and again, when someone counts on you. And I’m a recovering addict, which gave me a hard, honest education in what happens when connection and purpose disappear—and how healing begins when they return.

This book exists because of all of that. Because of a father who asked better questions than most. Because of a life that tested those questions in real ways. And because I believe that belonging isn’t something we discover by looking inward—it’s something that grows when our lives become necessary to one another again.