We live in a world with more comfort, convenience, and choice than any generation before us—and yet so many people feel disconnected, unmotivated, and strangely empty.
Traditional self-help tells us to focus inward. Be more independent. Optimize your habits. Manage your mindset. And while those tools can help, they often miss something fundamental: human beings aren’t wired to thrive alone. We regulate, stabilize, and find meaning when what we do actually matters to someone else.
The Need to Be Needed explores why modern life can feel hollow despite success, safety, and freedom. Drawing on biology, neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience, the book centers an overlooked truth—that belonging isn’t a feeling we chase, but a consequence of being necessary. Of being relied on. Of having a role where effort changes something real.
This isn’t a book about fixing yourself.
It’s about understanding why “working on yourself” isn’t always enough.
Written by a teacher, mother, and recovering addict, The Need to Be Needed is shaped by years of lived experience—and by the vision of the author’s father, whose lifelong curiosity about evolution, culture, and human behavior helped spark the core idea behind the book. Through countless conversations and shared questions, his insight—that people stabilize and find meaning when they are needed—became the foundation this book builds upon.
If you’ve ever felt successful but unsatisfied, independent but lonely, or calm only when someone truly needed you, The Need to Be Needed offers a different lens—one that explains not what’s wrong with you, but what may be missing.
Link to purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Need-Needed-Reclaiming-Connection-Belonging/dp/B0G96PZ6C3
Kate Barber 