The Maslow Shuffle
Since his traditional retirement a few years back, my father has been tirelessly working on book after book of family history. It all started with a tome he inherited from his aunt and uncle, who had no children. It was an oral history from the perspective of his aunt, detailing events of the past and many hilarious quips about my ancestors.
My father’s family, a hearty group of Scots-Irish, settled in the US when it was only a colony, so tracing the stories of the individuals often required that he reference historical or military documents for accuracy and clarity. This was a massive undertaking. And, as it were, a huge labor of love.
I received a couple of specially printed copies, complete with family photos, records, and documents. As I read through the weighty book, I realized just how incredible it was that I existed today.
The difficulty and hardship that made my ancestors leave England, and the continued struggle to merely survive disease, war, and lack of necessities gave me pause.
My mother’s family, though they came to the US more recently from Eastern Europe, had similar stories. These are far more difficult to document owing to the near total destruction of records.
They, and many more besides, immigrated to the US because they were finding it too difficult to look after their most basic needs. They were barely surviving. They were willing to take a chance on a boat ride across the ocean in the hopes that they could meet those basic needs and beyond.
Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, attempted to organize human needs from basic to more complex through a hierarchy. There is some debate over whether or not his model is completely accurate, but it does hold a lot of important ideas. Maslow didn’t create a pyramidal diagram, but that is often how his concepts are depicted today. Basic needs form the foundation of the pyramid, and each layer of need is stacked on top of the last layer.
The most basic needs a human has are physiological (food, water, shelter, etc.), then comes safety (personal security, employment, etc.), then love and belonging (Community, family, etc.), then esteem (respect, status, etc.), and finally self-actualization (desire to become the highest expression of self).
My very brave ancestors were living at the physiological level, their basic needs determining much of their lives and activities. As each generation settled and their basic needs were more easily met, they had more agency to live the lives they wanted.
When I consider their hardship, I realize what an incredible privilege I have in my life today. In fact, many of us do. Sure, things aren’t always butterflies and rainbows, but at least in developed nations people rarely contract typhoid or starve in a potato famine.
So, let the self-actualizing commence!
Right?
Well, actually, a lot of people in the western world are miserable. It made me wonder what is pulling us all away from living our potential.
In my own life, I recalled how, in spite of having all of my needs met from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy, the existence of massive student loan debt sent me into the emotional state equivalent to physiological survival. I also felt the same way if I listened to an inflammatory news story or a highly intense movie.
I started to wonder if so many of the benefits of modern life that allow us to reach our full potential can be simultaneously negated by the downsides.
For example, I have food, shelter, safety, education, and community. I also own a cell phone. Which means I can be continually notified of everything, all of the time.
If, in spite of being on the verge of self-actualization, I routinely look at negative content on my phone, what are the chances that I’ll ever reach my full potential as a human?
Probably not so good.
On the other side of this, even when people have very little and are barely surviving, I think they can still form community. In a way, having that community probably increased the likelihood of survival for my ancestors.
And this brought me to an interesting idea. Maybe it’s not about what’s going on externally, but rather, how we deal with it internally.
Viktor Frankl wrote about this in Man’s Search for Meaning. He survived a Nazi concentration camp and went on to practice psychiatry after World War II. He gained many insights from living with daily torment and forgoing the most basic of human needs. One such insight was that humans need to have a reason to keep going. They can survive an utterly terrible existence as long as they have meaning in what they are doing. When they lose this, they lose the will to keep going.
This point strikes me as interesting vis a vis the frequent fatalistic quips I hear from those of us living in the west. Is it the near constant stream of bad news and social comparison that results in a hopeless point of view? Is it a failure to recognize (or a failure of society to teach us about) our own agency in spite of economic/ecologic/sociologic difficulties?
And, for the record, how do we find meaning when it’s hard?
For me, I had to remove the things that weren’t helping (like social media and all news). Which means, maybe I’m slightly out of touch, but everyone still tells me about the big stuff (pandemics, war, the Kardashians) in an unsolicited manner.
I’ve also been practicing gratitude and re-framing. Instead of complaining, I see the possible good things and focus my attention there. Pro-tip: if you are a parent, you likely do this all of the time with a child who complains; it’s a decent reminder to turn it around on yourself.
Paying off my loans/being debt-free did have a huge impact on my well-being, and so did the concepts of FIRE. But it wasn’t everything. It was only a part of developing personal agency. Maintaining it sometimes means that I have to forgo the things we deem “normal” in our current culture. Like Instagram or Twitter (or whatever it’s called now). But it also had to do with managing my thoughts and emotions.
Self-actualization, I think, is a process of going within. It is how we bring our best selves to the fore. And the more I consider this, what better way to do this than in the service of others? In not focusing so much on ourselves?
No matter where someone is on the hierarchy of human needs, I’m beginning to believe that we can move up or down on the basis of how we think and how we feel. Despite having all of my needs met, my student loan debt brought me to a lower emotional level. Anything scary can do that. An illness. A family crisis. A memory.
But it doesn’t have to.
Reframing it can go a long way. Finding meaning, and finding ways to serve others might just be the key to expressing the highest version of ourselves, no matter our outer situation.
My brave ancestors would have had to reframe their journey to a new land not as difficult or dangerous, but as something full of hope and possibility. If not for them, for their descendants like me. And I’ll have to do the same.
