Three quick points about Maslow: while his “hierarchy of needs” is often presented as a pyramid, he didn’t conceive of it that way, that is, as a fixed order through which one proceeded.
Some of his ideas may have come from fieldwork he did among the Siksika (Blackfoot) in Alberta, Canada in 1938. By comparison, he was appalled by the local whites.
Finally, in support of your writing here, Maslow wrote “self actualization is not enough. Personal salvation and what is good for the person alone cannot be really understood in isolation. The good of other people must be invoked as well as the good for oneself. It is quite clear that purely inter-psychic individualist psychology without reference to other people and social conditions is not adequate.”
All your answers are good but perhaps under Good Education you should expand it to include “The ability to desire and value the benefits of a good education.”
I get it, but in my experience, those who disparage education (looking at you, dad! Sister in law! Disgruntled parents of my students! Students!) have often been deeply scarred and deprived in other ways: it’s a response to something, rather than a thing in itself. It was that other guy, Bakunin, who said, roughly, there are uneducated peasants who are often much smarter than the educated professional or teacher or civil servant, yet are ridiculed and humbled by them because of their authority over them. That doesn’t always make one aspire to higher education
Wouldn’t blame traditional television. Social media substituted digital effluvium for actual contact. More than half of Americans have few close friends. Politics has encouraged polarization, and social media has helped reinforce the idea that your opinion about everything is important, should be argued at length if Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, and that listening to people with different opinions is unnecessary. Cyberabuse is terribly common, and tragically normalized. Covid sequelae made social skills atrophy and made empathy rarer.
I might be too optimistic, but I think we are heading into the age of collaboration once the vanity thing wears off. It really is the next place to go. People will find fulfillment in collaborating.
What is the clear distinction between a need, a want, and a wish? We can argue about that, but I hope we can all acknowledge that we live in a world that doesn’t owe us a damn thing, and in a civilization that only grudgingly goes above that.
The Epicureans believed in balance between the extremes of necessary hardship and creature comfort rewards. The Stoics said that “virtue alone is sufficient for happiness.” But the toddlers of Mumbai and São Paulo don’t look forward to happiness, and they soon shed their virtues if they hope to survive.
Lifted above a savage struggle for survival (needs met at the expense of others), by what apparatus will needs/desires/wishes be supplied? Both the Plenary Committee of the Soviet and Neoliberal privatization have both shit the bed on that one.
Tolstoy thought a great deal on this. “One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.” Echoing the earlier English Romantics, with Wordsworth’s “To her fair works did nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.” But Tolstoy didn’t just think we’d all be happy if we took long walks outdoors. Recognizing that happiness is not man’s natural condition, he decided that the idea of happiness is more important than its realization. Although getting outside is still good, weather permitting.
Try to understand how loneliness and uselessness are mostly self-inflicted wounds, and remedy them from that perspective. And another suggestion to getting one’s needs met: don’t be reluctant to fill out the paperwork. What benefits civilization provides beyond raw nature always entails bureaucracy.
I think you are right, but wonder if we will be forced to embrace collaboration as the larger structures burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp.
Affordable childcare. If there ever anything that justifies socialism, it’s childcare. The economics of it in a for profit model just don’t work. If you pay childcare workers a living wage with benefits, it is unaffordable for all but the upper middle class and over. If you pay minimum wage, or even competetive minimums like $15/hr, you can only attract those with low skills. Not exactly who you want to entrust your most valuable resource to.
Most middle class families are caught between paying for childcare with most of one parent’s income, or having one parent stay home. It just doesn’t make sense without government subsidies. The economy would be far more productive with socialized childcare.
I think that the first part of that definition is something that hasn’t been explored well in this thread yet. People seem to be working a LOT more than they did in years past. I don’t remember anyone working 10-12 hour days as a standard thing in 1983, but that’s much more common these days. And nobody had expectations of being available if they got a work email after hours or over the weekend either.
When people have this sort of (IMO) unreasonable expectations and demand on their time, it starts to make it tight elsewhere. They start prioritizing things like laundry, food prep, and other housekeeping chores, and then basic relaxation next. Social stuff and self-actualization are further down the free time hierarchy for most.
I’d also go so far as to say that this lack of free time brought on by too much work has effects elsewhere- some people don’t exercise, some people eat less nutritious foods, some sleep less, and so on. Basically there’s no free lunch in terms of what you have/want to get done, and that time’s got to come from somewhere. (not incidentally, that’s why working-from-home is so popular; it lets people double up and do stuff like fold clothes while they are in a meeting, or run loads of laundry or dishes in between tasks).
And what was the rationale behind/result of this draconian, slavish work-life imbalance? A huge increase in both the wealth and income inequality indexes.
The Big Boss used to get a new Cadillac every year or two. The line-level employees – a new Chevy or Pontiac every three or four years.
But middle-class meant home ownership, savings, and putting your kids through college.
And anybody with even a passing interest in Sociology can identify no end of cracks across the American psyche – many of which you mention: poor diet, little/no exercise, alcohol/substance use/abuse, social media addiction (probably throw ‘porn’ in there, too), deep isolation and loneliness, depression, anxiety, etc., etc.
It’s sick, and – IMHO – it’s anything but organic.
And the only ones who are not suffering under this siege mentality and overwork epidemic are the relative few at/near the top.
And as soon as that cohort figures out how to outsource, offshore, or automate your job, the hell will become exponentially worse.
I also mention occasionally, that – with the inflation in the US on basic necessities soaring over time – there’s basically no way to opt off of that treadmill. It’s down to either: excel, maintain, or get run over by others.
ETA: rule of thumb when I was a kid was: house purchase price = 3x your gross annual income.
Today? In my unspectacular town? 10X. Think about everything that cascades deleteriously from that single metric.
How many people are actually working 10-12 hour days outside of highly competitive industries like investment banking. big law, or tech?
I would be cautious in applying an overly broad generalization based on personal anecdotal experiences or their own ideological bullet points.
That said, I think the biggest need that isn’t being met (at lest from my perspective) is a sense of community. At least compared to when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s.
I think another need is having the ability to disconnect from work and/or other obligations and just fucking relax. Like everyone has this mentality that if they aren’t constantly preparing and hustling and positioning themselves or their kids, they are going to fall behind some curve.
It’s certainly still very common in the advertising industry.
Edit: And it isn’t even just in white-collar jobs. A good friend of mine works at an intermodal ramp (where intermodal containers are moved from trains to truck trailers); she drives a “spotter truck” – a small semi tractor which is used to move the trailers through the yard.
She works five days a week; while her shifts are technically eight hours long, the reality is that, most days, due to the amount of traffic in the yard, she works 10 to 12 hours in a shift.
OTOH, the lauded tight-knit communities of years past weren’t necessarily about finding like-minded adults, either. Seventy years ago, you might have joined the local Eagles lodge knowing full well it was a hotbed of John Birchers and anti-fluoridationists - and you’d grudgingly accept it, because that was the price you were expected to pay for social contact.
Put differently, perhaps our more atomized modern society arose in part because our need to not spend time with those whose views we found repellent wasn’t being met?
One need that’s not being met is political maturity and normalcy. The sheer craziness of the last 9 years of politics have taken a severe toll on people’s mental health.
It’s really dependent on corporate culture, even down to the individual managers.
But I’ll say this- the general thrust over 20 years of corporate IT work has been something along the lines of “Any professional who only puts in eight hours a day is a clock-watcher who is doing the bare minimum and won’t be promoted or thought of kindly.” Some people think it’s BS and do what they’re going to do, but far more take it to heart and try and make it work.
Beyond that the out-of-work expectations surrounding emails and phone availability have gone up dramatically.
