The Pyramid / Maslow’s Hierarchy

All pursuits in life can be linked in some way to the concept of the pyramid. This analysis presents an extension to Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, published in 1943 as an exploration of what motivates us as humans.

To give a brief overview, Maslow’s hierarchy is founded on the central premise that human beings have needs which we strive to fulfil, and that these needs can be modelled as ‘degrees’ which are (a) successively higher and (b) built upon lower degree needs which form prerequisites. These ‘degrees’ or levels are represented pictorially below, followed by a brief description of the levels.

1. Physiological – basic requisite needs for existence: air, food, water, sleep, shelter
2. Safety & Security – safety of the self, property and health, security of family, employment
3. Belonging & Love – social needs such as acceptance and fitting into groups (be they interest, political, religious etc) and love needs such as family, friendships, relationships and physical intimacy
4. Esteem – the need to feel achievement and self worth; further, recognition, approval and respect from others
5. Cognitive & Aesthetic – encompasses the intellectual need for knowledge, understanding, morality and justice; and the aesthetic needs of beauty and balance
6. Self-Actualisation – need to reach one’s full potential and attain a state of heightened awareness of reality

These six levels form the vertical structure of Maslow’s hierarchy and six sevenths of our modified pyramid. The seventh level will be dealt with toward the end of the analysis.

At this point I will substitute ‘Pyramid’ for ‘Hierarchy’ as it is a more pragmatic expression of what we are about to delve into.

Ascension

Ascension has long been a concept hard-wired into the human brain. For as long as history has kept record, we have had a fixation with pushing or striving upward. Babylon had its tower, the most desirable penthouses are always on the top floor, and we often talk of climbing the corporate ladder. I’m not going to go into the triviality of why we credit significantly more achievement to climbing a mountain than diving the depths of the ocean – but note the fact: we have a perpetual ‘up’ bias which is almost universal.

We can construct a simple metaphor to explain the underlying principles of the pyramid which draws upon this upward bias. Our ingrained objective in life is to reach the top of the pyramid, and this pyramid can represent whatever you want it to. Some of us want to reach the apex so they can jeer at those below them, others to feel the sense of achievement from having climbed to the summit, and others still simply to admire the panorama from the zenith.

Following this analogy, the ‘hard work’ aspect of life becomes lucid: for most of us have to build our own pyramids. Fortunately for you, given you’re reading this over the internet, it’s unlikely you’ll have to start from scratch. Often our families and Governments have already built for us the base or foundation level of the pyramid (that is, physiological needs such as sustenance and shelter), leaving us unencumbered freedom to pursue belonging and esteem needs in the pre-adulthood stages of development.

From a realist angle, living one’s life and building the pyramid are one and the same. Normal development involves logically moving up the pyramid fulfilling the needs on each successive level. Heed must be paid to ensuring that balance and synchronicity, two highly important notions, underpin the journey up the pyramid.

Level Fixation

What I have encountered all too often is level fixation which occurs when progression up the pyramid is disrupted or prevented by an obsession with a particular level. The phenomena plays out chiefly on the Safety, Love/Belonging (especially), and Esteem levels of the pyramid.

Safety Fixation: hermits who consign themselves to their ‘box’ of comfort tend to stay at home, have few or no friends and are lacking in complex interpersonal interactions. This typifies a safety level fixation, where the subject is either antisocial or has had a life experience which has instilled trust issues and manifests as paranoia of the outside world.

Love/Belongingness Fixation: where the fear of loneliness and social anxiety result in concentrating an inordinate amount of energy to ‘fitting in,’ maintaining one’s social image and a desperate, consuming need for affection.

Esteem Fixation: perhaps the most intriguing of the level fixations, esteem fixation can play out in two ways. Most commonly, the symptom is an internal feeling of inadequacy, lack of self-worth or inferiority complex – deficit conditions which yield to depression unless corrective action is taken. The action will often be blindly chasing external reassurances of worth via whatever means necessary. At the opposite extreme are surfeit conditions such as the belief that one is ‘better’ than everyone else or a superiority complex. Such narcissism is borne from insecurity and self-denial of said insecurity. A fixation is created because the individual’s sense of self esteem is warped and can only be upheld by constantly exuding an artificial image which is designed to make other people fawn, thereby ratifying their inflated sense of self. This is precisely why I rarely attend nightclubs and do not work in Investment Banking– the clientele/disposition is generally preselected to this fixation.

Cognitive and Aesthetic Fixation: frequents the circles of academics, practitioners of the Arts and ‘free-spirit’ type personalities who are big on travel. Cognitive fixation comes about where the need to discover, explore and learn become the artificial top of the pyramid and subvert the desire to move any higher. Reading and travelling to attain ‘worldliness’ becomes a substitute for self-actualisation and a fixation here is the biggest reason many people never reach self-actualisation. Aesthetic fixation is inherent where the need to absorb beauty (possibly an energy concept) becomes a pseudo-psychological opiate that seizes impulsive control and begins to unduly affect decision making. Beauty is absolutely subjective across individuals; which means a fixation could develop from rainforests, anatomical form, Manolo Blahniks, or even specimens of rufus saeta puella.*

One of many iniquities I have is that ‘level fixation’ amuses the absolute hell out of me. Were I to go back and analyse why this is, I’d find the reasons would be massive cynicism and something of a warped mindset that precludes any desire to pursue ‘belonging’ or ‘esteem’ needs. Fitting in, the sense of achievement and attaining respect and acceptance don’t make it onto my list of life goals. Subverting these needs necessarily results in immunity from any downside inherent in pursuing them, which removes risk to contracting depression. However, it is important to note that depression, ersatz or otherwise, can be effected upon each of the six levels. A shortfall on any type of need can bear causality to depression, though the underlying reasons across levels would be very different. Depression from a lack of wealth (Security level) as distinct to depression from the morally depraved state of the world (Self-actualisation level).

Burning Out

The other problem, related to fixation, is too much passion: something which will often lead to what is aptly coined a ‘burn-out.’ I have always subscribed to the idea that we are limited in the amount of energy we can project toward people, pursuits, goals and the like. A metaphor I often like to use is that my energy is a single dollar. I can spend this dollar however I wish, perhaps 50¢ on friends and family, 30¢ on career and 20¢ on hobbies such as sitting on park benches.

Adding a layer of complexity, my dollar is not the same as yours. With respect to value, the purchasing power of your dollar versus someone else’s is not fixed, but relative. This bears allusion to the piece written some time ago entitled ‘Relationships Accounting’ which brings forth the supposition of emotional energy and analyses how it works. Fundamentally, how much your dollar is worth is conditional upon elements of your personality, attitude and perspective – consider a passionate optimist versus a disillusioned cynic; the relative value of the optimist’s dollar will typically be greater.

Linking the dollar concept back to the idea of ‘burn-outs,’ we can infer a causal relationship that is the same as being in debt. Let’s say you need money, and you borrow it from someone, but you borrow more than you can afford to repay. You are now in technical default and if you used that money to buy property, it is likely you will be relieved of its ownership.

Attempting to sustain an energy projection load of say $1.20 is like borrowing beyond your capacity to repay –it becomes a matter of when not if, you will inevitably default or ‘burn-out.’ Particularly relevant this is to many young people in law and investment banking – professions which demand not only a great deal of time, but stress high levels of energy.

Mark is a bright 23-year-old graduate who has just finished his Commerce/Law degree with First Class Honours and is working for a bulge bracket investment bank because he wanted a ‘challenge’ (read: 70+ hour working week for a six figure salary). He is extremely driven and puts 80¢ of energy into his banking job. Further, he maintains an active social life for a further 30¢ and lavishes another 20¢ on his girlfriend. Immediately we can see that there is 50¢ projected on love/belongingness needs, and 80¢ projected on esteem needs, for a total projection load of $1.30. The 80¢ is clearly a fixation on the esteem level.

We see that Mark has two distinct problems which foretell a burnout is imminent:

Overexertion: much like trying to sprint for the duration of a marathon, overexertion cannot be sustained in the long run. In any applicable scenario, it is just a matter of time before the inability to cope with abnormal levels of strain will result in collapse.

Imbalance: though there are no hard-and-fast rules governing how much energy should be allocated to the different need levels, we can safely assume that leading a ‘balanced’ life necessarily involves giving attention to higher order cognitive and aesthetic pursuits, and most definitely not tipping 80¢ of energy into one’s job like Mark.

Although the former is often adequate on its own, the combination of both overexertion and imbalance compound Mark’s susceptibility to experiencing a breakdown and burning out.

Of course, this leaves us to grapple with how to prevent something similar from happening to us. Maslow developed the hierarchy, but didn’t write any instructions on the ‘right’ way to approach it. Coincidentally, the analysis will now move to fill this gap using a traditionalist brand of logic.

Climbing Instructions

We have overviewed two conceptual areas thus far: (1) the pyramid we seek to build/climb (2) our energy ‘dollar’ which we can spend on its different levels. These are our two building blocks, and we will need to think as an architect, an engineer and a financier simultaneously to understand how everything fits together.

Initially, because foundations are important and the lower levels need to be broad to support the structure, we initially concentrate a lot of our resources on building solid lower levels (i.e. ensuring physiological and safety needs). Once we’ve finished those, we can shift our resources to building up the next two levels (fulfilling love/belongingness and esteem needs). At the absolute heart of all of this is the principle that ‘sustaining capital’ is much lower than ‘development capital’. I.e. once we’ve successfully completed and climbed each successive level, the amount of money/energy required to sustain those levels falls, freeing up more resources for building higher levels. For example, forging friendships is very effort intensive, but once they’re struck, it costs us a lot less to keep them going.

The trick is in intelligent allocation. To use another finance metaphor, we need to make sure we don’t sink too much of our dollar into lower levels when we can get a better return by investing it in getting to higher levels. In doing so, it is possible to avert falling into the trap of obsessive focus on a level such as love/belongingness. Once you’ve got your relationships in order, you can afford to concentrate more energy on cognitive, aesthetic and self-actualising needs. As aforementioned, this promotes balance, whilst devoting yourself neurotically to your partner does not. Adjunctively, may I also mention that excessive fervour directed at a partner can be suffocating and quite often ends up pushing the person away.

Managing your energy so that you have balance on the levels you’ve fulfilled, and not overexerting so you always have some spare to put towards pursuing higher levels is the most obvious route to reaching the pinnacle of self-actualisation.

Flying in the face of all this theory are the actual dynamics of getting to the stage of self-actualisation. From my experiences, which I hold out as being subjective, if you try to climb toward it, it becomes more elusive. Whilst it may seem absurd initially, it is more effective to ‘dig holes’ than try to climb (in a matter of speaking.) Why is this? That is the $64,000 question – it isn’t possible to just keep pushing until you ‘reach your full potential’ and wake up one morning feeling self-actualised. The process involves deconstructing, challenging and then rebuilding previously held beliefs, value systems, and perspectives into something that is very far removed from what you had to begin with.

Although it isn’t really beyond anyone’s ability, the amount of time and energy involved, coupled with a willingness to resign to the fact that you were completely misguided and overturn your entire mindset precludes all but 2% of people from ever becoming self-actualised. Holes need to be dug to discover what’s at the bottom. If you like, think of it as a large, old tree. What self-actualisation seeks to do is cut it down, and then plant a new one in its place – a feat which cannot be accomplished unless the stump and roots of the felled tree are first removed.

The kicker here is that due to the esoteric laws of epistemology, the peak of the pyramid can never be reached, though we may at times feel as if we have ‘made it.’ Self-actualisation in Maslow’s hierarchy is actually the penultimate level. At the very top, upon the seventh level, lies the grail of perfection or absolute knowledge and understanding of the universe, which, (depending on your subscriptions) is either absurd/ unattainable or bequeathed divinely in the next life.

In closing, when questioning your direction in life, for whatever reason, it is always helpful to stop and think about the pyramid. Which level are you on? Where do you want to go?  What’s stopping you from getting there? Questions like these, asked in the context of this framework, imbue a clearer understanding on personal development and can make plotting a good course through the murky waters of life just that little bit easier.

Until next time,

P.X. Waterstone 

*Redhead shop assistants (such as the one who works in the tableware department of Myer Melbourne.)