What Would Maslow Do?

May 7, 2023 12:36 PM

Is it possible to self-actualize? How can I know if I'm self-actualized?

I've been thinking more about Maslow's Hierachy of Needs over the last few years. At the top of the pyramid is reaching one's full potential (including creative pursuits). Esteem needs (prestige and feelings of accomplishment) are a rung below on the pyramid.

If a person remains in a mid-level profession without striving or advancement, and dips their toe in an assortment of hobbies without a lot of passion, can they become "self-actualized"? If a person has a life without prestige how can they self-actualize according to Maslow?

I'm a Gen-Xer who is thinking about my future. While I have a lot to be thankful for in the realms of family and stability (job, housing, safety, freedom), I'm not actively working on advancing my career, and I've never been a big goal-setter. I work in a helping profession and some might say I do "noble" work but it's probably below my "potential".

If I could get a do-over I would set more goals, career and otherwise. More now than ever I think more about goals and can see their value and importance. If I don't advance in my career what are some things that I can do at age 50 and beyond to reach my full potential?

I've spent a lot of years sleepwalking through life and thinking too much about myself and my personality and the ways in which I'm failing. I strove to be less reactive, more compassionate, more understanding, and less neurotic if that's possible, but mostly it was navel-gazing. Today I'm more interested in action instead of thinking too much. (One could argue otherwise by the very nature of this question.)

I can set goals to travel, learn new things, get super fit, get more organized, or a myriad of other things I'm interested in. I'm mostly interested in podcasts, traveling with my spouse, expanding my creative hobby, gardening, being outside, and exercising. I also think a lot about relationships and how I show up for others. I also think about authenticity and what that means. Could this be a path to self-actualization? If it isn't, what is?

We're all hurdling towards death and maybe it's all inconsequential at the end of the day. Still, If I wanted to make something good of my life and attempt to self-actualize what can an aging person do? How does a person know if they are self-actualized?

posted by loveandhappiness to Human Relations (21 answers total)

From what I understood of Maslow, the self actualization part of the pyramid was reserved for world-changing artists whose unique contributions shaped the future of entire disciplines. It's not something you need to feel bad about not striving for and may not even be a relevant or helpful concept to apply to your own life. I believe as a theory is does have merits but it is not a life path, therapeutic impetus or philosophy of life. It is just a way of explaining the scope and range of human achievement that fits nicely into the current psychological research trends.

But it's not designed to be spiritual life wisdom or a philosophy of living, which is what it seems you are looking for.
I would also be wary of seeking "authenticity." I think it's an overused and overrated concept used to promote a false elitism and will make you into an insufferable snob. This is just my experience of getting swept away with that idea when I was younger. In your more grounded state it might be helpful.
Now i may not be the best person to advise you seeing as I also ask myself these same questions. I could share some of the ways I have found to be satisfying in answering them though. Also wanted to note that it is exhausting to try and self actualize while also holding down a job so make sure to manage your energy carefully.
- cultural exchange and escaping your comfort zone by taking language classes in another country. Living weeks or months in another country and shedding cultural baggage from your home country to get closer to knowing what it means to be human
- artistic collaboration with cultural others. Experiencing artforms from other places and incorporating them into my philosophy of life.

- mentoring younger people in their early 20s (the only way you can hang with younger people that isn't babysitting)
posted by winterportage at 12:52 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you winterportage.

Apologies for the interjection. This will be the last time. I agree regarding authenticity. I want to clarify in this question I use authenticity as mostly being honest and “real” around others. I don’t like the term either, although I do feel I show up as my authentic or real self whatever that means.

Also hurtling not hurdling.
posted by loveandhappiness at 1:08 PM on May 7, 2023

I actually thought the self-actualizing stage was when you didn’t need set goals exactly or outside approval (including Maslow’s) anymore. Rather, you’ve kind of - become who you are, you’ve done the best at what you do (for you), and now you find joy in being. And doing. So what gives your joy? Are you able to do that at least some of the time?
posted by warriorqueen at 1:17 PM on May 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

I've found something that I'm completely ready to defend as self-actualization via assiduous refusal to let other people convince me that I have the potential to do whatever they think I ought to be able to.

Achievement is overrated.

I am an expert procrastinator.
posted by flabdablet at 1:18 PM on May 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

To me self-actualizing would mean feeling (mostly) happy with who I am and how I behave, and with the ways I share my life and resources with other people - both friends and strangers.

Resources to me means money, time, and skills - so donating money or buying things for people, spending time on causes that help others, and donating my skills - which can be, but doesn't have to be, formal volunteering. For instance, right now I'm helping a newcomer neighbour figure out an immigration thing because I have the skill of speaking English and thus can navigate dense government websites more easily.

So to further actualize myself, I would ramp up my efforts - maybe schedule weekly ways to keep connecting with loved ones, and to keep sharing my money and time and skills with people who have less resources than I have. Basically making a positive difference in other people's lives.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 1:22 PM on May 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's a cliche because it's often true: therapy.
posted by Alterscape at 1:26 PM on May 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

My impression of Maslow is that he didn't necessarily have a solid theory for how someone becomes self-actualized, and the main thing to take from the hierarchy of needs is that deficiency needs have to be met before people can start working towards self-actualization. His contemporary Carl Rogers had a lot more to say about the specifics of becoming self-actualized and might be more helpful in defining what working towards self-actualization would look like for you. You might also be interested in Erik Erikson's theory of development as a framework for what self-actualization looks like in the later stages of life, particularly the final stages (generativity vs stagnation and ego integrity vs despair).

When it comes to relationships I think it's more helpful to think of authenticity as how it relates to vulnerability, in which case Brene Brown has you covered.
posted by fox problems at 2:29 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I wouldn't think too much about Maslow as a strict prescription for how to live. Once you get past the first two levels--food, water, shelter, physical safety--the other levels are all open to you, for better or worse. For example, somebody could make amazing art that leaves them creatively fulfilled but not find the circle of friends or the lovers that they wish. Or the other way around--the person with a loving family and partner, a huge circle or friends and nothing to "show" in terms of creative or professional output.

Anyway, none of us ever reaches their full potential. Nobody ever fully self-actualizes, unless they're Jesus or the Buddha and even then your mileage may vary. There are always roads left untraveled, things we left undone or unsaid, and just a general lack of time. It's part of being human, and it sucks! But we can't avoid it.

That said, just like nobody ever fully self-actualizes, you can't really fail at it unless you don't make any effort at all. Personally I think that taking a look at career might be a good thing for you. Don't think of it in terms of "advancement" or what other people think is good or bad, but instead think about what would make you feel satisfied. What do you do during the course of the day that makes you feel accomplished? What makes you feel miserable? Is there any way to find a job where you get more of the first and less of the second? You are 50 and still have time to work--probably have to work for a good 12 more years at least. (If not, congrats!) Even putting a little effort into self-actualizing in the workplace could have great rewards and make you feel so much better about yourself.
posted by kingdead at 2:48 PM on May 7, 2023

I personally think self-actualization is impossible. A person needs to have a stable base, food and clothing and shelter, love and support, and a whole lot of needs consistently taken care of (and not lost later on) before you can even think about "self-actualization," and the way our world is going, that seems way too much to ask.

If you're not really driven to achieve, achieve, achieve and you're just chillin' and enjoying life, that's not bad. You don't have to become Mozart or whoever.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:51 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

You might find it interesting to look at adult development theory. This is the notion that humans can continue to learn and develop in significant ways throughout adulthood. There are a number of theorists who have developed patterns and measurement tools for people to become more aware of and deliberate in their developmental journey. Most of this work is grounded in the work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget.

Robert Kegan and Bill Torbert are seen as the main thinkers/researchers in this space, especially in adapting it to a workplace/career and leadership context. Jane Loevinger and Susanne Cook-Greuter are others.

Maslov's self-actualisation strongly resembles the shift towards self-authoring and self-transforming in adult development theory. Kegan talks about transformation in terms of how we change the self in relation to the world. It's how you see yourself, and how you make meaning, and how you situate yourself in a complex world.
posted by amusebuche at 5:02 PM on May 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

As an (organizational) psychologist who was captivated by Maslow early in my career but haven't read in many - and I mean many - years, my thoughts have drifted towards equating self-actualization with feeling satisfied that you have created a good life consistent with both your values and your dreams. What could be better than that?
posted by DrGail at 5:24 PM on May 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

This response might be very off-target but it's what immediately came to mind when reading your question. This is a paraphrase of a longer bit from Becky Chamber's book Psalm for the Wild-Built.

Dex is tea monk having an existential crisis. They're very happy in their profession and yet they want something more. Mosscap is a self-aware robot who's response is excellent, but I've taken Dex's question and then skipped down to the best part of Mosscap's answer.

----
Dex: “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why isn’t it enough?” Dex looked at the robot. “What am I supposed to do, if not this? What am I, if not this?”

Mosscap: "You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
----

And it's all any human needs to do. We're constantly making ourselves miserable asking why we're here and looking for our "true" selves and seeking "enlightenment" or "self-actualization". Enlightenment is when you realize you don't need enlightenment. It's when you realize that being right here, right now is enough. It's when you realize that wondering about your purpose is just your ego being scared that someday you'll be dead and no one will remember you, and realizing that's okay.

My sense of your question is that you're wondering about your purpose or trying to improve the world or something along those lines. That's jolly but don't let it make you miserable. It's enough just to be. And if you want to improve the world then improve yourself. Be a better person, treat others better, you are part of the world so if you're better, the world is better.
posted by Awfki at 5:50 PM on May 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

Apologies if this seems tangential; One of my old friends was fascinated by Crowley/Thelema practices, and one day I asked him:

- So what is the purpose of your meditations and practices?
- To achieve conversation with our Holy Guardian Angel.
- So, like what would your Holy Guardian Angel tell you?
- Instruction in achieving "The Great Work!"
- So... what exactly is "The Great Work"?
- Well, you'd have to achieve conversation with your Holy Guardian Angel to know that... (by this point we've had a few cocktails and things... here's a definition: The Great Work is The accomplishment of the True Will of one's Self in mystical union with the All.)

I'm a skeptic about higher powers and related concepts, but finding The Great Work is an interesting metaphor about the struggle to achieve personal meaning in Life.

(I actually think that the greatest thing that any person can achieve in life is living with compassion, generosity, and giving back to their community. I fail at this because I'm mostly self-absorbed and a loner by nature, it's my burden.)
posted by ovvl at 6:07 PM on May 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

So, self-actualization would look different for everyone, right?

So, if someone became a famous Dr or Scientist and made a great discovery, but it's because their family really expected and pressured them to be a Dr and they now feel stuck in this being famous business, even if they *are* very proud of the work they've done, then they wouldn't actually be self-actualized, right?
Whereas, someone who really wanted to be a train driver, and had a realistic assessment of their own skills that this is something they could really reach their full potential in, regardless of other people not wanting them to do that, and who became the best train driver they could be, and is very satisfied with the career they had, would actually be self-actualized. Right?


So I'm gonna take a left turn on this question, and I wonder if what you're really asking is something like what Barbara Sher addresses in her books. Which are mostly around figuring out your very individual and personal dreams and goals, and particularly why you feel like you can't pursue them, or don't even know what they are, often because they're not what you were taught your dreams should look like.
"I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What it Was" is probably the most relevant title, as it goes over what you were raised to think you should do, and then all the different reasons you might not be very clear on what you want.
But as you mention approaching 50, she's also got one called, "It's only to late if you don't start now" which is about figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life at midlife.

And it's not necessarily about changing what you do for your career, it's about figuring out what you really love to do, and that often looks like giving yourself permission to really explore a hobby that brings you joy, while staying in your same career.
Or maybe it involves moving to Alaska.

It's individual to each person, obviously.
posted by Elysum at 6:38 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

To answer your question, I think you might be thinking too literally about the pyramid. I would consider looking at it through a different context and lens https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-06-18/the-blackfoot-wisdom-that-inspired-maslows-hierarchy/

While Maslow's pyramid focuses on the individual, Maslow took notes from the Blackfoot Native tribe (in this article I link to the author considers the nuances and complications with understanding how much Maslow was inspired by the Blackfoot etc.)

In any case, if you want to think about connection and community, that might make you feel less anxious about not wanting to self actualize into some social construct around your job, etc.

Working isn't supposed to be our whole life or personality but we have been socialized into thinking it is so paramount.

Food for thought. I wouldn't work too hard figuring out the pyramid and do what makes you feel joy and happiness!
posted by AnyUsernameWillDo at 8:38 PM on May 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

I've given far too much thought to Mazlow's hierarchy over the years and have come to the conclusion that Mazlow is full of shit or, at least his hierarchy of needs is. The various groupings of needs are fine enough, but I absolutely do not believe you need to satisfy every part of every level before you can move on to anything else.

My view on 'self-actualisation' is believing that you are doing the best you can to be the best you can in things that are important to you. Authenticity is a good way to view this, I think, in the sense that you are living your life in a way that is genuine and based on your own beliefs about who and what you should be.
posted by dg at 9:51 PM on May 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I cannot favourite Awfki's answer hard enough.

A movie recommendation: It's Such a Beautiful Day
posted by flabdablet at 1:57 AM on May 8, 2023

Another plug for self-actualization using being about being true to yourself and becoming the most you you can be, not having anything whatsoever to do with external achievements.
posted by eviemath at 2:12 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

having anything whatsoever to do with external achievements.

Right. If you look at the pyramid, achievements and 'feeling of accomplishment' is the step down from self-actualization. So self-actualization is when you have met all the others, and for example take a vacation and think about how you can be, not who you can be.

And since the others are variable, you can actually self-actualize many times.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:51 AM on May 8, 2023

I think Maslow was a lot more concerned with barriers to those levels, which he was observing as the natural path of the mind. This wasn't a time where we talked about trauma (food and housing insecurity at the primary levels), or damage to the esteem mechanisms via abuse or traumatic experiences (the Hierarchy came out in 1943; Maslow grew up with pretty much constant anti-semitic bullying), and the deliberate roadblocks constructed by society and the dominant class to prevent reaching the higher levels. He's saying your mind wants to follow that path and will if allowed, and if something is preventing it? That's where therapeutic support can help remove barriers, though of course it's a different problem when the barriers are erected by the State.

Maslow was not a critic of satisfaction in a simple life at all. He radically believed that all human beings had value regardless of their vocation or how they were present in the world, and he didn't define "growth" like a productivity blogger, he just meant that the mind must be fed, and feeding it would organically (if there were no barriers) generate esteem.

And then maybe naively assumed that food would naturally be healthy, but he couldn't have predicted the internet.

That self-improvement that is ongoing is not meant to be groundbreaking or record-setting, simply getting a little better all the time. And we see what the lack of that does to people, right? Someone "stuck", whether that's through addiction or depression or physical illness or poverty or an unhealthy relationship, unable to figure out how to dig out, slowly coming apart mentally. It can be a problem for older people cut off from the stimulation and social contact of work, combined with maybe poverty or physical illness or timidity about finding new rewarding pursuits. People with young children often suffer from the lack of time or energy to have much of an inner life at all, and we know that's not good for mental health.

I synthesized Maslow's and similar work into an understanding that one has to do ongoing work - just like in any relationship - to have a healthy, loving, active and enjoyable relationship with self. To primarily have an amiable ongoing discourse with your Inner Narrator or the voice you speak to yourself with, to have archived the ugliest internal tape loops that were originally installed by adverse events and toxic people. I feel like when I have been stagnant or in crisis, I become highly avoidant to that discourse for fear it will be mean, and actualization is moving past that fear and improving the relationship so you don't have to fear it so much.

So I think what Maslow and Humanistic Psychology would say is: pick anything that you feel feeds your mind and makes you a slightly better person in some way. This is why learning new skills can be so frustrating (the mind places high stakes on the endeavor even if it is not critical to the world) and also so satisfying. He was also big on taking responsibility for one's actions as part of that healthy satisfaction in life, because even the hard lessons have value. Observe what this practice does to your mental well-being. If in doing so you discover that you are erecting your own barriers to reaping the rewards of those exercises, see if you can dismantle them. If you identify barriers being actively created by other people in your life, consider what to do about that.

As Jefferson Airplane would say, "Feed your head."

This was never meant to be a board game where you land on Self-Actualization (or Transcendence) once and win. If you are here and able to communicate and ask this question and process the answers, you have likely experienced Self-Actualization in many moments in your life already. Just like we experience various ongoing threats to the lower physical and psychological levels that require constant re-negotiation, we continue to develop the higher ones on multiple axes. It's more of a habit than an achievement, and you create that habit one action at a time.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:34 AM on May 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I find it useful to read about ethics and moral philosophy, as well as various practices of religions. Buddhism uses the concept of self-actualization, which is reached by giving up attachments and living a moral life. Other religions use the concept of heavenly rewards. You can actually learn a fair bit from The Good Place, which is great fun as well as containing some interesting lessons.

I try to embrace the Buddhist and Quaker concepts of Right Living.

In line with We're Animals, which is accurate, I recommend Robert Sapolsky's Behave, as well as Primate's Memoir. Humans are evolved, we have complicated brains, and we have very limited free will, if any, because Nature and Nurture shape us so profoundly.

Most days, I'm a hot mess of obsessive thinking, attachment to things, foolishness, etc. It's okay, I'm just a frail human trying to get by. If I have a real philosophical statement, it's from the end of Monty Python's Meaning of Life: Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.
posted by theora55 at 10:45 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]