Posted by Luke in Recently I heard somebody say that they thought Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was crap because people trade things for security at the different levels they are at. One thing that struck me was that the argument that it’s crap rests on the idea that self-preservation is worth more to us that our needs. What do I mean?
Well, most people will trade off a certain amount of personal security to gain money and often vice versa. People will solve a problem that makes more problems for them, simply because they don’t want to solve the key problem. This is a form of self-preservation and I think it poisons us. It’s a problem that I think we really haven’t found an easy answer to at any stage. You could say it this way, “self-preservation is a problem because it makes us think, act and behave in ways that gives us an illusion of security”.
This illusion of security presents to us a false belief that by having a stable source of income now I will be more secure later. That is, security is formed around concepts of self-preservation… which may or may not be a good thing. In a made effort to preserve ourselves we can destroy our true potential because we may protect ourselves from growth because it may “hurt” or “cause problems”. The question I will leave you with in this short post is this: How do you know that this pain you may experience may not be precisely what you need to grow?
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