Hierarchy Of Needs
As I attempt to re-orient my internal compass towards prioritizing my mental and physical well-being and close relationships, I've been thinking a lot about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It's been a popular meme format for the last few years, but it may shock you to learn that it's an actual psychological theory from the 50s!
This is far from a rigorous scientific concept, and Maslow himself was kind of a weird asshole - he came up with the pyramid by studying "self-actualizing" people, believing that studying struggling people could be of no use:
"The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy" - Maslow, 1954
Not a great look. Still, like a lot of popular psychological concepts, while it may not be terribly scientific, it's been useful for a lot of people. My atrophying academic brain tends to balk at stuff like Maslow's hierarchy, the power of positive thinking, or whatever pop-sci theory manages to break containment and enter the popular discourse. But the fact remains that clearly these things are useful to a lot of people, and given that my baseline has been somewhere between moderately and deeply unhappy for most of my life, maybe I don't have a lot of ground to stand on when I reflexively start to look down my nose at things that seem to help people enjoy their lives. I'm not going to do a deep dive into his work, but the idea that you need to take care of low-level, foundational needs before you can really reach for nebulous concepts like self-actualization, or be able to love yourself, holds water to me.
So, anyway, I've been thinking about the hierarchy of needs. Something I've struggled with for the past few years, I think, is trying to ignore the bottom half of the pyramid while focusing on the top, specifically self-actualization. Believing that I had to prioritize my creative work over everything else led to a lot of sacrifice. Primarily, I've sacrificed health, sleep, and "a sense of connection" - the last one often because I'm too tired or stressed to connect with others. This becomes a vicious cycle where at any given time I'm likely either overworked or burned out, neither of which is a great position to be in to take care of the base of the pyramid. Whenever I reach the tail end of a burnout period, I start to feel like I need to self-actualize again, commit myself to some project that I think will get me there, and start the cycle over again without ever addressing the fact that I'm unhealthy and unhappy. Ironically, I think, I probably end up getting a lot less creative work done this way, since so much of my time ends up being spent recovering. There's a bit of dragon-chasing going on here: when you're really in a flow state on a project you care about, there's no better feeling in the world. But, no matter what you're working on, there will always be times when it feels like pulling teeth, especially if you're already running on empty.
Having spent the past few months forcing myself to not fall into this cycle, I am recognizing that the times in my life when I felt most self-actualized or fulfilled were times when I was maintaining those base parts of the pyramid. Probably the last time I really felt I was at "peak performance" was in grad school back in 2019: I was exercising consistently, sleeping well, and being pretty social until the pandemic, which, like many others, threw me out of my routine in a way that I am still recovering from. To be fair, I was also five years younger and had fewer ongoing health conditions to deal with. But, regardless of the reason, since then it has seemed like what limited energy budget I had to spend mostly went to big creative projects, and often at the cost of everything else.
Over the past few months I've finally gotten back the mental energy and fortitude to focus on safety, security, and base physical needs again: exercising regularly, eating well, and sleeping well, along with a stable working environment. I'm cooking, cleaning, and generally being more organized than I have in years (just don't ask me to do cable management - I can only make so many changes at once). Being more social is a work in progress - I am in my 30s now, and I turn into a pumpkin at 10pm - but it's getting better than it was.
Now that I'm doing those things, being consistently creative without burning out doesn't feel so unattainable. I'm actually really enjoying writing every day, and doing slow but consistent maintenance work on this website. Writing tends to lead me down creative paths that I've been meaning to explore, be it a code experiment or a graph I've been meaning to make, and it ends up being a virtuous cycle where I write because I feel healthy, I make things because I want to write about them, and I stay healthy because I want to keep feeling good enough to do these things. The parts that are hard or boring or painful feel less so, and the activation energy to do them decreases significantly.
None of this is terribly groundbreaking stuff, and most of us probably know it intellectually. But knowing something is different from feeling it, and I'm feeling it right now. It's always hard to tell if you're feeling bad because you're not taking care of yourself, or you're not taking care of yourself because you're feeling bad. But if you have the capacity to take care of the base of your pyramid, I recommend focusing on that before anything else. Journey before destination; marathon, not a race. I'm finding that if I prioritize the small but important things that make me feel healthy and safe, instead of thinking I have to spend whatever energy I have on leaping straight to self-actualization, I tend to wind up with what I need to make the slow climb up to the top.
