In a recent blog post, I made the statement that an issue with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is that it artificially gates levels from one another. The following post is a digestion of a conversation a colleague and I had diving into that premise.

To restate my claim:

The classical problem with Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is that it is set up in a way where one layer precludes the others. Hunger gates love; Love gates aesthetic pursuit. I think life is less linear than that.

Paraphrasing my colleague: Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs doesn’t actually gate the levels from one another. People who “enjoy” cold showers do so voluntarily. Maslow’s model doesn’t preclude one from choosing aesthetic ventures lest one’s hunger is fully sated. The hierarchy provides order to ones needs when there’s no choice between them all. Fasting in meditation or getting lost on a hike for fun is only available to someone who has the levels below covered. The main insight here being that reaching a level in the hierarchy includes access to all the previous levels much like rewards program tiers.

Even with the insight of being able move back to previous levels there are still corner cases that Maslow’s model doesn’t cover. Starving humans or refugees still have the capacity for love and aesthetic venture. War torn countries still have poets in them to record what the war felt like over what happened in the war. The human spirit perseveres, and it means more to be a human than to hunt and gather. In John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars”, the main character have a very, very close brush with cancer for the nth time. Despite this they fall in love and find themselves, etc., etc. This is fiction, but it does tell the story of using humanity to pull you through a struggle. Maybe the hierarchy of needs can be restacked if precariously.

Paraphrasing my colleague again: The privation of one level can be ignored for one, but not indefinitely nor totally. If you have to haul your water and gather your food, these things will necessarily take time away from your work in the upper levels of the hierarchy. That doesn’t preclude you from any time in the upper levels. While Maslow’s model may seem very fluid and voluntary to someone who has been afforded such luxury, this doesn’t hold for someone who has known true hunger.

And here I think the use of the model is much more fleshed out. Even though the main character of “The Fault in Our Stars” is dying of cancer (and fictional (both quite the hit to ones physiological layer of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs)), they still have food to eat, water that runs, and time ostensibly free enough to fall in love.