Have you ever wondered what the meaning of life is? Well according to Abraham Maslow (the late American psychologist), we exist to satisfy needs both for ourselves and others. Maslow created a visual aid called the Hierarchy of Needs, depicting the psychological and physical levels of human needs. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs is a pyramid consisting of 5 levels, which are what I am going to discuss.
The lowest level, the base of the pyramid, is physiological needs. These needs are basic for survival and must be satisfied first before moving up the pyramid. These physiological needs consist of; air, water, food, rest, etc. The second level is safety needs, which involve self preservation as well as physical and financial well-being. Safety needs consist of; shelter, clothing, protection from threats, and so on. The third level, social needs, is the most important in terms of interpersonal communication and I will elaborate on it soon. But social needs are concerned with love and friendship and the concept of being accepted, appreciated, loved, and cared for. The fourth level is self-esteem, or personal needs, which include the need for achievement, status, prestige, and the desire to respect ourselves and be respected by others. The fifth and final level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is self actualization needs. This is the notion of personal fulfillment; the ability to fulfill our potential and become everything we are capable of being.
Now, you may not necessarily agree with this theory, I mean, I agree that we are all trying to chase success, but I don’t think it’s our sole purpose on this planet. I don’t think life is so simple that we can structure it and condense it into five stages. However, upon deeper analysis of the third level (social needs), I found that many of the needs we have in this area connect to many, if not all of my relationships. Interesting.
Social needs, or interpersonal needs, can be broken down into three separate categories; inclusion, control, and affection. As people we want to be included in society, clubs, teams, relationships etc. We want control, we want to be able to do what we want to do, and if we don’t want control, we will seek relationships with controlling people in which we relinquish our control. And your original perception of affection may be that we just want to be loved and cuddled, however, it means that we want to have power over other people, but this power is based on other people’s perceptions of us. Power must be given to us by our peers; it does not just come because we want it.
The needs we have (our self needs) are often hard to measure for ourselves for a number of reasons. Often we do not have an awareness of what we want within specific areas of needs. The problem here is that if we don’t know what we need, we can’t request it and obviously we won’t receive it. We may also repress our needs, not admitting them to ourselves or our relationship partners, which causes immense frustration for both parties in the relationship. We may distort our needs to make them seem like more or less than they really are. Finally, we may avoid our needs by moving on to other activities or conversational topics whenever this need arises. I’m sure you have either witnessed or performed many of these in your interpersonal experiences, I know I have.
In contrast to the self needs, there are other needs. They are essentially the exact opposite of self needs and they are just as difficult to analyze. Self fulfilling prophecies assume that some is a certain way, so we treat them this way and regardless of whether they were this way or not, they will start acting how we treat them. Concealment is when other people try to hide their needs. Verbal and non-verbal behavior can mean multiple things, but we naturally assume we know what is being communicated, when more often than not we are actually so much more far off than we think. Selective interaction is when we choose to interact with people whom have similar or matching needs to our own. We get so used to seeing these needs that if a new need arises, it is unrecognizable to us and we are unable to fulfill it. Finally, sometimes we overvalue the intent of people’s behavior and interpret the way they act in a way they didn’t intend. A common example for me is if I talk to someone who has just had a bad day, or even had a fight on the phone. They may have not had enough time to get over this negativity and they still talk to you with an unintentional attitude. This is where we often overvalue their intent of behavior and we may think they are mad at us, when really they are just frustrated at an external source.
Obviously our needs change over our lifespan and between males and females, but do you really think that the only reason we exist is to fulfill these needs? I can see where Maslow was coming from, but I don’t buy it, we strive for success and we compete to reach the top of our field, but at the end of the day it’s only physiological and safety needs that we physically can’t live without.
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