Your Position on Maslow's Hierarchy?

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Where would you place yourself on Maslow's Hierarchy? I'm curious to know how far up most WP people feel they are. If your position isn't clear please post comments to explain. Also post comments just to elaborate generally if you want to.

Google Maslow's Hierarchy if you're not familiar with the model, Google Images provides many good example pyramids. But in brief the levels are:

5.Self-Actualisation (morality, creativity, spontaneity...)
4.Esteem (self-esteem, achievement, mutual respect)
3.Love/Belonging (friendship, family, intimacy)
2.Safety (security of health, livelihood, property, family etc.)
1.Physiological (the physical requirements for human survival)

...and the idea is that you shouldn't be able to move up a level until you've fulfilled the criteria for the one below, although in reality we're all in several positions at once broadly speaking.

How are you considering what level you are at? The level that you've last succeeded all of what's at it? The level that you are working on? What?

Also, what are the halfway points? I've never seen those before.

I think if you want answers you should say more of how you are expecting people to answer. (Or at least that's true for me)

Well, I placed myself at 2.5 because I have several of the Safety needs fulfilled (but by no means all), but I also have some of the Love/Belonging level. Putting myself halfway up Safety seemed to place most of the 'have's' and 'have not's' on the appropriate sides of the dividing line. It's a completely subjective self-report and by no means an exact science.

My phrasing of the question "Where would you place yourself on Maslow's Hierarchy?" was intended to indicate this and leave people free to interpret it as desired. The original model is too primitive to do much else with in my opinion, short of spending months preparing an extensive study based on it, but it can still be used to roughly gauge what level of survival/fulfilment people feel they are existing at.

I added the halfway points since they seemed sensible to just expand the scale a little for this purpose, otherwise the criticism would be that the options were too "all or nothing" for most people. I think it's interesting that so far the halfway options are so much more popular. It makes perfect sense that that's happened, but it's interesting to see it occurring all the same.

I selected 'self actualisation' but I feel that I have never achieved 'esteem' and have had variable success in 'love/belonging' and 'safety'.

There is absolutely no way for me to answer this correctly.

It would be like putting bicycle riding as a 2 and crawling as a 5. It makes no sense.
Who's mind thought of this one.

I disagree with the hierarchy. I tend to turn it upside down--things like morality and achievement, being who I am, doing the important things I'm meant to do, are more important to me than basic needs like food, sleep, and security.

Unless I have a purpose in life, I can't live. Nothing else matters. I'd rather be doing something important than be safe, warm, fed, and housed.

You ever read "Man's Search for Meaning"? That's pretty much the way I see it. The guy who wrote it was a psychologist who lived through the Nazi concentration camps. There's a lot of talk about finding purpose and meaning in life.

My pyramid of needs would also not be shaped like this one at all, and would have doing meaningful stuff much lower down (probably the "important stuff, meaning to do stuff" level would be the 2nd level - food, water and warmth would still be first, but then it jumps to something related to the 5th level) before security.

The important stuff is more important. Being able to stay fed, watered, and warm, and to some degree sleep is necessary, because without that my body shuts down, but after that it goes straight to that. And those can be compromised to not having enough, one meal a day and 3 hours of sleep is enough at times.

Either way I'm currently struggling with the basic needs level, despite working on the important stuff level, so I'm answering with struggling with the basic needs level.

If you didn't happen to have somewhere safe to live and enough to eat, believe me - that would be your main focus, so it is in the right order of priorities.

So imagine yourself homeless with no money and nothing to eat - now tell me what are you going to focus on - your morals or finding somewhere to sleep/stay and eat?

I don't buy into the whole pyramid thing. I am comfortable saying I have 1,2,4 and 5. But nothing that resembles 3.

One could easily have self esteem and self actualization without friendships or belongings. In fact, in my experience, if one is to base self esteem and actualization off of relationships to others then they are bound to failure. Having your self esteem being based on others friendships (as the pyramid proposes) is a disaster waiting to happen. you can't base you self esteem off of others. That's outright stupid. Self esteem and actualization is something you need to get to yourself.

Last edited by Cash__ on 24 Dec 2012, 10:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

I disagree

Self-esteem is directly linked to other-esteem; it does not occur in a vacuum

Ok. Others are free to tie their self esteem into acceptance from other people. I choose not to. I basically live and work in a vacuum so it is possible possible to have self esteem without others.

I can't do it anyway

It's how others relate to us as well as how we relate to ourselves that forms our personalities
- that's how it generally works

I suspect that when you do interact with others, it doesn't go too badly, hence it's not having an adverse effect on your self-esteem but you see it as being all down to your own efforts

Human beings are designed to interact with others - their brains respond positively to it, so no positive interaction with others is not good for us.

Oh no. I do not interact with others very often and when I do it goes horribly awry. It was at the suggestion of my counselor that I do not tie others acceptance into my self esteem. It has been some of the best advice I have ever been given.

Now that I think about it more. You are correct. Self esteem probably does tie directly into other-esteem. I made a conscious decision to remove it, which I wouldn't of had to do if it wasn't naturally there in the first place.

OK. I changed the rules of the game. In the words of Seinfeld, "you're a step skipper".

Interesting

I think I try to do the same as you but I only have to interact with others and have it not go well and my self-esteem goes down ie I don't have control over it.

I deal with this by avoiding people to avoid the damage they invariably do to my self-esteem as I am not able to stop this damage as my mind isn't that strong.

I don't avoid all interaction with others, I just seek to limit it to interaction that is more likely to go well than not.

I voted 2.5 because I have truly passed the levels below 3, but am still working on the ones above 2. I don't even know what self-actualization would be to me, though I have a better conception of what esteem and love/belonging would mean to me.

I don't "have enough to eat". Because of my disability I don't have the ability to reliably feed myself, and thus am having problems with being low on some nutrients. I live in a house that we can't afford to heat, my bedroom is regularly under 50 degrees when I wake up, and we need to make sure that we are managing to keep the pipes from freezing.

I do have a roof over my head. I do have one meal a day. I'm not in as bad of shape as other people. But its still not that simple.

You'd say according to this hierarchy that people in this situation, who cannot reliably afford to buy food because they are that low on money, who have a disability that interferes with eating at all, then interferes with a well balanced diet. Who lives in a house where they can't afford to heat, where they can't afford to pay the bills for electricity, where they can't afford rent, or any of that. That they would at the very least be focusing on the security level.

But as a whole people here aren't. People here are doing exactly what you are saying to Callista that she wouldn't do if she didn't have no money. Yesterday we couldn't afford to buy food for dinner and ate leftovers from coffee hour at church because they gave us the leftovers. But, the focus isn't on that, its still on things like what a teacher does for their students, or a mother for their children, or volunteering tutoring autistic students, or helping drug addicted teenagers overcome addiction, or designing robots that do new interesting things at a company that doesn't pay yet because that's what is this person's life. And that's even before getting to the level of morals, people necessarily don't suddenly break morals because they are poor and hungry. The poor, the homeless, the hungry, aren't dangerous just because they are poor. They don't suddenly make different decisions. They don't suddenly act differently.