Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is brilliant, and one of the more brilliant things is what is not in his hierarchy: survival. The sum of many needs is survival, but survival itself is not a need. This is prescient because he did his research years before Watson and Crick discovered how genes are inherited and many decades before biologists realized that organisms are not driven by a desire for their individual survival but instead are driven by their genes to allow the specific genes to survive.
In Maslow’s model, eating and drinking are two of the most powerful Needs a human can have. Most people who have the luxury of using a computer to read what I am writing have ever experienced hunger or thirst to such a degree that they would be willing to sacrifice all of their other current and future needs to satisfy the present hunger or thirst. I doubt I have experienced it either, but I have a better understanding of it now that I did just three days ago.
My psychological pain has been growing for years. I live in the cracks of society; neither rejected nor embraced, expected to conform but not welcomed into the institutions that make conformity possible. My options for living a normal life are limited and unlikely. “Unlikely” as in, “it is unlikely I will win the one-hundred million dollar lottery.”
I need the pain to end, and for most of the last 60 hours, I have not felt the psychological pain. It has slowly been replaced by hunger and thirst. Liquid and food is only inches from my head but I do not consume them. I am shocked at how powerful and primal my motivation to consume them is.
That is all I wanted to share: Maslow was right. His description holds truths that most people in contemporary societies will never fully understand.
