You Can't Chase Love on an Empty Stomach

How can you chase true love on an empty stomach? And who wants to hear about your dreams before you've even put a roof over your head? We all carry different needs: we chase a full meal, a comfortable home, the approval of others, the values of freedom and democracy, and our own dreams. To make sense of what drives human beings, Abraham Maslow proposed the Hierarchy of needs. Because the theory is so often drawn as a pyramid, it is also known as the pyramid of needs. These needs propel each of us through life. On one hand we hustle for three square meals, for a place to live, for a better Hong Kong; on the other, we sometimes feel baffled when someone gives up the pursuit of an ideal or a value for the sake of others. So what exactly is the Hierarchy of needs? And what does it have to do with the search for meaning in life?

The Hierarchy of Needs

In the Hierarchy of needs, Maslow sorts human needs into five levels: physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, esteem needs, and self-actualisation. Physiological needs refer to an organism's requirement for air, food, sex and the like; these are generally regarded as the lowest level of pursuit. Safety needs sit one level above the physiological. Beyond survival, they call for physical, psychological and economic well-being, and they touch on every aspect of personal security. Social needs are about connection with other people and with communities — the pursuit of love and of belonging within a group. Esteem needs belong to a higher level still: people seek personal glory, an identity, and recognition from others. The highest level, self-actualisation, refers to fully realising one's own ideals, drawing out one's potential, living out one's personal values and finding one's own meaning in life. The higher the level of need, the more abstract the concepts it tends to involve. Broadly speaking, people satisfy the lower-level needs first and then pursue the higher-level ones. Once a person has met the needs of a given stage, those lower-level needs no longer act as a driving force; instead, higher-level needs become the engine of their life. In The Meaning of Life, the philosopher Yin Hai-kuang proposed four levels of human life — the "physical layer", the "biological-logical layer", the "biocultural layer", and "the true, the good and the beautiful, the ideal and the moral". Although the two thinkers emphasise somewhat different directions, both make clear that the cultures of East and West alike hold that human life should not stop at meeting the needs of survival, but reach instead for higher moral values.

Putting the Hierarchy of Needs to Use

Many people may have heard of the "Hierarchy of needs", but do you know how we can put it to use in everyday life? First, we can treat it as a tool for understanding people. When we observe that someone has not yet begun to pursue values or meaning, the reason may be that they are still bound up in lower-level needs. When a person has not yet met lower-level needs such as safety or belonging, then according to the theory, they find it hard to channel their resources into higher-level pursuits. In real life, some people may not understand what the freedom and democracy that young people fight for actually amount to, or why young people are unwilling to be a lifelong "wage earner" content to spend their days in quiet security. Such people may simply be lingering at a lower level of need, and in the short term they find it hard to advance to a higher one. This shows that the pursuit of life's value is not a goal everyone is chasing. Even if it is the ultimate need of human life, a person who has not satisfied their lower-level needs will not necessarily recognise that they need to search for meaning, and so will fix their attention on the pursuit of material things and esteem instead.

The theory can also be applied to people management. The Hierarchy of needs gives managers a framework for understanding their staff. Through various means, managers can come to understand an employee's personal background and attitude to work, and from there gauge what that employee's greatest need is at the moment. The theory holds that a person's drive is built on their needs of the moment, so when managers can grasp what their staff need, they can use a correspondingly fitting form of encouragement to spur their staff's motivation at work. For example, if an employee is still wrestling with making ends meet in the short term, an employer who keeps banging on about dreams and values is completely missing that employee's needs, and offers no hope of meeting them; while if an employee is set on self-actualisation within the company and wants a chance to spread their wings, talking to them only about pay falls on deaf ears. Applied with care, the Hierarchy of needs can meet employees' needs in life while injecting fresh energy into the workplace — a win on both fronts. If you would like to learn how psychological theory can inform corporate training, you are welcome to get in touch with TreeholeHK.

Of course, the levels of the Hierarchy of needs are not absolute. Some people value the pursuit of personal ideals above their own safety. There is an old saying — "a scholar may be killed, but not humiliated" — meaning that dignity matters more than life itself; in certain situations, people's decisions need not follow the layers of the Hierarchy of needs at all. Whatever the case, the Hierarchy of needs is a framework that helps us understand human motivation; used aptly, and paired with other theories or models, it lets us understand each individual more systematically. "How can you chase true love on an empty stomach?" Seeking true love is rather like self-actualisation: no matter how much you long for the values of love, you are still better off eating a good meal first.