Transcendence
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is such a useful heuristic for business and professional achievement as to be a cliché, and it mirrors, with uncanny symmetry, the lifecycles of a company and a person’s career.
At the base is bodily survival. Air, food, water. Enough revenue to keep the lights on or open a bank account.
Meet those needs, and you begin seeking shelter. You build a fence or two. Sharpen a pile of rocks into arrowheads. Put a little cash back into the business. Write a resume. Look for a better job. Start a 401 (k).
Once you’re no longer exposed to the elements, naked, and starving, you start considering ways to consolidate your gains through belonging. You make friends with colleagues. You go to networking events. You hire that first person. The second. The third. Suddenly, you’re part of a tribe on its way to becoming a village.
Now comes the flex of the ego. Esteem. Power. Control. You seek recognition. Prestige. Prowess. A desire for more. You’re building a brand.
But is it the best brand? Is it the right role? Are you happy, fulfilled? Have you truly optimized all the things—your talent, your capabilities, your teams, your spend, your efficiencies—to achieve, to actualize, to be the person, the company, the brand that you know you can be? What are the consultants saying? The growth hackers? The voice in your head when you’re trying to sleep at night? The problems you appear to be inventing to keep an edge? And why, at the pinnacle of what should be your existence, do you feel trapped inside the padded walls of your own skull and hunted by shadows?
Because these are the questions that plague the peak of self-actualization.
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When I was still teaching, I ended every course by having the class sit in a circle and read aloud, paragraph by paragraph, David Foster Wallace’s "This Is Water." There’s some really wise shit in this tiny tome, and here’s how it starts:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
Wallace goes on to argue that everything in our immediate experience supports our deep belief that we, as individuals, are the absolute center of the universe, “the realest, most vivid and important” people.
Of course, we don’t like to think about this natural, basic self-centeredness, because “it’s so socially repulsive,” but it’s also pretty much universally true.
“It is,” Wallace argues, “our default setting, hardwired into our boards at birth. Think about it,” he writes. “There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.”
Wallace makes no judgment here. But he does make an urgent case for how to keep yourself from going through a “comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life” as “a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone.”
Because we’re not alone, we’ve never been alone.
We exist in a highly interconnected, intersectional, and interdependent system of sentience with other individuals, just as unique and complex as ourselves.
And that real personal freedom involves “attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
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In the years before he died, Maslow became increasingly dissatisfied with the pinnacle of his pyramid. His hierarchy had been popularized in a culture obsessed with corporate achievement and self-help, self-centric mantras for amassing personal gain. Nothing wrong with that, exactly. Just incomplete and a bit hollow.
He began drafting a theory of an additional level of being, in which the fully realized person is absorbed in something larger than the self. A transcendence.
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Cynicism is abundant. Maybe increasingly so. And there are days when I struggle to know why I do what I do, despite my great luck at getting to do anything at all with the skills I enjoy most. Post-late capitalism, post-human creative, post-communal communities. All pixels are converging into an impenetrable ocean of data. And either you’re in the money, just outside the money, or evicted entirely from the chambers of loose coinage.
And yet I contend that the greatest organizations in this world remain composed of a relentless desire to be more than the sum of their parts. To achieve a distinction of cohesion and talent and difference that turns an idea into an icon. To transcend the constraints of the market, the norms of the industry, the commonplace of advertising, the emptiness of a category promise, the blah of the slop coming through the screen of your phone. To make something of itself that is lasting and true, real and good.
And where absent, for there is plenty of absence, the problem is not the lack of ambition. It is the lack of substance. Of meaning. Of genuine, aligned intent to do a thing that matters, no matter the twilight dissolving the pink sorbet in the high clouds above the mountains.
Even now, we are moving, as Maslow argued before he died, from becoming the fullest version of ourselves to being beyond the self. What he called “plateau experiences.” A kind of serene, sustained, noetic awareness of the miraculous in the ordinary business of life.
Like water.
