The Self-Actualization Economy

The courage to live our own lives

Dear Friends,

If you’re in the United States, I hope that you had a lovely Thanksgiving. Iris cooked a mouth-watering chipotle albóndigas soup and I contributed a persimmon salad and pumpkin pie.

I was grateful for many things on Thursday, but especially for Iris, who has kept me grounded through a bunch of minor setbacks over the past month¹ (and the ocean, which I missed more than I knew).

Walking along Sunset Cliffs on Thanksgiving morning before a long swim in the sea

Moving on: What was the point of last week’s newsletter? It wasn’t my clearest piece of writing to be sure. There was something I wanted to describe and something I wanted to argue — and I feel that I came up short on both.

I wanted to describe what it was like to travel internationally as a poor college student in the early 2000s and then return as a 40-something professional: how much the global economy has transformed over the past two decades and the impossibility of predicting which countries would become very rich and which would stagnate.²

As for the argument, it’s embarrassingly simple really: As a country (on average), we have enough money and material stuff. We could keep growing material consumption, marketing, and social media, but none of it will make us any happier. And so we ought to be in favor of higher taxes on (non-essential) consumption, inheritance, property, and capital gains to fund the things that will make our lives less stressful: child care and elder care, public safety, healthcare, libraries, good public education, community college, and parks.³

I wanted to explore: What does Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs look like applied to an entire country? How does a rich country like the US shift its focus from high economic growth and low unemployment to supporting other parts of the human experience: our relationships, health, creativity, and sense of belonging?

Loneliness and distrust have only gotten worse in the 23 years since Putnam wrote Bowling Alone. His latest book, How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, describes how America became more community-minded from 1900 through the 1960s.⁴ But then:

Between the mid-1960s and today … we have been experiencing declining economic equality, the deterioration of compromise in the public square, a fraying social fabric and a descent into cultural narcissism.

In July, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act to create an Office of Social Connection Policy within the White House to give federal agencies guidance to increase social connection. Will another office in the White House coordinating across federal agencies accomplish anything more than slide decks and bureaucratic bloat? Probably not. But at least we’re transitioning from lamenting an epidemic of loneliness to doing something about it.

A sensible libertarian might ask, Why should the government take more taxes from my paycheck to build a new library, playground, or swimming pool when I am dealing with inflation (and would rather buy a new TV, video game, or record player)?

I don’t have a better answer than a paternalistic “Trust me, you’re going to be happier at your local library with your neighbors than shopping on Amazon alone in your living room.” But is it for me to tell others how to live their lives? “No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people,” observed William Taft.

While thinking through this week’s newsletter and my own position on the role of the government in facilitating social connection, solidarity, and compromise, I realized how relatively good we have it.

Iris and I are (unexpectedly) in San Diego this month, and even the poorest neighborhoods have pretty great libraries, skate parks, and public pools. There are non-profit YMCAs and for-profit cross-fit centers in every neighborhood. There are farmers markets, concerts in the park, coffee shops, and crowded bars.

Whether private, public, or nonprofit, there are plenty of opportunities to connect with our communities. If we instead choose to read a newsletter, binge-watch a Netflix show, or look at Instagram, it’s ultimately our choice. (Hopefully, we get something out of that too.)

As I look to the future, I feel fairly optimistic that we’ll want to spend less of our time and money on things and screens that isolate us and more on experiences that make us feel connected.

What is self-actualization anyway?

It had been some time since I revisited Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” and his 1943 article A Theory of Human Motivation. Humans are “a perpetually wanting animal,” he writes, and we spend our days partly satisfied and partly dissatisfied. To feel fully satisfied, we must first attend to our basic needs of food, shelter, health, and safety.

From there, Maslow says we need to feel love from friends and family to build self-esteem and confidence. That makes sense. But in my experience, it’s often the other way around. As James Clear puts it:

“The ability to love yourself improves your ability to be loved.

The person with a healthy self-esteem doesn’t have to jump into any relationship because they already have a great one wherever they go.”

Whether it’s love and belonging that build our self-esteem or self-esteem that leads to love and belonging, once we have both Maslow says we reach our potential through self-actualization. What’s a self-actualizer? According to Maslow and his peers:⁵

• Self-actualizers accept their own human nature with all its flaws. The shortcomings of others and the contradictions of the human condition are accepted with humor and tolerance.

• Independent, not reliant on culture and environment to form opinions and views.

• Spontaneous and natural. True to oneself, rather than being how others want.

• Non-hostile sense of humor. This refers to the ability to laugh at oneself.

• All of Maslow's subjects reported the frequent occurrence of peak experiences marked by feelings of ecstasy, harmony, and deep meaning.

• The self-actualizer seems to constantly renew appreciation of life's basic goods. A sunset or a flower will be experienced as intensely time after time as it was at first.

• Few close intimate friends rather than many perfunctory relationships. They share deep relationships with a few but also feel identification and affection towards the entire human race.

I aspire to all of those descriptions, and often I fall short. My humor becomes hostile. I take beauty for granted. I ignore my closest friends while messing around with people I’ll never see again. I resist spontaneity, lured by a false need for control.

But here I am at 43 with a whole year of midlife freedom to chart a path toward self-actualization for the second half of life. My friend Revaz recently put me back in touch with the wisdom of 83-year-old James Hollis. His description of midlife as a period of courageous creativity between the first and second half of life still speaks to me:

The task of the first half of life is ego building. I have to build a sense of myself and become functional enough to meet my parents’ expectations, to deal with what the teacher wants from me, to cope with playmates on the playground … and ultimately with my colleagues, spouse, employers, and so forth. But in the end, what I've achieved is a set of adaptations.

And then the question is, what is the right path for you? That sounds very simple, but that's the project of the second half of life, which is the recovery of personal authority. We find the courage to live our own life.

So that’s one more thing to feel grateful for this Thanksgiving weekend: The chance to find the courage to live my own life. And to have an entire second half of life to deepen those intimate friendships that mean so much.

And dear reader, I am grateful to you too. I have an idea for the next four newsletters I would like to write, and the topics all come from messages I have received from you.⁶

I hope you had a gratitude-infused Thanksgiving and a self-actualized Sunday,

David

1. First a cold that wouldn’t go away, then someone stole my gravel bike, and then our renters moved out of our house in Seattle, prolonging our trip and taking a hit to our sabbatical budget. But as Iris reminded me, Who says life is without problems? And that ours are minor in the grand scheme of things.

2. Mexico was five times wealthier per capita than China in 1990. Today China is the richer country. But which country will have the stronger economy over the next 30 years? Who knows!! Similarly, Noah Smith gave some compelling reasons why Egypt’s economy could outperform over the next decade. Maybe, but I’m not buying the VanEck Egypt Index ETF, which has depreciated 70% since it first launched in 2010. Or maybe I should?

3. It’s such a basic liberal agenda, but I wonder if there is more bipartisan support for the basics as political debate is stuck on gender, sexuality, guns, abortion, race, and permissible speech?

4. While recognizing the insane inequalities and discrimination of the time based on race, gender, and sexuality

5. As summarized on Wikpedia

6. Those four topics:

1. The question isn’t why it was so easy to fire Sam Altman. Rather, why is it impossible to fire Mark Zuckerberg?

2. Freedom from ethnic determinism: Intergenerational trauma is real, but not inevitable

3. How to de-optimize, optimally: Optimization as a false antidote to limbic capitalism

4. Writing is for robots? Orality makes a comeback