When people think about all this stuff, they sometimes get confused about what the point is. A typical mistake is to imagine that the thing you actually want is at the top of the pyramid. Like, “I want to be an intellectual challenge for my friends.” In reality, you don’t just want those two things (the pyramid needs itself suggests that this is impossible). You want all the things.
When you don’t feel satisfied, it’s usually a bit of the “self-love” and/or “comfort” needs that go unfilled. You feel like you’re doing your best, but that’s really only part of “doing your best” – you also need the “feeling like a competent adult” and the “positive emotional connection.”
The psychological and self-fulfillment needs are not mutually exclusive. When you think about what you actually need to do well in school, you probably can’t do it without satisfying your basic needs too. The more basic your needs are, the more they come into conflict with the psychological and self-fulfillment needs.
When you think about it this way, the pyramid helps us see that the “best” is actually the least bad. It is the point of “doing your best” that seems most distant and unreachable, because the distance between it and our present reality keeps getting larger with each step. A step up feels like an increase in self-fulfillment needs, a step down feels like a loss.
What the pyramid helps us understand is that these goals are not mutually exclusive, and that getting closer to the goal will involve more and more needs. “Doing your best” requires a lot of basic needs, but they get covered up by the self-fulfillment needs that make it feel like your work is good enough. “Being an intellectual challenge” requires a lot of basic needs but a lot of self-fulfillment needs.
The thing I’m describing is how I think about this, but I’m pretty sure it’s how it’s usually thought about too. It’s a way of thinking about the needs pyramid in general, not just about how things work for me specifically.
Why do we have the pyramid? It’s not a perfect model, but I think it provides useful context and understanding.
And the more important point is just that it is useful. A lot of the stuff in the pyramid – self-fulfillment needs in particular – are very hard to motivate yourself for, and so people are often tempted to think that the self-fulfillment needs have nothing to offer, that they are more about “fun” and less about “results,” that there is some way to get results without doing any of the hard stuff.
But this is a mistake. The reason that self-fulfillment needs are a thing is that we want our work to be good. We want the results to mean something. The people who make “interesting” art are motivated by “self-fulfillment needs” of some kind, but that motivation is in service to an artistic goal. The “fun” and “results” stuff isn’t the motivating factor – the fact that art is the goal makes it all “self-fulfillment” needs at once. But it isn’t all that fun and all that useful either.