Living Longer Column, February 18, 2010 (835 words)
Why Do We Do What We Do?
& How Can We Do What We Do Better?
by Art Kunkin
Since I am planning to live for a minimum of several hundred years because of the new knowledge about longevity now developing, I am concerned with living the most productive, happy and useful life possible. (Of course, even if I were only planning to live for ten more years, those would still be my concerns). So how do I (and you) get to do that? How do we stay motivated to function at the highest level of efficiency? How do we avoid drifting from day to day, as many people do, allowing ourselves to be senselessly entertained by television and consumer sports? How do we and why should we avoid living aimlessly like bored and retired or semi-retired people simply waiting to die?
According to most of the pop psychology books, the answer to this question is simple. All we have to do is change our goals to more meaningful goals. All we have to do is write our goals down and post them on three by five cards on our refrigerator so we don’t forget them. Then according to this too-obvious advice, we should take one action after another toward our goals, even if we take only small actions at first. All we have to do is keep moving in the direction we want to go. It all sounds so easy but what motivates us to find and formulate those new goals to begin with? What gets us out of the stuck and conditioned rut we may find ourselves in?
Well, I am half way through this column now and all I have succeeded in doing is perhaps posing the problem. To get to an answer in the four hundred words remaining, let’s quickly look at psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of motivational needs.
According to Maslow, we are first motivated by such biological and physiological needs as air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc. Then, once those first needs are fulfilled, we are motivated by safety needs such as protection, security, order, law, etc. Thirdly we become motivated by belongingness and love needs such as family, relationships, our work group, our religious needs. And once those are fulfilled, Maslow says we aim for esteem needs such as achievement, status, reputation, etc.
Finally, according to this hierarchy of needs, a few creative people get motivated by something Maslow calls Self-Actualization. There is a feeling of needing to discover and achieve one’s full personal potential. There are occasional “peak experiences” of “oneness” and “spiritual drive.”
Unfortunately, as Maslow sought to redefine the objective of psychology away from its previously limited goals of healing psychological illness to creating self-actualized people, he found very few really creative people. Many children seem to be free spirits. However, as children get older and face the problems involved in the first four levels of motivation, they often became conditioned and “other-driven” instead of creative and self-actualized. As a matter of fact, Maslow came to the rather dismal conclusion that the most self-actualized, secure and most psychologically healthy people were only one percent of those over 50 years of age.
Now there can be much discussion and objection to Maslow’s analysis and even conclusions. Among them, a criticism I have is that Maslow doesn’t seem to precisely say how to educate or create his idealized unconditioned, self-actualized, self-motivated, thoroughly creative and non-bored people. So, in the hundred words remaining to me, let me try to sum up my answer to “How Can We Do What We Do Better?”
I think Maslow’s self-actualized people are motivated by what I call a sense of history, by a sense of knowing that other people have achieved great things and they, likewise, have the ability to accomplish great, creative, never-before-seen original works. Somehow, maybe by a sense of past lives welling up into their consciousness or, if you don’t believe in the possibility of past lives, perhaps by some genetic configuration of the DNA in their chromosomes, there is this inner sense of building on and competing with the achievements of past individuals.
In short, perhaps what we need to do to become more creative, motivated, productive and happy creators rather than passive consumers of entertainment is to have a greater and more conscious awareness of our heroes and heroines. Decide whom you admire most! Read about them! Admire them! Feel them inside of us! Compete with them! Then set new goals! Then write the goals on three by five cards and post them on our refrigerators! Then start and complete a new ACTION!
In other words, your role models determine your life!
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Art Kunkin is the journalist who founded the alternative weekly newspaper, The Los Angeles Free
Press, 1964 to 2010. Art’s book, “Immortality: The Secret Finally Revealed” is available through
his web site www.alchemyrevealed.com. A free introductory report about his own research into
stopping aging published in the English magazine, Fortean Times, can be obtained at
www.immortality-is-possible.com. These articles are archived at his blog artkunkin.com.
To learn more about his new organization, The Association For Living Longer (ALL),
please contact him at artkunkin@gmail.com.