An Alternative to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Allow me to present:
The Babushka1 Dolls of Concerns.
Unlike Maslow’s tidy pyramid, which implies that the next rung cannot be reached until the bottom is satisfied2, the babushka dolls of concerns always exist within one another. You might be able to set aside the biggest one and look at the tiniest concern (what to make for dinner)—and maybe it is your favorite of the lot, the cutest to be sure, and the one that feels most managable—but it will always belong nestled within the other concerns.
For the metaphor to work, we have to envision a truly unwieldy set of dolls. Which shouldn’t be too hard to do. Just take your biggest concern and give it an intricately designed, portly ceramic body. Climate change and its devastating effects on the planet’s ability to sustain life, for example, is not a doll that can comfortably sit on a table. Even the thought of lifting it should make your muscles ache with effort.
My philosophy is that no concern is so big that nothing can be done about it, so this ceramic body should not be city-sized. Maybe just about the size of a Fiat. It seems impossible to move, but you can imagine a world where one might be able to carry the concern away. Probably not without help. And though moving it might be a possibility, we can’t be expected to carry a Fiat with us at all times. We leave that concern parked where we left it, though we aren’t too surprised every now and then to find it late at nights in our beds.
Within a Fiat it may not seem like there’s a lot of space, but you have to remember just how small some of our concerns are, and how tightly our dolls can fit within each other. Some so tightly that they stick when we try to seperate them, that we have trouble identifying which is bigger at just a glance.3 We have to really twist them apart, and often don’t even realize that we’ve left one concern within another, giving one some added weight.
But of course we do rend them apart, lest they paralyze us with their weight.
We go about our days as best we can, trying to keep the concerns we carry with us to those that at least will not break our backs during our day-to-day. Finances, careers, the state of world, yes, but in a hazy way. Not the doll itself, but a portrait of the doll rolled up inside a smaller doll to fit into our financial concerns. Not job security, but keeping a grocery tab below $100.
Yes, lawmakers want to cut services from the poor, the needy, and the middle class to give tax breaks to billionaires; a travesty while staring at that particular babushka doll, but at the grocery store it is a sigh while deciding whether to pay an extra two dollars for the eggs encased in plastic instead of styrofoam (to appease the Fiat—wait, will the Fiat be appeased? Which is the less evil choice?).
The grocery bags are heavy enough as it is.
Sometimes we think the teensiest babushka doll is deciding what to make for dinner, but its weight is still a burden, and so we set it aside and open it up and find a concern so small it is quaint: we have not read enough books this year. And our concern about what to make for dinner is not about dinner at all, but about the time it takes in deciding what to cook, and the cooking time itself, and the cleanup. In my case, I listen to audiobooks while cooking and cleaning and so the concerns aren’t quite related. They are maybe more like Schroedinger’s babushka dolls; they both exist within the larger concern of time’s limited resource, just not at the same time. Time’s limited resource, of course, nestled within other concerns, so it kind of looks like this:
MORTALITY!!
Life as we know it will not survive a climate-changed planet.
Oh right, the billionaire class are fueling authoritarianism and climate change.
Actually, they’re ruining industries. There are other forces ruining other parts of society. Like the modern day gestapo, and warmongers, and the industrialists pillaging the earth.
Venture capital money is ruining everything
The publishing world and the film world, your industry and potential industry, are funnelling money upward to just a handful of heavy hitters, thanks partially to larger corporate controls that care more about the bottom line than the products/services they offer
The finnicky publishing world has not offered you a deal in a while
Finances are not as strong as one would like
How to stretch the limited resource of time to work more/sleep more/read more and still have time and money left for fun
Time is a limited resource
Needing more time to make dinner/read books
I’d like to listen to this audiobook but am getting distracted by what I need to make for dinner
Will I reach my reading goal for the year?
Cartoon by Asher Perlman
Despite what the above might intimate, I am not the kind to spiral, concern-wise. It is more like I’m playing with babushka dolls. Putting them all together so I’m only staring at the big one, setting aside smaller worries (is that half onion in the fridge still good?) so I can properly consider the state of the world.
Though, like most people who at least try to hang onto their sanity, I don’t spend too long on that big babushka doll. I’m a concerned citizen of the world and want to leave this place better than I found it, but I know how much weight I can reasonably heft on a daily basis.
Wait a second.4
Real-time epiphany here, folks. Or pherhaps real-time unraveling of this post’s entire argument. The metaphor isn’t quite right. The babushka dolls are a little more Escher-esque than that. The smaller concerns open up to reveal a larger concern hidden within. And one with perhaps several offshoots. I started attempting a crass pictoral representation, but I got as far as the following image before I decided to concern myself with something else.
As you can see, my pictoral representations leave quite a bit to be desired. Or maybe there was a reason that Maslow chose an easy to draw and comprehend shape to embody his theory.
I wish it were as convenient as a pyramid. But I think that what concerns us is a constant unraveling and restacking of larger concerns within smaller ones. Small, manageable, every day concerns that we can carry with us because our actual concerns—the state of the world, maybe—could crush us like a small Italian car. The cherry on top of the pyramid is that the dolls sometimes have minds of their own. We may choose one doll to focus on (applying for a job) but it’ll scurry away and climb into a larger one (am I qualified to do anything but what I’ve done), and then those two will open up and reveal that inside them is an even larger doll (is capitalism going to kill everything). And just facing that thought might empty your soul for a moment, until you shake your head and twist the doll open and get back to the delightful, maddening concern that eats away at all of us:
What am I going to make for dinner?
Also known as Matryoshka dolls, but babushka is just more fun to say.
Okay, I’m inferring about the pyramid; it’s been a long time since Psych 101 and I’m not sure if that’s what Maslow actually meant, but I think I’m right.
I’ll stretch the truth about the actual dolls here, since there is a measurable way to tell which is bigger than the other, whereas how can one be expected to accurately distinguish which is the larger concern: the rise of authoritarianism that seeks to violently punish those caught beneath its boots, or the violent rammifications of the billionaire class, how it subjects others to starvation and disease and violence in order to inflate its net worth.
Wait a second.