Tom's Love Quest

Dear [Mentat],

Well, we don’t have to become   better   than anyone else at making good relationships, so long as we possess the skills necessary to create one that meets our basic needs. As with any relationship (romantic, friendship, professional), the measure of its goodness would be how well it gratifies the basic needs its supposed to gratify. If a relationship gratifies well, then it’s good enough. If not, then seek another.

I think we need to consider, for the various activities being discussed, what needs each activity is aimed at gratifying. Athletics, music, sports, … don’t generally satisfy the same need(s) that a love relationship does. Piano-playing, sports, and athletics would seem to better gratify levels four and five needs [in Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle] than a love relationship which primarily centers around level three. We’ve discussed elsewhere that the relative urgencies of needs gratification change depending on what level we’re talking about, and that people in general feel more compelled to fulfill the lower level needs before the higher ones. Maslow demonstrates this by asking the question: If we thwart an organism’s ability to gratify all its basic needs, which ones will it attempt to gratify first? In short, he says that it will first seek air, food, and shelter. Then it will seek to be secure, and then it will seek love, then esteem, and finally, when all the lower needs are basically satisfied, it reaches for self-actualization. Thus, level three needs tend to be more immediately important than the higher ones. So it’s no wonder that the lovelorn might devote more of themselves to finding a lover than say, doing missionary work in the Congo.

We also must understand that a single activity along with its corollary activities often satisfies needs at more than one level. Part of playing piano publicly involves interacting with maestros, the audience, promoters, and such, in addition to actually plunking the keys. It’s conceivable then, that a person might play   not   just for the sake of being creative, but maybe he enjoys working with others collaboratively (belonging and esteem). Then again, the collaboration may not excite him at all, so he might play only by himself. The point to get is that different people play for different reasons, and even the same person likely plays for multiple reasons. Why they play really depends on which needs they need to gratify. And that combination as well as the relative urgency of each need in that combo is as unique to the individual as the finger print. Piano-playing for example, can satisfy the level four esteem needs such as approval from others, world-class excellence, and such, as well as those of creativity and purposeless expression at level five. When we play to gratify the esteem needs, then what I’ve said about having to practice much to gain a competitive edge in world markets applies. The more world-class our performance, the louder the applause from the most respectable people, and so the more effectively our esteem needs are met. On the other hand, if our esteem needs have been satiated over all from some other (even unrelated) pursuit, and we then play piano strictly for level five needs gratification, then what you’ve said about how internally gratifying it can be without involving external measures is also accurate.

You seem to be evaluating the worth of activities from primarily a level five perspective (the creative, edifying, and spontaneous concerns), while I’m focused down at levels three and four (the pragmatic, coping, and adaptive considerations). We’re both right here, assuming that the concept of righteousness applies at all. More on this in the next few segments.

Tom Hesley