Burnout and Belonging
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Welcome to Recalibrating! My name is Callum (@_wanderloots)
Join me each week as I learn to better life in every way possible, reflecting and recalibrating along the way to keep from getting too lost.
Thanks for sharing the journey with me ✨
This week we are going to talk about the next level of Maslow’s Hierarchy: Belonging/Love needs and how this concept fits into modern social networks.
Introduction and Connection to Last Week:
Last week, we touched on personal knowledge management (PKM) as a way to seek new experiences, make sense of what we have experienced, and share those experiences with others.
This week, we are going to continue on the last point, sharing experiences, by moving up to Level 3 of Maslow’s Hierarchy.
While Maslow structured the hierarchy as a pyramid, with each level requiring satisfaction before moving to the next, there has been a lot of criticism to this rigid hierarchical structure. Many people believe that the needs should be more flexible, allowing for people to be at higher levels without meeting the needs of the lower levels.
Some argue that the third level, social connectedness with other humans, is an essential part of survival and thus should be lower on the hierarchy, while others argue that social connectedness is at the core of human behaviour as a whole, permeating through the rest of the needs.
Let’s dive in ✨
Level 3: Belonging and Love Needs (Connection and Community)
Level 3 of Maslow’s Hierarchy is the first tier of the psychological needs. This tier is reached after the physiological needs (levels 1 and 2) have been met.
The third level, Belonging and Love Needs, can be defined as:
a human emotional need for interpersonal relationships, affiliating, connectedness, and being part of a group.
Examples of belongingness needs include friendship, intimacy, trust, acceptance, receiving and giving affection, and love.
In other words, this level refers to the emotional relationships humans have with one another. Emotional connectedness (belonging) with others is essential for reaching self-actualization.
Emotional connection is also extremely important for maintaining positive mental health. A lack of emotional connection can lead to loneliness, depression, and anxiety. Maintaining positive emotional connections with others leads to a feeling of love and acceptance, which helps promote positive mental health.
The third level is also referred to as a deficiency need. If this level is not met, there is an inability to grow, to change. Stagnation (lack of change) can lead to a decline in mental health, as we try to grow but are unable to. There is a feeling of being lost, of not knowing where to go next in life. Being lost and constantly questioning direction in life can also lead to anxiety and inability to properly rest causing deficiency, slowly moving backwards.
Humans are not meant to be alone; one of the reasons people fear loneliness.
Note: Love for family and friends is on a deeper emotional level than other social connections and should not (in my opinion) be substituted. For the purposes of this entry, I am going to touch more on trust and acceptance through social connections, rather than on love.
Stagnation and Lack of Personal Connection (Fear of the Unknown)
Social trust and acceptance arise by making connections with others and maintaining those connections over time.
Throughout our lives, social connectedness typically begins with geographically instigated connections. We go to school and make friends based on who lives nearby. We are part of local communities that our parents belong to, again based on geography. As we grow into adults, we move through different phases, with each phase being mostly dictated by geographic circumstances.
After finishing school, many people reach a stagnation point where their circumstances stay roughly the same for the foreseeable future: employment.
Employment brings about a sense of belongingness and acceptance. People are accepted based on their employment circumstances and trusted by their colleagues, providing a social connection that hints at satisfying the Belonging and Love Social Connection Need.
Humans fear the unknown (the one fear to rule them all). After so many years of uncertainty and change (growing up and graduating), people welcome the chance to introduce stability through employment to begin “settling down”. In a way, this is a result of physiological needs through emotional homeostasis (equilibrium).
However, this stability comes at a cost. A lack of change results in people becoming more and more comfortable with the situation they have ended up in, moving further and further away from the unknown into the known. Spending all of one’s time in the known makes the unknown appear relatively more frightening over time.
The thought of doing something different, something new, moves deeper into the back of people’s minds as they work to maintain the conformity provided by their employment, not wanting to rock the boat and introduce change to their newfound stability. See Entry #6 on Financial Security and Mental Safety.
Almost completely unconsciously, people do the same thing day in and day out, operating in an employment habit loop. This loop emotionally and cognitively follows them home by way of burnout. The burnout makes it difficult to maintain an emotional or cognitive flame for their own passions outside of work. These passions move to the back burner or extinguish entirely.
The stagnation spreads to other areas of their lives, introducing habitual inertia that makes change more difficult. A difficulty of introducing change brings about a greater fear of change, stemming from the fear of the unknown (a changed future). These fears prevent people from taking actions to improve the quality of their personal experience based on their emotional and cognitive interests. Instead, they default to the actions and behaviours valued by their employers to maintain the feeling of trust and acceptance by their “community”.
Fear of Change and Lack of True Community
A criticism of Maslow’s Hierarchy is that the lower levels do not necessarily need to be met before moving up the pyramid. Some say that the third level (connection) should be considered an essential aspect of human survival, since humans would not survive without community.
I agree.
I also think that for the trust and acceptance aspect of community, there is often something missing when emotional and cognitive (intellectual) resonance is not present. Emotional and cognitive resonance with life inspires our actions to introduce new and fulfilling experiences that help us to grow as individuals.
Traditionally, we share our experiences through story to people who find the subject matter interesting. If no one listens or cares about your stories, the connections fall flat and fail to satisfy your social needs. There is not acceptance of your story. It is hard to self-actualize if you cannot share that experience of self-actualization with others on the path of self-actualization.
Unfortunately, modern employment often does not offer a sense of community that leads to self-actualization. There may be cognitive resonance with the type of work, but that only goes so far.
While there is a social connection with colleagues by virtue of employment (needing to make money) and fear of being fired (losing financial security), when acceptance becomes predicated (based) on not rocking the boat and “doing things the way they have always been done”, mental safety is removed. The emotional connection of acceptance is removed.
When mental safety is removed, there is no longer trust and acceptance, and the community is not what I would consider True Community: a group of people that satisfies aspects of the Belonging and Love Needs while fostering emotional and/or cognitive resonance with others.
As I discussed in Entry #6, the corporate hierarchy model is not one that values individuality, but rather conformity. This model is one that has historically been a result of corporations forming around a collection of like-minded people with similar geography. Personal interests that bring about cognitive and emotional resonance of the employee are not considered.
That is not to say that corporations need to value personal interests, that is up to them. Businesses are there to make money after all. Having a social life at work is also not a bad thing, it helps to foster community with employees and improve happiness.
However, if the corporation burns out their employees to the point that the employee does not have emotional or cognitive energy for a healthy and self-actualizing personal life, the quality of life suffers as a result. In my view, the community fostered at the workplace is no longer a True Community.
The problem is that people are so burnt out that they do not recognize the lack of community is impacting their ability to self-actualize. They do not have the energy to recognize what is missing.
Technology and Moral Panic
One solution to this burnout problem is through technology. Technology has advanced to the point that we can drastically reduce the cognitive effort required for many tasks. In particular, the Internet enables instantaneous global communication and sharing of value (see Entry #7 on the Creator Economy).
Technology is a disruptor that introduces change, sparking fear and moral panic. A great example of a fear of change that is happening right now is introduction of artificial intelligence. More on this fear in Entry #9 on Mental Safety From AI-nxiety.
However, institutions hold on to the pre-Internet/pre-AI age, wanting to operate as if nothing has changed. They fear change. They fear the unknown.
New technology causes a reordering effect that impacts the way society operates, shuffling the elite from their positions of power. People in those positions of power do everything they can to hold onto the way things used to operate because they do not know how to adapt (to change) to the new circumstances.
This fear gets projected onto employees and the world at large, removing a sense of mental safety from the workplace. If new operating methods are not accepted, the people who wish to operate differently are no longer accepted by the employers, thus failing to satisfy the Belonging and Love Needs.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a common theme for societal response to new technologies. I recently listened to a podcast with Marc Andreessen and Andrew Huberman on this topic and found it fascinating. I recommend listening if you’re interested in learning more about innovation and the societal response towards new technologies.
The sad part is that these new technologies have the power to reshape how we think of work as a whole, improving mental safety, reducing burnout, and generally improving employee happiness across the globe.
As framed in this article on Social Needs:
“Belonging to a community provides the sense of security and agency that makes our brains happy and helps keep us safe.”
Feeling burnt out and undervalued, exposed to an overarching fear of change, does not make our brains happy and does not make us feel safe.
How can we change?
How to Change
To meet the Level 3 needs, we need to foster social connections that make our brains happy.
To do this, we need to be able to build connections with others by sharing our experiences towards our self-actualizing pursuits (personal interests).
Since the early days of humanity, one of the most common forms of sharing experiences has been through story. We’ll get into this more next week, but for now, here’s a graphic representation of the hero’s journey, one of the most common forms of story. As you can see, the hero moves between the known and the unknown, transforming along the way.
Self-actualization requires a change of self, necessitating a certain comfortability with change and a reduction in fear of the unknown.
However, with the burnout associated with employment and the suppression of personal interests in the workplace, it can be difficult to even begin to identify what helps us self-actualize, let alone change our behaviour.
To improve our social connections with others and meet the Belonging and Love Need, we must first learn to pay attention to ourselves.
Paying attention is the first step towards self-awareness, one of the most valuable skills I have ever developed.
Self-awareness can be defined as:
Self-awareness is your ability to perceive and understand the things that make you who you are as an individual, including your personality, actions, values, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts. Essentially, it is a psychological state in which the self becomes the focus of attention
Next week: Self-Awareness and Story
I realize this week covered a lot of tough topics. I hope that I have given you something to think about. If any of these topics caused you to feel stressed, I recommend taking a mindful minute to breathe deeply. Then ask yourself: why did this make me stressed?
Next week, I’ll go more in-depth on the nature of storytelling and provide some useful tools on how to improve self-awareness to continue your journey of self-actualization.
Stay tuned ✨
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