Maslow was not a (modern) New Yorker
Finding an apartment in a high-demand, low-supply city like New York or San Francisco goes a little like this:
(1) Search on Craigslist for your dream apartment — enter your price limit and desired neighborhoods. Click “search”, await greatness.
(2) Check internet connection for potential outage.
(3) Debate increasing your price limit by $100. You can live without one expensive dinner a month. Click “search”. Check connection again.
(4) Add “up and coming” neighborhoods to your criteria. Remember when you rolled your eyes at NoLiTa as yet another BS acronym that really meant Chinatown? Add all of the BS acronyms.
(5) Add Chinatown.
(6) Add another $100 to your price limit. You can live without turning the lights on in your bathroom*.
(7) Ten results! Message all of them, even the ones that make Riker’s Island look cozy.
(8) Get response from one, with no punctuation. Just an address and a date, and a request that you bring all of your personal and financial information along with a non-refundable check at time of viewing.
(9) Show up to “private” viewing in your least homeless-looking outfit. There are 34 other people there already. It is impossible to walk around because the apartment is 250 square feet and full of people richer than you. Still, there doesn’t appear to be any mold or visible dead bodies. You hand a stranger your CIA dossier. You’re not even sure he’s the one showing the place. It doesn’t matter.
(10) Receive the following email two days later:
thank you for your interest but we have offered the apartment to someone else your information will be destroyes do not worry
(11) Worry.
[repeat from (1)]
The amount of times I’ve moved, coupled with the amount of apartments I’ve applied to and lost, has resulted in an alarming number of people who have possessed my social security number. At this point, I am no doubt involved in some sort of international crime ring or at best, am a (hopefully benevolent) dictator on a small island nation somewhere.
Perhaps the most alarming part, though, is that I no longer find any of this, well, alarming. In most parts of the world, homes are exclusively shared with family members, spouses, or at worst long-term friends. And yet over the past few weeks, I spent countless hours scouring the darkest depths of the internet for a roommate. The process for finding a person to share your apartment with is not so different from the above — wear your best outfit that suggests you’re responsible but also enjoy sharing a glass of wine or five. Then, meet with a slew of strangers and talk for approximately 5–12 minutes to decide whether or not you’d like to spend every day together for the foreseeable future. “Will they pay rent on time?” is the least of your worries when you’ve invited a stranger into a position that makes it exceptionally simple for them to kill you in your sleep.
Do this no less than 7 times in your life.
In my intro to psychology course in college, I learned about a preeminent theory in motivation called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Abraham Maslow grew up in a poor, immigrant neighborhood of Brooklyn in the early 1900s, meaning he experienced actual hardships and would choke on his borscht if he heard our current complaints (/read this piece) or witnessed the average millennial male pant size today. As a result, his theory of motivation is primarily based on actual necessity, being potentially responsible for the wellness others (children, elders), and not being a completely self-absorbed prick. In other words, it’s entirely obsolete.
The basic premise is that human behavior is motivated by a series of needs of increasing importance — before we can indulge in frivolous desires like “self-transcendence” (undoubtedly a major at Sarah Lawrence), we first need to meet basic necessities like shelter and security. It is often represented as a pyramid, where the base needs take precedence over those at the top:
Thinking back at my housing experience, establishing a secure home is addressed within the two most basic needs. Don’t get me wrong, I tried to make the safest choice possible. Before lowering my standards to accepting any prospective roommate without literal human blood smeared on their bare hands, I spoke to my friends if they could recommend anyone. I advertised to my network via Facebook. Only when these avenues proved dry did I begrudgingly succumb to posting on Craigslist, and in a moment of particular desperation, browse the housing-wanted ads and consider reaching out to Andrey who is currently out of the country, but promises “for me, prompt payment is no problem.”
I held interviews. I met one young man who casually whispered the term “those Chinese” at one point. I met an energetic student who asked if she could practice her fire-breathing in the backyard.
I thought of reaching out to Andrey again.
In the end, I met a great person and it all worked out (i.e., it’s been a week and I still have all my fingers), but this got me thinking — the classic hierarchy of needs barely applies in modern times, in areas of high competition and limited power. The basic evolutionary instincts instilled in us over years of fine-tuning for survival, hold a very light grip on our motivations today. If I had prioritized physiological/safety needs, I would’ve looked for an apartment where a broken window didn’t take months to repair. Or where the fire escape didn’t go right back through the potentially burning building. Or where the smoke detectors didn’t dangle from the wall by a wire, and weren’t the same yellow-cream shade of every obsolete electronic from 1992.
I would’ve moved to the suburbs. Where the extended commute and lack of social life would have impaired my superfluous “need” for self-actualization.
Meaning moving to the suburbs was completely off the table.
Think for a minute about the last date you went on. You probably used an app that facilitates meeting someone for the first time over substances that impair your judgment (1. Physiological), to decide whether or not you want to get naked with them within the next couple of hours (2. Safety). But you were feeling kind of lonely (3. Love/Belonging), and needed a confidence boost since your last breakup (4. Esteem) so you did it anyway. And then you spent the whole night listening to him talk about his recent trip to Joshua Tree that really answered a lot of things for him (5. Self-Actualization), while you stared at the cherry stem in your drink, wondering if it was somehow long enough to form a noose (2. Safety, again?)
The absolute bulk of what we talk about lives at the top of that triangle. Our perpetual quest to understand ourselves, to grow from tiny sociopaths into misshapen misanthropes serves not only as fodder for our conversations, but also as the north star to guide our every decision. Quitting your job and eschewing the comfort of a regular salary and benefits (2. Safety) to follow your dreams? 5. Self-Actualization. Breaking up with your long-term partner (3. Love/Belonging) to finally “take some time for me”? 5. Self-Actualization. Spending 75% of your salary on a shoebox studio in the East Village where you have to sit on the toilet at an angle to prevent your knees from hitting the sink (1. Physiological), but which allows you to be blocks from every bar, cafe, and venue in which you’ve ever achieved some sort of self-indulgent nirvana? 5. Self-Actualization.
The wikipedia article for Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs states that “Maslow believed that to understand this level of need [Self-Actualization], the person must not only achieve the previous needs, but master them.” Which makes me think that either I’m misunderstanding something (impossible), or that maybe we need a new model (submissions welcome).
Or that maybe it’s time to leave the city.
*I actually did this for 2 years.
