Is safety still one of our life priorities?
When we asked a French student, Paul, about his short-term expectations upon graduating from Management School and moving on from his student life, he told us that he wants to find a job in which he could be happy and satisfied. He also raised the willingness to travel during the next few years and he hopes that he would have the chance to pursue part of his career in another country. He does not exactly know what kind of job he would do and in what kind of company, nor does he know where he will be in a few years.
We are far away from the expectations and sort of “mapped out life” of final-year students 50 years ago. After his studies, the traditional life path for André, who graduated with a Master’s degree in economics, was, first, to find a job related to his qualifications and possibly in a large company that would ensure him job stability and opportunities of career development. The next step was to invest in real estate by buying a flat/house in which he could live and eventually start a family.
Finding a job is still one of the priorities of Paul, but he does not imagine himself working for the same company and being in the same job for his entire life. For him, committing himself for 2–3 years in a company is already something difficult. Moreover, buying a flat is no longer the priority of most of today’s young people, because they prefer renting flats. This is mostly due to the fact that real estate is far too expensive in big cities, where most all of the students with the same background as Paul begin their career. Indeed, when we asked André on what would be the one thing that he could afford when he was younger but that would be impossible today, he answered us: “A house! I would still be at my parents’ house! I see my grandson come back to live with my daughter at the end of his studies because the rental flats in Paris are so expensive! This is a scandal, it is still a need that should be filled nowadays. When I compare before when I was a student, I rented my studio in the best neighborhood in Paris for 2000 francs (300 euros).”
Moreover, according to Paul, the “moving” trend of young people that are used to travelling and changing places during their studies and the beginning of their career also contributed to the fact that owning a flat is now not necessary for people from this generation.
Then, is the need of safety still as an important priority as 50 years ago?
Are the needs expressed and hierarchized by Abraham Maslow in 1943 in the “Theory of Human Motivation” still relevant?
This theoretical model, in form of a pyramid, that positions the needs related to safety at the second level of the pyramid, has been facing numerous critics during the past years, leading to question its current validity. The main critic is that diverse types of needs are ordered by priorities, meaning that the upper needs will not be satisfied unless the bottom needs are not satisfied either. Needs do not coexist but replace other needs when they are achieved.
The way the various priorities and needs are sorted under Maslow pyramid has already been questioned and the observed changes in living trends show that safety seems to be no longer the second most important need for current generations. Indeed, new ways of living young and highly qualified people try to adopt are changing their relation towards safety needs. The “renting trend” taking over the “ownership trend”, introduced by Jeremy Rifkin, is another evidence of the rearrangement of current young generations’ needs and priorities, coupled with reorganization of cities and the linked increase of life prices in big cities.
Suzy S. & Julie C.
