What Does it Mean to be Down and Out?
I don’t know about you, but I totally buy into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. OK, so maybe not “totally” because I don’t necessarily think that a person needs to be loved before he can achieve high self esteem, and I don’t believe vagrants can’t be enlightened. But the overall concept is a great way to think about things.
I recently read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London for my food travels tour on the home site, and I could really see that bottom level of the pyramid in action through his story. The search for food, sleep and shelter predominates in Orwell’s tale, and getting beyond that is a hard task.
He described work as a restaurant kitchen grunt in Paris, how the workers didn’t have time to think about a better life because they had to spend so much of their lives just working to survive. Traveling on to London, his narrator found himself with even fewer resources, eating only bread and tea, hardly sleeping as he landed in shelters and flophouses with rough beds and noisy bunkmates. It was really hard for most of the people he encountered to think about anything but where their next meal was coming from.
It’s interesting to look at Maslow’s pyramid from different perspectives, though. People have different levels of need for different things in the pyramid. For instance, some people are more asexual than others, and having sex might not be of much importance at all to those folks. Personally, I’m out there with Henry Miller on this one. Tropic of Cancer is another Paris story of someone who thinks about nothing but where his next meal is coming from, but Henry is also sure to fit the sex in there as a very important part his base needs.
It’s also interesting to travel along with Wade who has simplified his needs but still attains all those levels to reach the top of the pyramid, even as he continues to focus energies on the safety level. Meanwhile, I’ve chosen my cozy house and 40 hour a week job as my means of keeping my safety in check so that level never goes away, but I still have the time and energy to explore the other levels.
At the other end of the spectrum are people who reach love and belonging to get a wife and 2.5 kids, then get stuck in the safety section because they feel the need for more — more stuff to own, more luxuries for the wife and kids, more insurance for fear of losing it all, more hours at work, more, more, more. Then they lose their wife and 2.5 kids, binge on crystal meth, lose their jobs and find themselves back in the base of the pyramid wondering what happened to their lives.
We can travel up and down these paths, focus on different needs at different times. It’s all about the journey.