Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[rref]

As such, we're more like the theoretical physics department of modern science and a lot less like the traditions of Roman Engineering.

Who is the most recent example of the Roman engineering version of what you are trying to do?

[thef0x]

But why do you want those things? If part of the price of something is maintaining it, then part of the price of ownership or even use of an item are chores.

Maybe it's just for me, but I think there is a certain pleasure in maintaining the things one uses and a lack of maintenance is a sign that one has extended their scope too far.

These are the kinds of questions I eventually reached when trying to actually have a web of goals and not just arbitrary nodes.

^^ my emphasis

Yeah, I'm not really considering the totality of these wants and the cost of ownership. I guess your question makes me wonder: with everything I own, should I try to have every part of it, even something that at first glance looks like bothersome work, really be aligned with my values? Is it okay to like 80% of ownership of the thing, accepting 20% is tiresome? Should it always look like 100%?

I like having a house but don't want to redo the exterior trim paint. <-- I'm not really accepting / understanding the nature of the ownership of this thing when fighting parts of its constituent structure (maintenance as painting).

So the wider view is to ask: what does ownership of this thing really mean? And how can I find a joy in what I'd initially consider to be a negative (maintenance).

For many items, I really do enjoy the ongoing maintenance (restringing a guitar feels great). I think I need to be a bit more curious about some of the maintenance I dread. In the right lens, it's all valuable progress, homeotelic action.

Lack of maintenance as a marker of overabundance is a super useful idea. More to ponder.

[Jin+Guice]

I guess your question makes me wonder: with everything I own, should I try to have every part of it, even something that at first glance looks like bothersome work, really be aligned with my values? Is it okay to like 80% of ownership of the thing, accepting 20% is tiresome? Should it always look like 100%?

Now it is getting interesting! I don't have the answers, these are the same problems I'm trying to figure out.

I don't think anyone SHOULD do anything. It has to come from somewhere.

Since we are on the ERE forum, I assume we are trying to reduce costs and the amount of stuff we own and increase skills. So I think maintenance heuristic is useful. I don't think its absolute, but I think it's worth pondering why you don't want to maintain anything that you own or use.

Overlaying "needs of modernity" and initial conditions helps. For example, I don't want to own a car, but I need a car to extract money in the most efficient way possible. I don't want to learn about car maintenance, because I don't like cars. But I need to at least access a car because someone built the modern world to require jobs and put the one that meets all of my other WoG needs across a giant fucking river from where I live. So car maintenance isn't on my list.

The initial conditions of your life may be such that it is really annoying to maintain something or you have to use something you don't really need. This is a loop to be eventually closed, but I wouldn't spend too much effort learning to maintain it if you don't feel compelled to.

Now let's think about something like food. Technically, if you can't forage, hunt or grow your own food AND prepare you own food, you can't really maintain your physical body. But pretty much no one is doing this. Using modernity but keeping costs low, you want to be able to buy food, prepare food and clean up after yourself.

A lot of people find shopping and/ or cooking and/ or dishes tiresome. My question is, do you really not like to cook or is it some weird insecurity/ cultural programming/ no one ever taught you how? If you give me some speech about how you make more money at your job to afford to pay for others to prepare your food because you are an optimizer, I don't really think you've considered that it might be more fun and meaningful to cook for yourself. If you tell me how you tried for six months and just really hate it, I'm more inclined to believe you don't like it.

The more shit that is involved in running a basic human life and not just a modern one that someone tells me they don't want to do, the less I believe them. Insecurity, cultural programming and lack of knowledge are difficult to overcome. One has to be vigilant to not become their slave.

The hallmark of one of these being present is internal conflict or a problem or pattern that recurs or a person who has a problem and argues solutions to that problem in a loop.

Everyone is also interdependent. No one does everything for themselves. If you know you don't like to cook or shop but still need food, the greater capital networks you grow, the greater are your avenues for meeting this need.

[jacob]

Yeah, I'm not really considering the totality of these wants and the cost of ownership. I guess your question makes me wonder: with everything I own, should I try to have every part of it, even something that at first glance looks like bothersome work, really be aligned with my values? Is it okay to like 80% of ownership of the thing, accepting 20% is tiresome? Should it always look like 100%?

You should get your head out of the "optimization"-framework. The optimization itself has a maintenance cost and this cost is too high the closer to the "edge of perfection" you get. In algorithmic trading, almost all agos operate with something called a slop-band. Naively, you might attach a certain value to something, lets say $10, and if the price is less than $10, you buy (go long), and if it's more than $10 you sell (go short). But what if the price hovers just around $10, like $10.02...$9.95 ... $9.97 ... $10.01 ... $9.99 ... Then your dumb algorithm would be spinning its wheels racking up transaction costs. The simple solution is to insert a slop band so you only trade if the price exceeds the value +/- the slop. E.g. if the slop is $0.50, you only sell if the price is >$10.50 .. and only buy at price>$9.50.

The slop does not need to be symmetric.

You can apply this to time or energy cost as well. You don't quit a job that's "acceptable" just because you have had a bad day or a bad hour which makes it slightly "unacceptable". Instead slop makes it so you only quit if the job is "acceptable - slop = bad+ ... and likewise you only take a job if is is "acceptable + slop = good".

Apply the same method to ownership. Enter slowly. Exit slowly. Try to make all changes reversible. Try to change as few things as possible at the same time.

[black_son_of_gray]

Maybe it's just for me, but I think there is a certain pleasure in maintaining the things one uses and a lack of maintenance is a sign that one has extended their scope too far.

These are the kinds of questions I eventually reached when trying to actually have a web of goals and not just arbitrary nodes.

Yeah, the way I might describe my own "pleasure in maintaining" would be something along the lines of "stewardship", defined as "the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care."

So the thinking becomes, "maybe I don't want to have to have a car, but since I do have one, what way of "taking care of it" makes the most sense for me? Having scheduled maintenance performed by a mechanic because I hate tinkering under the hood is still much more in line with my beliefs/goals than say, never changing the oil and having an otherwise perfectly fine motor seize up and be unusable to anyone after only a few years."

To that end, lack of maintenance would seem to indicate: a system with too many components (that I don't really have an balanced relationship with); or, a lack of systems-perspective about the components in my system (that is, I'm thinking too much about me being the main consideration at the heart of every decision rather than a more complete view of each component's needs/lifecycle)

[thef0x]

I think it's worth pondering why you don't want to maintain anything that you own or use.

This might be an overshare but I think this comes from fear of becoming grumpy/scary/joyless like my dad was growing up. I hated it; he'd choose a perfectly manicured lawn over time with my siblings and I. Part of his generation, I guess. Picking a lawn over family.

I've reacted in my life extremely strongly against those behaviors. Simultaneously, I notice myself coping with hardship through similar mechanisms. It scares the shit out of me.

^^ Peeling the onion.

The more shit that is involved in running a basic human life and not just a modern one that someone tells me they don't want to do, the less I believe them. Insecurity, cultural programming and lack of knowledge are difficult to overcome. One has to be vigilant to not become their slave.

Furthering this point, I find meeting my basic needs to be some of the most delicious activities in my life. Cooking, eating, bathing, exercise, sex.. all so visceral and real. I love getting in my head, galaxybrain style too. But the feeling of cool sheets after a full day and hard exercise is so so good.

Our culture pushes us to outsource those behaviors via time=money rationalizing and I'm absolutely guilty of it myself in many ways. But it pushes us away from the core, animalistic aspects of our being. Drinking when you're really, really thirsty (like you cannot stop thinking about water thirsty).. it's hard to describe how relieving, satisfying, and good that feels.

I like the quiet vividness of satisfying those core needs.

Everyone is also interdependent. No one does everything for themselves. If you know you don't like to cook or shop but still need food, the greater capital networks you grow, the greater are your avenues for meeting this need.

I suppose this is where I see myself drifting specifically with the needs of modernity. I am at a strange inflection point where I can have a lot of the 'toys', but I'm looking around the room as I write this surrounded by guilt-shaped excess -- even if comparably small by other's standards.

This is where I wonder if there's an operating principle behind "limiting storage" to limit excess, e.g. you can only have so much shit. That idea of unused items creating drag feels to describe me well. Yet.. looking at the homebrew equipment sitting there, I feel that twang of fear of missing out, thinking at some point I'll make cider to reduce summer BBQ CapEx (insert w/e rationalization here).

You should get your head out of the "optimization"-framework. The optimization itself has a maintenance cost and this cost is too high the closer to the "edge of perfection" you get.

It's weird to admit I've internalized this principle in business but really have not taken it to heart in my personal life. Maybe I just hit burnout in business and had to create slack or else kaboom. Working with people (staff) immediately demands a slop-band .. yet that same all-too-human slack isn't easily granted to myself. I guess it's not exactly an uncommon occurrence to be hardest on yourself.

You can apply this to time or energy cost as well. You don't quit a job that's "acceptable" just because you have had a bad day or a bad hour which makes it slightly "unacceptable". Instead slop makes it so you only quit if the job is "acceptable - slop = bad+ ... and likewise you only take a job if is is "acceptable + slop = good".

Apply the same method to ownership. Enter slowly. Exit slowly. Try to make all changes reversible. Try to change as few things as possible at the same time.

Useful in a practical sense, thanks. Quantifying slack across other currencies / personal capital sounds challenging (esp compared to money) but those intuitions are what I'm trying to develop these days.

To your point, too rigid of a structure lends itself to fragility; better to build a body that can absorb a few blows and shake them off.

This has been a really fun, interesting conversation. Thank you both. Way better than redoing the paint on my exterior windows.

[Jin+Guice]

I've been working on a short series on self-actualization which I'm planning on posting in the next few weeks. So far it's three posts... we'll see if it grows.

[Jin+Guice]

Environment, Self-Actualization and Transcendence

I've recently been thinking about how to self-actualize. Self-actualization is the 2nd highest point on Maslow's Hierarchy, a state achieved when all "lower-level" needs are met. "Actualization" is also the name for WL8.

Above actualization is "transcendence" on Maslow's Hierarchy.

Self-transcendence is a feeling of oneness with all things, seeing yourself in everyone and everything and everything and everyone in yourself.

Something that bothered me about all of this... why is it so fucking hard to get to these upper-levels? Humans crave these things yet have trouble achieving them, it strikes me as odd. Why would we be designed to want something so few achieve. It seems very elitist... very protestant work ethic.

So I asked myself "what are the conditions that would make transcendence not only easy but necessary?"

My hypothesis is a small group of egalitarian people who are interdependent on each other for survival in an abundant environment. In this case you literally depend on the people in your group for survival. This makes it easy to see other people as yourself. Their survival is tied to your survival and the survival of the group.

If resources are abundant enough that everyone's needs can be met with little work and goods are largely non-differentiable, and everyone knows how to do roughly the same thing, I imagine everything will work better if everyone works together. Lying and theft are almost unimaginable. What would be the point?

In this situation I think the self is in alignment with its environment. The natural world provides what we need and non-rivalrous group work makes us feel deeply connected to one another.

I continued this thought experiment with conditions for self-actualization.

Maslow claimed that in order to reach self-actualization all lower level needs are fulfilled. I think the WL table is more informative because it provides not only conditions, but also a map of how to get there.We reach actualization when we have a web of goals. We seek to make the actions we take to meet our needs reinforce each other.

As I have been working on moving from WL6 to WL7, I realized something significant. WoGs need to be internally generated, otherwise the system won't work. This idea seems obvious, but I kept running into roadblocks when I would do various activities. Why am I doing this activity and what are the outcomes I want?

As people reach WL6 or retirement, a lot of them experience ennui. I think the reason for this is that we are unable to internally generate values. I don't think this means we have no values, it just means we do some things for reasons we aren't aware of.

As I was struggling with what to put in my WoGs, I was working on insecurities and shadow behaviors in therapy. And it dawned on me... I sometimes struggle in relationships because I have trouble experiencing the moment I am in due to suppressing emotions. This leads me to be in situations or relationships where I am not getting my needs met and don't realize it. In other words I stay in relationships for reasons I'm not aware of.

In other words, I'm not generating my own values for goals or relationships.

[Ego]

Something that bothered me about all of this... why is it so fucking hard to get to these upper-levels? Humans crave these things yet have trouble achieving them, it strikes me as odd. Why would we be designed to want something so few achieve.

It is possible to be so health "conscious" that we search for problems and constantly take them to a doctor to fix. Much of the depression epidemic is the result of a population that has been trained to be hyperaware of feelings, emotions and state of mind. The hyperawareness causes rumination which feeds depression.

Meditation deals with this by encouraging people to notice the thoughts that appear and then simply let them go.

Do people who reach higher levels do so not by ruminating on the process or adding new things, but by simply letting go of the things that are holding them back?

[zbigi]

Much of the depression epidemic is the result of a population that has been trained to be hyperaware of feelings, emotions and state of mind. The hyperawareness causes rumination which feeds depression.

I'm not sure about that. When you put an animal into a cage in a zoo, it becomes depressed too, while it obviously doesn't have any ability to introspect. I think depression was always rampant in the industrial society - just look at the alcoholism epidemic in the XIX and XX century in industralized countries. The difference is, now masses of people have the ability and the vocabulary to name their depression, and not just go into drinking, wife-beating etc.

[Jin+Guice]

@Ego:

I don't think this is a recent thing. Part of my hypothesis is that any society beyond our capacity to know every person or which makes us not interdependent on each other breaks the conditions for transcendence. And any environment in which our bodily and emotional impulses don't directly help us survive break the conditions for actualization.

I am 1) making this up as a hypothesis and 2) not saying my hypothetical state is better (in an absolute objective way) or a state that I think we should (or can) return to.

The hyperawareness causes rumination which feeds depression.

I don't think I agree with this, but I'll have to think about it.

However, I agree that rumination is not emotionally healthy. I think that the healthy way to have emotions is to notice them, experience them, express them and let them go. This is in fact experiencing emotions, as ruminating on emotions causes one to emotionally react to the past instead of present moment. In my mind, rumination is caused by not completing experience/ express cycle fully cycle. If one can experience->express emotions then one doesn't really need to "notice" or "let go" of them as this will be automatic.

I'm hypothesizing this is the emotional pathway humans are wired for. It is only when our environment misaligns our emotional system with survival that this becomes disrupted. Once disrupted "letting go" and/ or "noticing" need to get added to the mix. I think with practice (which could be meditation) this pathway can be restored.





I think to talk about emotions, we need an extra dimension, "emotional regulation." Google says "emotional regulation is the ability to control and manage your emotions, including the intensity and duration of your emotional experience." I think that definition again lacks a dimension. I think emotional regulation is the ability to move from a deregulated emotional state to a regulated one. I think when people talk about "being emotional" or "being controlled by emotion" they mean being easily driven to an emotionally deregulated state and having trouble returning to a regulated state.

I believe emotional deregulated is what happens when your emotional system determines that you are in danger and activates the fight/ flight/ freeze mechanism in your nervous system. The emotions and body take over from the mind. Thus I think the definition of emotional deregulation is an emotion that will be expressed. These emotions cannot be controlled or suppressed by the cognitive system.

This is an emergency response system. If your emotions make complete sense in your environment this reaction will always be warranted and help you survive. If your emotions and environment are misaligned, this mechanism will misfire and do things that decrease your chances for survival. I believe our current environment is misaligned with this system, so the advantage goes to those who can emotionally regulate more easily.

Emotional deregulation is not the same thing as experiencing emotions within the regulated range. Regulated emotions, which can still be quite strong, inform and effect behavior. We can choose whether or not to express these emotions, the emotional system working in concert with the cognitive system. If we feel like we react emotionally without thought in the regulated range, it is because the emotional system reacts faster than the cognitive system. In general, I believe emotions want to be expressed and suppressing them only leads to problems.

I think that the recent uptick in psychiatric "diseases" is, as @zbigi mentions, more a product of us noticing and acknowledging the conditions rather than an actual uptick of the magnitude we are seeing (though there could be an actual upward trend as well). I think that things like depression and anxiety as well as possibly adhd and autism and a range of more serious mental illnesses are the result of prolonged emotional deregulation and suppression. Our impulses no longer make sense to us and over time we learn not to trust them. We deregulate, don't know why and the results are disastrous. While our nervous system can't sustain prolonged periods of constant emotional deregulation, the deregulation enters our subconscious/ shadows, causing a state of either perpetual over-stimulation/ fear (anxiety) or under-stimulation/ emotional muting (depression).

Instead of learning to regulate emotions, we learn to suppress them. Suppressed emotions appear regulated for awhile because we short-circuit our emotional systems ability to enter deregulation. The result is loss of connection with our emotions, even regulated ones. Emotions drive behavior. If we are unaware of our emotions in the moment, we will react to them without knowing what is going on. Emotional suppression will also lead to insecurities, which I think are past instances where we have learned that our emotions are unreliable. When presented with similar situations we will react as though we are in the prior situation, a sort of hardwired rumination that occurs without cognitive recognition.

[Ego]

While I stick by what I said, the depression comment distracted and detracted from my overall point. Is it possible that part of the process of reaching higher Maslow levels is to become a person who does not have to think about how to accomplish it? In other words, the higher one climbs, the less they have to deliberately try because it is who they are, not what they do.

[jacob]

While I stick by what I said, the depression comment distracted and detracted from my overall point. Is it possible that part of the process of reaching higher Maslow levels is to become a person who does not have to think about how to accomplish it? In other words, the higher one climbs, the less they have to deliberately try because it is who they are, not what they do.

Well, then my question is how one learns to become a person who doesn't have to think about how to accomplish things? Usually the approach is to study or think hard until one learns them well enough to not have to think so hard anymore. There's no direct path from "unconscious incompetence" to "unconscious competence".

The idea behind the pyramid is that people's priorities are set by and rests on external demands of increasing order of importance (as we go downwards). E.g. the highest priority is air, then water, then food, ... then one can think about shelter. Once that's satisfied, one starts thinking about friends or family and once one has this sense of belonging, one starts thinking about how to impress them or impress oneself by getting that job promotion or whatever.

According to Maslow, it is only when one is satisfied at the lower levels that one begins to focus on the next level. Otherwise, one will likely be too distracted by unmet lower needs.

While mostly famous for the pyramid itself, much of Maslow's career was spent researching the top part of the pyramid, specifically actualization and transcendence. He developed an framework (perspective) around the idea of "Being" and wrote entire books about just that part. He saw that the [rare] people near the top of the pyramid all had things in common that people who were more focused on paying the rent and grocery bills, safety and comfort, jobs and paychecks, other people's opinions, whether they were liked or respected or feared for that matter, status, being rich or popular or impressing others,... did not.

[sodatrain]

Great stuff J+G - If you will allow me to bumble my way thru this....

I've recently been thinking about how to self-actualize. Self-actualization is the 2nd highest point on Maslow's Hierarchy, a state achieved when all "lower-level" needs are met. "Actualization" is also the name for WL8.

Above actualization is "transcendence" on Maslow's Hierarchy.

Self-transcendence is a feeling of oneness with all things, seeing yourself in everyone and everything and everything and everyone in yourself.

Something that bothered me about all of this... why is it so fucking hard to get to these upper-levels? Humans crave these things yet have trouble achieving them, it strikes me as odd. Why would we be designed to want something so few achieve. It seems very elitist... very protestant work ethic.

This begs the question... is transcendence the goal? Sounds reasonable but is that actually what we should aspire to achieve? Maybe it is - idk. It's beyond my abilities to competently answer. *Shrug*

So I asked myself "what are the conditions that would make transcendence not only easy but necessary?"

My hypothesis is a small group of egalitarian people who are interdependent on each other for survival in an abundant environment. In this case you literally depend on the people in your group for survival. This makes it easy to see other people as yourself. Their survival is tied to your survival and the survival of the group.

If resources are abundant enough that everyone's needs can be met with little work and goods are largely non-differentiable, and everyone knows how to do roughly the same thing, I imagine everything will work better if everyone works together. Lying and theft are almost unimaginable. What would be the point?

In this situation I think the self is in alignment with its environment. The natural world provides what we need and non-rivalrous group work makes us feel deeply connected to one another.

This makes me think of the community of people I got to know in western colorado during the pandemic. I was volunteering on a small farm/homestead and got to know the owners as well as their community locally. It was (still is) a fantastic group of people who share a set of values and work together to help achieve/live the lives they aspire to. One homestead has pigs, another has beef, another focuses on milk/butter, one bakes bread. They all largely support themselves, but also share and work together to make the system work. Time to harvest the chickens? 5-10 people show up to help get thru the 100 birds, everyone goes home with a couple to put in their freezer. Not to mention the satisfaction of productive work, largely done outdoors, with an interesting/strong sense of community. It was excellent to be a part of for a while.

That seems like the goal - lots of self-sufficiency supported by a strong small community. ERECity!

As I have been working on moving from WL6 to WL7, I realized something significant. WoGs need to be internally generated, otherwise the system won't work. This idea seems obvious, but I kept running into roadblocks when I would do various activities. Why am I doing this activity and what are the outcomes I want?

Can you share a couple examples to help paint the picture?

As people reach WL6 or retirement, a lot of them experience ennui. I think the reason for this is that we are unable to internally generate values. I don't think this means we have no values, it just means we do some things for reasons we aren't aware of.

Do you mean we don't/cant generate them internally at all? Not sure I'm totally tracking you here - that statement seems broad and inclusive but then "we do some things" seems more narrow.

Maybe interesting/related is the book The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. "Sam Harris argues that science can determine human values and morality by focusing on the well-being of conscious creatures, which he visualizes as peaks and valleys on a "moral landscape". He challenges moral relativism and religious-based ethics, asserting that objective moral truths exist and can be discovered through scientific inquiry into human and animal welfare" (Thanks AI for giving me the two sentence summary of the book as I requested)

As I was struggling with what to put in my WoGs, I was working on insecurities and shadow behaviors in therapy. And it dawned on me... I sometimes struggle in relationships because I have trouble experiencing the moment I am in due to suppressing emotions. This leads me to be in situations or relationships where I am not getting my needs met and don't realize it. In other words I stay in relationships for reasons I'm not aware of.

In other words, I'm not generating my own values for goals or relationships.

Sounds like a deep/heavy/meaningful learning! Do you think you/we/people have the potential to and you are just not - so that you can change this? Or is this a 'there is no free will' kind of thing?

[zbigi]

I've just looked up some of Maslow's work, and found this gem in one of his books

If I wanted to be mischievous about it, I could go so far as to define science as a technique whereby noncreative people can create. This is by no means making fun of scien­tists. It's a wonderful thing it seems to me, for limited human beings, that they can be pressed into the service of great things even though they themselves are not great people. Science is a technique, social and institutionalized, whereby even unintelli­gent people can be useful in the advance of knowledge.

Shots fired

[jacob]

Do you mean we don't/cant generate them internally at all? Not sure I'm totally tracking you here - that statement seems broad and inclusive but then "we do some things" seems more narrow.

Correct, if you reconsider

The idea behind the pyramid is that people's priorities are set by and rests on external demands of increasing order of importance (as we go downwards). E.g. the highest priority is air, then water, then food, ... then one can think about shelter. Once that's satisfied, one starts thinking about friends or family and once one has this sense of belonging, one starts thinking about how to impress them or impress oneself by getting that job promotion or whatever.

According to Maslow, it is only when one is satisfied at the lower levels that one begins to focus on the next level. Otherwise, one will likely be too distracted by unmet lower needs.

and remember that the pyramid goes like

1. Food and water.
2. Safety.
3. Belonging (friends, family, tribe)
4. Esteem (job title, status)
5. Actualization
6. Self-transcendence

And consider that one can draw a big fat line between 1+2+3+4, which are all externally motivated, that is knowingly (or more normally unknowingly) following scripts written by others, and 5+6, which are internally motivated, then the pyramid begins to make sense. Maslow defines actualization as "internally driven creativity (for oneself) and self-transcendence as ditto for the universe as such. Actualization is the ability to self-author one's own scripts (Kegan5). What the pyramid asserts is that this is unlikely to happen to someone who is more focused on career (Kegan4), being a good family member (Kegan3), being safe or respected (Kegan2), or focused on sheer survival (Kegan1).

[OutOfTheBlue]

If you haven't, I recommend checking out the book "Transcend - The New Science of Self-Actualization" (book discussion here: viewtopic.php?p=260706) which deals with Maslow's psychology, including his unfinished theory of transcendence. After all, he did not only contribute to humanistic psychology but also helped found transpersonal psychology.

Straight from the intro, you get headings like "Maslow never actually created a pyramid to represent his hierarchy of needs", "We can work on multiple needs simultaneously", and "Maslow argued that all the needs can be grouped into two main classes, which must be integrated for wholeness: deficiency and growth".

[black_son_of_gray]

Something that bothered me about all of this... why is it so fucking hard to get to these upper-levels?

Of course I don't have the answer (is there one?) but I do think one particularly nasty aspect is this: sometimes moving forward looks like moving backwards, and it makes sense that a person would have reservations in those circumstances. I would argue that the inflection point is somewhere around "actualization"/ Kegan 4 / Wheaton Level 7ish.

Some examples:

• A person starts out in an earn-spend cycle, thinks little about long term plans, indulges in relatively immediate interests and entertainments. Slowly, over the years, that person gets really good at the whole personal finance, saving, investing, etc. to the point of becoming FI. They have now achieved their goal (yay!), and look forward to: 1) Not working, 2) worrying a lot less about the long term, 3) indulging in relatively immediate interests and entertainments. Of course it isn't exactly a reversion, but there are aspects of earlier stages that start showing up again on the other side of FI. But then a question is, can the person return to those aspects, or will they reject them as "something they have moved passed"? The story of the Mexican fisherman comes to mind here.
• A little girl grows up and as she enters adulthood begins to read and think about feminism. She does a lot of soul-searching, questioning traditional gender roles in society, power structures, and so on, and tries to figure out what she really, truly wants out of life. As it turns out, she discovers that she does find satisfaction in a lot (though not all) of stereotypical domestic activities: she finds joy in being a stay-at-home mom, she really loves to cook for others, she actually enjoys cleaning. From the outside, she is quite aware that this looks like taking a step backward, but she wants to make this fully empowered decision for herself. Is it an easy decision to make? (Naturally, this isn't what every woman would want, I'm just using this as a possible specific example. She's not truly empowered if she can't choose what she wants, but that doesn't mean that the decision will be easy).
• A person grows up drawing their values and their identity from the groups they find themselves in (Kegan 3). Over time, they learn to distinguish their own values, who they really are, and how they really feel about things. They learn to inhabit their own self (Kegan 4), but there are times when that expression of who they are becomes rigid and gets in the way of better outcomes. They figure out that they have a range of expressions of who they really are and begin to play with which version/aspect of themselves is the best to show/share in any given situation (Kegan 5). Sometimes they find that it is better to "go with the flow" or even "check out", even though that sometimes looks like passively accepting group values, or "masking", or a regression to Kegan 3 behavior.

Self-transcendence is a feeling of oneness with all things, seeing yourself in everyone and everything and everything and everyone in yourself.

It strikes me that the sequencing of self-actualization then self-transcendence creates a particular difficulty: to go beyond yourself into the ways in which all things are connected, you first have to spend a whole bunch of time teasing apart who you are relative to others...It makes sense that this kind of mental u-turn either takes a loooong time or meets a lot of internalized mental resistance.

[ertyu]

Fwiw, in How To Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan says that Maslow was part of an underground culture in intellectual circles of using psychedelics and that a lot of what he means by transcendence are experiences one accessed via meditation, shrooms, and LSD. That might be a good book to look at.

While I have not done shrooms or LSD, for me personally transcendence pits me against fear.

To transcend, one needs to let go of that pole one's clutching in the storm, and let the wind take one where it may, including against the rocks.

Being connected with others requires opening your heart to them and loving them, sharing with them, being generous -- and this means opening yourself to being hurt, opening yourself to being manipulated, opening yourself to being used. It's easier manipulating you and using you than it is to make one's own path in life and risk being unsuccessful at doing the hard thing, after all.

Opening one's heart to others often also means facing square in the face that they will not open their hearts back. You might be there for them to talk, you might thoughtfully stay with their stuff because you love them and it's healing and it matters, and then when you need someone to be there for you, there will always be something more captivating for them elsewhere.

And so on and so forth.

In other words, transcendence means going past everything one has learned to do to protect oneself and obtain safety, both material and psychological. Buddhism says safety is an illusion. That one sees this -- sees the inevitability of impermanence -- as one practices. Letting go of fear and our constant self-protectiveness isn't trivial. thick books by people who've done it, iirc, say that fear lets off when one "gets first path." The Stoics' main practice is staying with impermanence and fear, too -- see your child as already dead, consider what it would be like to be completely ruined and fail, see the cup as broken. Tldr transcendence is a quantum shift. One can meet one's lower level needs without too much inner transformation - millions manage it daily. Few get beyond. (Certainly not me, yet)

[Ego]

Well, then my question is how one learns to become a person who doesn't have to think about how to accomplish things? Usually the approach is to study or think hard until one learns them well enough to not have to think so hard anymore. There's no direct path from "unconscious incompetence" to "unconscious competence".
...

He saw that the [rare] people near the top of the pyramid all had things in common that people who were more focused on paying the rent and grocery bills, safety and comfort, jobs and paychecks, other people's opinions, whether they were liked or respected or feared for that matter, status, being rich or popular or impressing others,... did not.

My point is that Maslow is an attempt at description, not a prescription. It is easy to confuse the two.

Right now we are on the edge of one of the Blue Zones. A few days ago we were walking past an old stone home as a seventy-year-old woman struggled to wheel her ninety-year-old mother out of the house. The older lady called to us in Greek, asking us to help lift her over the eight inch threshold. Once we settled her at a table in the narrow alley, they thanked us and the daughter began setting out what appeared to be a typical Greek lunch for several others who had not yet arrived.

In the US, we see a scene like this in the Blue Zones book, pick and choose the elements of their lifestyle that we like, and then believe we discovered the secrets to longevity. We believe that two glasses of wine a day, a salad and some good whole-grain bread will allow us to have wonderful golden years. We fail to realize the millions of tiny things that went into keeping that one woman alive.

It is tempting to use Maslow in the same way.