10d • General discussion
Socrates vs Maslow
Up to this point, we’ve been looking at happiness from the inside out. Socrates was concerned with the state of the soul, with virtue, self-knowledge, and inner alignment. His focus was on how a person ought to live once they were able to reflect, choose, and act with reason. But there’s an important question sitting underneath all of this. Under what conditions does that kind of inner life even become possible? Because if your me, learning about this for the first time your likely asking some very relevant questions or at least some honest observations right. Such as ‘that’s all well and good, but ive got bills to pay, I need to put food on my table, a family to support - how does self knowledge and inner alignment help me in that sense?’
Wisdom, reflection, and moral clarity don’t exist in a vacuum. They require a certain level of stability to take root. It’s hard to examine your values when you’re constantly in survival mode. Hard to pursue meaning when your nervous system is focused on staying safe. In that sense, Socrates’ emphasis on inner virtue quietly assumes a degree of ease within life, or at least a momentary freedom from immediate threat.
This is where modern psychology begins to speak a different language. Not about virtue or the soul, but about needs. About what you and I require to survive before we can even think about thriving. About the conditions that must be met before the kind of inner life Socrates described becomes realistically accessible. And this matters, because happiness and clarity shouldn’t be reserved for the lucky or the comfortable. You are deserving of that sense of meaning too.
Few models have captured this idea more clearly than Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Now stick with me here, let’s get creative for a second. Imagine you wake up alone on an island. Not a tropical beach resort, but instead your typical castaway-style island where all you have for a friend is a beach ball.
We’ve all been posed this scenario in one way or another, but it’s completely relevant, I assure you. Imagine: you have no phone. No calendar. No long-term plans. Just heat, or lack of it, hunger, thirst, and the slightly unsettling realisation that whatever happens next depends on what you do today. In that moment, life becomes very simple very quickly. Your attention narrows. Big questions about purpose, fulfilment, or who you’re meant to become fade into the background. Right now, your focus is solely on survival, the constant question of what’s next.
Your first concern is water. If you disagree with me, you’re wrong. Without it, nothing else matters. Next, obviously, is sourcing food, but only once you’ve secured something to drink. You then look for shade, then shelter. Somewhere safe enough to rest without being exposed or constantly on edge. Each decision you make is entirely practical, not philosophical. Your mind is focused on just staying alive. Once those basics are covered, something shifts. Your nervous system settles. You’re no longer scanning constantly for threat. You begin to notice more than just what might kill you. Time stretches out again. You start organising your space. You improve what you’ve built, not because you have to, but because you can.
All sounding good, right? I mean, you’re not thirsty, have a full stomach, a roof over your head, all the essentials. So why aren’t you happy? What can possibly be wrong?
The loneliness creeps in. Survival is possible alone, but it’s thin. Luckily, you have a vivid imagination and now you imagine another person on the island. Someone to share the work, the silence, the small wins, a comfort blanket for when island life isn’t so breezy. Trust starts to matter. Cooperation becomes valuable. Once again, life feels a little more human.
Are you happy yet?
Checklist time…
- Water
- Food- Shelter
- Friends (ideally not imaginary… or a beach ball)
Sounds good. Island life no longer feels like the essence of fear, but instead you feel a sense of prosperity. Your needs are being met, and therefore only after all of this do bigger questions begin to surface once again. Those “what am I capable of?” “How can I contribute?” “What does a good life look like, even in a place like this?” type of questions. Because meaning doesn’t arrive at the start, unfortunately. We don’t come out of the womb asking philosophical questions on the meaning of life. It emerges once survival stops consuming everything.
On that island, you wouldn’t call this a hierarchy. You wouldn’t draw a pyramid or label stages. You’d simply live it. Need by need, layer by layer, your priorities would reveal themselves. That quiet unfolding is the key to understanding what Maslow was really pointing toward.
What you’ve just walked through on that island isn’t a thought experiment. It’s a pattern. One that shows up wherever humans are pushed back to basics, whether through hardship, crisis, or simply prolonged stress. In the 1940s, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow noticed the same thing playing out again and again. Human motivation, he argued, isn’t random. It follows a rough order, shaped by needs.
Maslow described this as a hierarchy, not because life moves in neat steps, but because certain needs tend to demand attention before others can emerge. When survival is uncertain, the mind narrows. When safety is fragile, growth stalls. It’s unrealistic to plan world domination when you’re stuck in a prison cell… mmmh, history may disagree with that one there. But that’s beside the point. What reality shows us is that only once basic needs are met does attention reliably shift toward connection, confidence, creativity, and meaning - the big-picture stuff, the things that actually make us want to get out of bed in the morning.
Importantly, Maslow never intended this as a rigid ladder or a test you pass or fail. Needs overlap. People move back and forth between them constantly. Stress can pull you down just as growth can pull you up. Later in his work, Maslow even went beyond self-actualisation, suggesting that the deepest form of wellbeing wasn’t self-focused at all, but self-transcendent.
In other words, Maslow wasn’t explaining happiness. He was explaining when the pursuit of happiness becomes possible. And that distinction matters in the modern world. We live in a time where images of meaning, freedom, and fulfilment are everywhere, yet the foundations needed to support them are increasingly unstable. For many people, especially younger generations, the tension between visible ideals and lived reality isn’t a personal failure. It’s a psychological mismatch. And Maslow helps us understand why that mismatch takes such a heavy toll on mental health.
When Maslow talked about a hierarchy of needs, he wasn’t laying out a checklist for a perfect life - he was instead describing a pattern he saw in how human attention and motivation tend to organise themselves. At the base are our most basic physiological needs: food, water, rest, the things that keep us alive. Just above that sits safety, not just physical protection, but stability, predictability, and the sense that tomorrow isn’t an immediate threat... which, as you know, is a great feeling.
Once those foundations are reasonably secure, social needs come to the foreground. That sense of belonging, connection, trust, and feeling accepted rather than isolated. From there, people begin to care more about esteem: competence, confidence, contribution, and the feeling that they matter and can handle life. Only after these layers are in place does attention reliably turn toward self-actualisation, the desire to grow, create, and become more fully oneself.
Despite their differences, what Socrates and Maslow were circling, in yes, very different ways, was the same truth (dramatic twist, I know!). What they explain is that a good life requires inner alignment, but that alignment can’t be forced when the ground beneath you feels unstable. Socrates showed us what human flourishing looks like from the inside, whilst Maslow helped explain when that kind of flourishing becomes possible in the first place. Neither cancels the other out. They complete the picture. It just took a few hundred years for the ideas to align.
If meaning feels distant, or motivation feels out of reach, that isn’t always a failure of character or effort. Often, it’s a signal that something more basic needs attention first. So, before chasing purpose, we need somewhere - something - a little sturdy. And once that strong foundation exists, the deeper questions don’t have to be hunted down or scrutinised; instead, in life, as you know, they tend to find us on their own.
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Socrates vs Maslow
