Maslow's Second Insight: Post-Gratification Forgetting and Devaluation.

Can time prices cure this pathology?

In Motivation and Personality Abraham Maslow discusses a “needs hierarchy” and discovered that rising up this hierarchy has negative consequences. People at the highest levels tend to feel an “independence of and a certain disdain for the old satisfiers and goal objectives…with a new dependence on satisfiers and goal objectives that hitherto had been overlooked, not wanted, or only casually wanted.” Old gratifiers “become boring, or even repulsive.”  New ungratified needs are overestimated. Lower basic needs already gratified are underestimated or even devalued. The old car or house isn’t good enough anymore. The old consumerist lifestyle isn’t good enough anymore. The old worldview of economic necessity isn’t good enough anymore. He writes, 

In a word we tend to take for granted the blessings we already have, especially if we don't have to work or struggle for them. The food, the security, the love, the admiration, the freedom that have always been there, that have never been lacking or yearned for tends not only to be unnoticed but also even to be devalued or mocked or destroyed. This phenomena of failing to count one’s blessings is of course not realistic and can therefore be considered a form of pathology. (Page 61) 

Maslow called this condition “post-gratification forgetting and devaluation.” He said, “this relatively neglected phenomenon of post-gratification forgetting and devaluation is in my opinion of the very of very great potential importance and power.” He also notes that “In most instances it is cured very easily, simply by experiencing the appropriate deprivation or lack, e.g., pain, hunger, poverty, loneliness, rejection, injustice, etc.”

We may not need to experience this deprivation directly, but by more fully understanding the facts. This is why time prices are so important. Most people don’t realize how abundant life is today relative to yesterday.

We describe the process of becoming more aware and grateful in our new book, Superabundance, available at Amazon. Jordan Peterson has called it “profoundly optimistic.”

Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.