On Working with Your Passion

This is not a new thought to me or my gen x /millennial cohort. However, it made some amorphous thoughts crystalise.

Economics doesn't understand Maslow's pyramid.

I don't give a snotty fuck if stonk go up or we have more iphones than our parents. They're cherry-picking data. Maslow's pyramid is a useful model; GDP is meretricious puffery.

Pyramid delta is a bigger factor in a generation's zeitgeist than position.

Self-actualisation was, generally, off the table for the greatest generation. For most people, their lives were mapped out at birth. OTOH, hunger was a recent memory, so they made progress up the pyramid.

Boomers were the first generation for whom self-actualisation was within reach. You didn't have to give up housing to be a beat poet.

We were brought up to believe that self-actualisation was available to us, too. But in practice, you risk housing. I have personally been through a full cycle of this. I'm infinitely richer than when I was 20, but I'm back where I was on the pyramid. I still have a long runway to chase self-actualisation, but I'll ultimately go back to being a wage slave for a company I don't give a shit about.

So, when economists compile charts of numbers going up, and politicians crow that the economy is growing, you'll excuse me for dithering between prozac and axe murder.