Existentialism, Capitalism and Self Actualization
According to Wikipedia: Existentialism is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the problem of human existence and centers on the subjective experience of thinking, feeling, and acting. For example, in the view of an existentialist, the individual’s starting point has been called “the existential angst”, a sense of dread, disorientation, confusion, or anxiety in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor.
According to Maslow, “What a man can be, he must be.” This level of need refers to the realization of one’s full potential. Maslow describes this as the desire to accomplish everything that one can, to become the most that one can be.
According to most humans, need money to survive and to secure their future from the random fluctuations in the global economy and their health.
According to Rust Cohle in True Detectives: Human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law… We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody…
According to the Stoics and the Zens, with some liberal paraphrasing, we just are and we just have to be. No more, no less.
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Each of us have wants and needs - material, emotional, psychological. We live in a mostly capitalistic world - where other forms of wealth distribution not being very compelling based on historical evidence. We trade in skills, time and labour for money or associated statuses/roles/power that equate to more money. Capitalism has got us into an illusion that once our material needs are taken care of, our emotional & psychological needs will be taken care of as well - simply because we can buy our way in, mostly. Because money helps us buy things, which is indicative of our ability to further our genes, there is an implicit notion that we can always buy more things later, when we have more money. So we trade in skills/time/labour now for potential for more money later and sacrifice the present for the promise of a future.
However, our material needs are only proxy to our emotional needs which are in turn proxy to our deep rooted psychological needs. Having more material wealth doesn’t guarantee that the other needs will be met. Though it takes care of an awful lot of the needs in Maslow’s hierarchy. This also impacts the idea of the power of more money later - because emotional and psychological needs evolve over time - which means more money later cannot help buy the psychological needs of today.
If, however, once after the emotional and psychological needs are met, as Maslow theorized, we are left with no other purpose than self-actualize. One symptom of hitting that point is having hit mid-life crisis where one yearns for purpose in life. It may be tricky to find purpose at a later point in life, if all along you are not preparing to find it. However, existentialism offers a contrary view that there is no purpose to life - only angst. This seems to make more sense purely based on the absurdity and the pointlessness of evolution and life itself.
Between existential angst and self-actualization, between the needs of psychological needs of today and the material needs of the future, between Stoicism and a monthly salary, between existentialism and capitalism - is life.