A Guide to Life’s Problems
Coaching generally involves helping people solve problems, but often what we think of as “the problem” is just a starting point. A set of issues appear more pressing or pointed at first, and over time we realize that they mask other, deeper challenges which emerge only when the former are resolved, in whole or in part.
We tend to progress through these challenges in a rough sequence, although it’s by no means universal, and we may deviate from this path in any number of ways. The sequence that I see most typically in my practice is illustrated in the graphic above, which I call, only half in jest, The Onion of Fear and Regret.
It’s inspired by the Hierarchy of Needs developed by Abraham Maslow, the great 20th century psychologist who’s one of my most important influences. [1] But where Maslow envisioned us climbing up and down a metaphorical ladder (not a pyramid [2]) as various needs are fulfilled or denied, I see us “peeling the onion” as we seek to mitigate our fears and avoid regrets, a process that starts at the outermost layer, working “from the outside in.”
Money
This is usually the presenting problem, although it’s rarely articulated quite so bluntly and can take an endless variety of forms. But many of the issues that come to mind as sources of fear and regret are, put simply, “money problems.” Sometimes we literally lack funds for life’s necessities, although this is rare among people I work with. More common are problems related to our perceived needs for power, freedom, and safety. However we spend it, money’s eventual purpose is enabling us to meet these perceived needs.
Note my emphasis on “perception.” Most of us have sufficient power, freedom, and safety to sustain life, but that’s a low bar measured against our expectations, which derive from our upbringing, our professional background, and our sense of social comparison–the extent to which we are “ahead” or “behind” the people we perceive as peers. [3]
Money problems are real, of course–try going without sufficient power, freedom, or safety for very long. But a theme in my practice is the dawning recognition that sufficient wealth to mitigate our money problems doesn’t eliminate all sources of fear and regret. Having enough money to meet our perceived needs for power, freedom, and safety merely allows those other, deeper needs to be felt more acutely.
Here, too, note my emphasis on “sufficiency.” Our money problems may never entirely disappear, no matter how much money we have. That’s a function of hedonic adaptation, the inevitable process by which we adapt to changes in our environment and take for granted material conditions that once seemed luxurious. [4]
Status
But if we achieve a degree of material success, at a certain point money problems begin to recede into the background. This doesn’t mean they’ve been extinguished. One of the reasons Maslow used a ladder and not a pyramid to illustrate his framework is that we occupy multiple rungs simultaneously as we’re climbing up or down.
And when we feel sufficiently powerful, free, and safe, we become more keenly attuned to our status, and “status problems” begin to emerge. This evokes images of “status symbols,” markers of prestige that can consume much of the money that’s been earned: The house, the vacation home, long-distance travel, the private jet to get there. And there are certainly people who desire these things merely for the pleasure of their consumption.
But in my experience that’s rare. In most cases status symbols are vehicles that enable us to obtain something far more important: desirable attention from people we esteem. That definition of status applies to everyone, even those of us who don’t care that much about fancy homes or exotic trips or personal aircraft.
We all require a sufficient amount of desirable attention from people we esteem, and when our material and financial aspirations are achieved, this becomes an even more important goal, and an inability to accomplish it poses a profound dilemma. This is by no means a bad thing–in fact, it’s a deeply rooted drive in human psychology that’s beneficial for the species, albeit problematic for us as individuals. [5]
And yet status problems can be even more difficult to solve than money problems, particularly in an increasingly dynamic society in which traditional institutions and social structures that formerly met our needs for status have declined or disappeared. This is one of the main factors fueling the rise of social media–it’s an easily accessible source of attention, even if it’s not all desirable, and even if most of it comes from people we don’t know, let alone esteem. When we’re denied legitimate, authentic status, we’ll settle for the fake kind.
Legacy
We’re subject to occasional concerns about status, largely because we evolved to associate a loss of standing in the clan with the risk of abandonment, isolation, and death. But over time and with sustained effort most of us secure a sufficient sense of status in our families, our personal networks, and our professional lives.
And when our status feels secure, we begin to worry about our legacy. I could also use the term impact here, because what I mean is transcending our individual experience and engaging and affecting others. This may take place in the moment by having an effect on those around us. But it can also occur over time, by having a lasting effect on those same people or on others at a distance, or by affecting those who come after us, so that our impact lives on.
This needn’t be a self-aggrandizing act of hubris, like that of Shelley’s Ozymandias, the vainglorious king. [6] But we don’t just desire attention from others–we want to know that we made a real difference in their lives. And the means by which we accomplish this goal, the vehicles for solving legacy problems are what anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Becker called “heroic projects.”
As I’ve written before, describing Becker’s views, “We engage in any number of activities with the (typically unconscious) goal of achieving a symbolic victory over mortality, which offers us at least a provisional respite from this terror. These energies can be directed toward many different ends–raising a family, building a business, pursuing fame or status or wealth.” [7] These are our heroic projects.
Meaning
Heroic projects can take many forms, and they’re not all equally worthy. When we begin to feel that we’re capable of transcending our immediate experience and having an impact on others, whether our contemporaries or our successors, we start asking, “To what end?” Will our legacy ultimately be a meaningful one?
“Problems of meaning” are harder to assess and resolve than those that came before, in part because they’re more subjective. Money, status, and even legacy have objective elements that can be quantified and measured. Meaning is a more ephemeral construct.
This offers some advantages to those of us who’ve “peeled the onion” this far. It is up to us, and no one else, to determine whether our heroic projects are meaningful ones. But there are traps to be found here as well. Many such efforts are materially rewarding, high-status, and yield a lasting legacy, and yet we doubt whether they’re truly meaningful. It can be tempting to answer in the affirmative.
It can be equally tempting to stop asking the question. When our money problems are mainly (or entirely) solved, when we enjoy a sense of status, when our legacy is assured, it can feel superfluous (or daunting, or both) to wonder whether the life we’re living is a meaningful one. Why bother?
Existential Dread
This is why: At the end of this line of inquiry, at the center of the onion, we’re confronted with the starkest of realities. Whatever we believe about what precedes or follows this existence, we can surely agree that our time here, in these bodies, with these fellow creatures, is finite. A handful of species seem to demonstrate an understanding of death: elephants, ravens, whales. But it seems certain that we humans are uniquely aware of our own impending demise as individuals. It is, as Becker says, “a terrifying dilemma.” [8]
That dilemma is at the root of everything that has come before, at the core of life’s problems. Philosopher Sam Keen, in his introduction to Becker’s The Denial of Death, noted that Becker believed that “the basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.” [9] All of our “problems” in some way trace back to this primal fear, and all of our “solutions” are in some sense efforts to assuage this fear.
We don’t think about this on a daily basis, of course. Becker cites the Russian psychoanalyst and historian Gregory Zilboorg, who noted that the fear of death “must be properly repressed to keep us living with any modicum of comfort… Therefore in normal times we move about actually without ever believing in our own death, as if we fully believed in our own corporeal immortality.” [10] And yet we all find ourselves here eventually, even if it’s very late in the game.
Conclusion (From the Inside Out)
There’s no universal solution to existential dread, but all human activity can be viewed in this light, as one or another heroic project attempting to transcend mortality. That these efforts will not indefinitely extend our time on the planet is irrelevant. It’s by making the effort that we ensure that our time here will be well-spent. Thus the importance of choosing heroic projects wisely.
The heroic projects that appear to be most useful in this regard are those that most readily evoke a sense of meaning. This is different for everyone–again, meaning is highly subjective–but the activities that my clients most reliably describe as meaningful include raising a family, religious faith or spiritual practice, membership in a community, and building a business with a mission they care about. (To be sure, this is by no means an exhaustive list.)
Experiencing a sense of meaning in life will not shield us permanently from existential dread, but it’s a bulwark that helps us keep it at bay much of the time, and a toolkit for coping when it overtakes us. And if we start here and “work inside out,” the problems we considered previously may weigh on us less heavily. And recall how many of these problems are ones of perception, of “sufficiency.”
When we experience a sense of meaning, legacy problems become easier. When we’re confident that we’re leaving a legacy, status problems become easier. When we enjoy desirable attention from people we esteem, money problems become easier. When we feel more grounded on deeper levels, the “problems” we previously perceived on higher levels may no longer be problems at all.
Thanks to Mary Ann Huckabay and Kevin Martin for a rich discussion of The Onion of Fear and Regret. And thanks to Holly May and her Stanford GSB classmates Helen Chen, Jackie Bello Neumann, Jason Scott, Juan Gonzalez, Ken Ettinger, Michael Glassman, Neal Watterson, Suzanne Adatto and Yubing Zhang for the inspiration to (finally) finish this essay.
Footnotes
[1] For more on Maslow’s influence on my work, see the following:
- Holding Our Breath (On Maslow’s Hierarchy)
- Tumbling Down Maslow’s Hierarchy
- Hard Problems in Soft Cultures
[2] Who built Maslow’s pyramid? A history of the creation of management studies’ most famous symbol and its implications for management education, page 91 (Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, John Ballard, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2019). I’m precluded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from linking directly to a freely-available version of this paper, but you can search for it on the Victoria University of Wellington’s open access repository, which is located outside the U.S. and not subject to the DMCA.
[3] For more on social comparison
- The Trap of Competition
- Learning How to Fall Behind
- Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (Matthew Lieberman, 2013)
[4] For more on hedonic adaptation:
- The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does (Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2014): “Human beings have the remarkable capacity to grow habituated or inured to most life changes… What is particularly fascinating about this phenomenon, however, is that it is most pronounced with respect to positive experiences. Indeed, it turns out that we are prone to take for granted pretty much everything positive that happens to us.” [pages 18-19]
- The Laws of Emotion, pages 353-354 (Nico Frijda, American Psychologist, 1988): “One must, I think, posit a law of hedonic asymmetry, the law of asymmetrical adaptation to pleasure or pain: Pleasure is always contingent upon change and disappears with continuous satisfaction. Pain may persist under persisting adverse conditions… The law of hedonic asymmetry is a stern and bitter law. It seems almost a necessary one, considering its roots, which, theoretically, are so obvious. Emotions exist for the sake of signaling states of the world that have to be responded to or that no longer need response and action. Once the ‘no more action needed’ signal has sounded, the signaling system can be switched off; there is no further need for it. That the net quality of life, by consequence, tends to be negative is an unfortunate result. It shows the human mind to have been made not for happiness, but for instantiating the blind biological laws of survival.”
- We Won’t Be Happy WHEN. We Could Be Happy NOW.
- Pain, Suffering and Hedonic Adaptation
- Stop Trying to Be “Good Enough” by “Getting Better”
[5] Why We Crave Attention (and What We Can Do About It)
[6] “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
[8] The Denial of Death, pages 25-26 (Ernest Becker, 1973)
[9] Ibid, Introduction.
[10] “Fear of Death” (Gregory Zilboorg, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 12, 465–475, 1943)
