Self-actualisation is the missing piece to the puzzle of a happier world. Here is why and how to get there.

According to Maslow, only 1% of the population ever reaches self-actualisation.

Considering he thought self-actualisation was the highest human need, that’s a sure recipe for an unhappy world. Promoting self-actualisation and making it likelier amongst our population might be the ultimate key to building a happier society. Self-actualisation is not a luxury; it’s a necessity if we want to build a better future.

But how do we get to a world of self-actualised people? 

First things first, what is self-actualisation?

I recently wrote a post on self-actualisation, its link to happiness and how to cultivate it, so I’ll try not to repeat myself much here, but it’s essential to clarify the concept of self-actualisation before anything else. 

Self-actualisation is the higher-state need in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It would sit at the top of Maslow’s pyramid if he had ever drawn one (he didn’t). It is what human beings aspire to when they have all other needs satisfied. 

Self-actualisation is not a destination but a journey; it’s about becoming the best version of ourselves, not a perfect one.

Self-actualisation manifests itself in our hunger for learning, growth, creating new things, and for achieving and maximising our highest potential.

In his later writings, Maslow called it humanness or being fully human. For him, self-actualisation was our eternal search to be the most human we could be. 

Self-actualisation makes us fully human, so without it, we cannot be fully complete.

Self-actualisation, the missing piece for a happier world?

A couple of months ago, I was reading Abraham Maslow’s writings on self-actualisation when an idea struck me like a wave crashing onto the shore.

The force of the idea hit me with full impact. Here I was writing about building a better future for all, a more humane and human future of work, a more humane society, and isn’t self-actualisation one of the missing pieces? 

Maybe one of the most important pieces?

In today’s Western society, we prioritise external achievements over internal fulfilment, and it’s making us miserable. We have more technological progress than ever but also more depression, anxiety and suicides than at any previous time in history. Something is not working well.

There are many things we need to fix in our world (although many others are better than ever, that’s also true), and self-actualisation is one of them.

Making it easier for people to follow their passions and purpose, helping them to learn and develop, giving them what they need to become their best version, or allowing them to reach their maximum potential, would make people much happier.

In sum, enabling people to go on their personal self-actualisation journeys would make all of us happier.

How to get to a self-actualised world

How can we get to this desired state?

Self-actualisation is a personal journey. Governments, corporations and other social agents could do more to promote it among the population (and that’s a discussion for another day), but at the end of the day, it has to come from inside each of us. Everyone has to work on their own path. 

You cannot impose self-actualisation on others, but you can teach and promote it.

In the article I mentioned above, I already covered three main tips to work on your self-actualisation: know thyself, be creative and don’t stop learning. 

There are three other tips anybody can undertake to self-actualise:

– Identify your life purpose and work towards achieving it. 

– Identify your passions, what you enjoy doing, and what will make you enter a flow state, and double down on those activities. 

– Cultivate a growth mindset and understand that mistakes and errors are only milestones in your growth and learning journey.

A protopia of self-actualisation

Some would argue that a world where everybody is self-actualised would be a utopia, but that’s incorrect. It would be a protopia. 

Kevin Kelly coined the term in 2009 when most thinkers and futurists were struggling with a binary discussion: are we going towards a utopia or a dystopia? Kelly chose neither, and he settled with protopia, which means a world in progress, becoming something different, slowly but inexorably. 

A utopia is stifling. 

In a utopia, all problems have been solved, so there are no opportunities for the new to arrive. A utopia is stagnant. It sounds great, but it wouldn’t be nice to live in. 

That’s why even if a world of self-actualised people sounds utopic, it is anything but. 

Self-actualisation means people are growing and evolving, and therefore, the world they inhabit is also changing. It fits perfectly with the definition of protopia. You cannot have a utopia of self-actualised people, as they won’t want to live in a stagnant and immobile world.

Protopias are slow to materialise, but we may already be travelling towards a protopia of self-actualisation. 

Today, more and more people are discovering their purpose, learning new skills and becoming the best version of themselves. The progress is slow, but it is there. 

Self-actualised people may comprise 3% or 5% of the population, I don’t know, and that is not much, but it is already higher than the 1% Maslow estimated a few decades ago. 

It is slow, but it is progress. That’s how protopias work. Let’s hope that the progress continues. If it does, we will eventually reach a critical mass of enough self-actualised people. 

Once we get there, the process will be unstoppable. Self-actualisation is the key to a happier world, so we better be on the right track. 

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Self-actualisation: what it is, why it is important and how to work towards it.

Self-actualisation is probably the most important element of a happy and fulfilling life you haven’t heard much about. 

Or maybe you have. It is not part of everyday language, but it has been discussed for decades in humanistic and positive psychology circles.

Maslow put self-actualisation at the top of his famous hierarchy of needs as the highest and most sublime need humans can have. Other psychologists have expanded on Maslow’s work in the last few decades.

But what exactly is self-actualisation? And why is it so important? Can it be developed and worked upon?

We’ll answer these and other questions below.

What is self-actualisation?

So many features and dimensions have been added to the concept of self-actualisation over the years that it no longer has a clear definition.

In A Theory of Human Motivation, Maslow defined it as “self-fulfilment, namely the tendency for the individual to become actualised in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.” 

In later writings, Maslow replaced the term self-actualisation with being “fully human”. For him, self-actualisation was the highest human need and being self-actualised meant being fully human or displaying the fullest humanness possible.

Self-actualisation is about being the best version of yourself, having a growth mindset, and constantly wanting to improve and learn new things. 

It is also about self-awareness, listening to your nature and being your true self.

It is a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional concept.

10 characteristics of self-actualisation

Maslow wrote about many of the characteristics of self-actualised people in different papers. The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman has looked at them in detail, and after testing them and comparing them to existing research, he has grouped them into ten characteristics.

He explains them in his best-selling book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization and has created a free test to find out how self-actualised you are based on these ten characteristics. 

Let’s have a quick look at these ten characteristics.

Truth Seeking

Self-actualising people like to get to the truth of things and people. They like to find out how things really are. 

For Maslow, truth is one of the most fundamental human values, recognised across all cultures. It is a universal value. 

Self-actualised people are driven by the search of it.

Acceptance

The first person one has to accept is oneself. 

Before being able to love others and be compassionate to them, we need to start with ourselves.

Self-actualised people understand this. They understand they are not perfect, but they accept themselves as they are, with their quirks and desires, without shame or apology.

Purpose

A favourite in this blog, purpose is essential to being a happy and fulfilled human being. It is also an essential part of self-actualisation.

Purpose is about having a mission that goes beyond one’s self-interest, knowing what it is and working towards achieving it.

Authenticity

Self-actualised people are authentic to themselves. 

They accept themselves as they are, so they have no problem with being authentic to their real self, regardless of the situation they find themselves in.

As Barry Kaufman says, they “can maintain their dignity and integrity even in situations and environments that are undignified”.

Continued freshness of appreciation

Self-actualised people enjoy and appreciate the little things in life. 

They are like grown-up children who haven’t stopped marvelling at all the wondrous things life has to offer.

Watching a sunset is wonderful, it doesn’t matter how many you have already seen. So is smelling the earth after a summer rain, listening to a moving song, watching the view from a high mountain, and other million things. 

Others may have become tired of these experiences, but self-actualised people keep enjoying and savouring them as if it were the first time.

Peak experiences

Maslow dedicated much time to studying peak experiences. 

In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, he defined peak experiences as “transient moments of self-actualisation. They are moments of ecstasy which cannot be bought, cannot be guaranteed, cannot be sought.” 

They can be attained by different means. For example, giving birth to a child can be a peak experience, but so can be working in a flow state on something requiring concentration, finishing a marathon, making love or having a hallucinogenic-induced trip.

Humanitarianism

Self-actualised people have a genuine desire to help the human race to get better. They want to contribute to building a better world and a better society.

Good moral intuition

Self-actualised people know straight away when something is right or wrong. They have a well-tuned moral compass, and they are guided by it.

They don’t need to reflect on it. They just know. 

The right moral intuitions guide them.

Creative spirit

People manifest their self-actualisation through their creativity.

Self-actualised people like and want to create new things. They realise creating things is one of the most human endeavours, and they relish their creative spirit.

They squeeze their creative juices to the maximum.

That doesn’t mean all self-actualised people are artists or that they are the next Leonardo or Michel Angelo. Creativity can be applied to all human activities, not only arts, and we will all apply it in our levels of mastery, without necessarily being the next genius.

Read more: 6 Practical Tips To Unleash Your Creativity

Equanimity

Self-actualised people tend to take life’s vicissitudes with equanimity. 

They take them with grace and acceptance. 

They know that life has ups and downs, which are a necessary part of life, and they accept them as such.

A pyramid that isn’t a pyramid

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been drawn as a pyramid so many times that it is now difficult to imagine it any other way, but Maslow himself never envisaged it as such.

He thought some needs were at a higher spectrum than others and that you needed to have some basic needs covered before you could aspire to others, but Maslow never envisaged life as a videogame with different levels, where you need to cover one need before you go up to the next one.

Life is more complex and nuanced than that, and so are human needs. 

As Barry Kaufman tells us, “most people are partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time.”

Following up with the videogame metaphor, we are all playing at all levels all the time, depending on our state of mind at the moment. I might be working on my self-actualisation because some of my lower needs are covered, but in specific moments I might feel unsafe for some reason, and my need for safety will need covering.  

The psychologist John Rowan compared Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with Russian dolls: “each larger doll includes all the smaller dolls but also transcends them.” When working on a higher-purpose need such as self-actualisation, the lower-level needs don’t disappear but become integrated with the higher need. 

Self-actualisation is at the peak of the pyramid that isn’t a pyramid. It is the highest-purpose need, but it is integrated with all the rest. 

It includes and transcends them all.

Why is self-actualisation worth pursuing?

Self-actualisation is the higher need we humans can have, so it is essential to being happy and satisfied.

It is as simple as that.

It is what we are meant to do, but we often go astray and lose our ways. Self-actualisation is your way to go back to what you were supposed to be doing. 

All babies are born with the desire and urge to grow and learn. During the first years of their life, toddlers and little children are sponges absorbing all kinds of knowledge and new skills. They explore the world and become better at being human beings.

Then most of us lose that urge and become stuck in adulthood. We get stuck in a job we don’t like, relationships we don’t enjoy, thought and behaviour patterns that make us unhappy, and unhealthy habits. We don’t learn new things, we don’t create anything new, we don’t grow.

We get stuck.

We don’t let our self-actualising nature express itself, so we wither and wilt like an untended plant.

Self-actualisation is worth pursuing because it will make us feel alive and bring a higher purpose to our life. 

It is what will give us real and profound joy.

How to self-actualise

All this is great, but how do you self-actualise? Is it possible to become a self-actualised person?

First of all, self-actualisation is an ongoing process, like life itself. There is no final destination where you suddenly arrive, and hey, presto, you are now self-actualised. 

You constantly self-actualise, but there is always room for improvement. It is a process of continuous becoming rather than being.

You can do different things to work on your self-actualisation, to work on this continuous becoming. 

The ten characteristics mentioned above would be the best starting point. Just look at them and reflect on how you do against each. 

In some, you will do great; in others, not so much, but that’s OK. You will then know now where to start.

Once you do that, you can focus on the three areas below. 

Know thyself

Self-actualisation is about following your nature, about being your real self. It’s about doing what you are supposed to do and not what your parents or society expect from you.

To do that, first, you need to know yourself well. You need to know who you are. You need to be self-aware. 

There are different ways to know yourself better, like asking for feedback from others or using the services of a coach. I explained them well elsewhere, so I won’t discuss the details here.

Another good option is to carry out the test on self-actualisation I mentioned above. By doing so, you will gain self-awareness in general and in all the specific dimensions of self-actualisation, so you will know where to focus more.

Once you know who you are, you just need to be yourself. Find your purpose, what you are meant to do, and try to live according to your authentic nature. 

Be creative

Creativity is one of the most human features. 

Creating things gives us purpose and meaning, so it can be highly satisfying. It is also fun.

All human beings have their own creative impulse. Don’t ever believe you aren’t creative.

We all are. 

So, create new things, build them, test them. Try and experiment with new things. Play an instrument, draw, paint, mould clay, write, try a new method or process at work, or, why not, start your own blog. 

Express your creativity the way that feels best for you. We all have our own different ways of being creative. 

Find yours.

You will know what it is when you do it.

Don’t stop learning

Learning is the source of one of the biggest joys in life, but it is an unappreciated joy for many.

Don’t be one of those many. Appreciate the joys learning brings.

There is so much knowledge, so many skills, so many interesting facts, so many valuable tips… so many things to learn out there, that you can learn something new every minute for the rest of your life, and you will still have plenty of things left to learn. 

But that’s fine, it’s not a race.

The self-actualised person doesn’t compete with anybody else, only with him or herself. They want to become the best version of themselves, get as close as possible to their potential as a human being.

To do that, the self-actualising person needs to keep learning and improving. 

They keep learning not because they must so they can get better but because of the joy it brings them. 

Learning is not a means to an end; it’s the end itself.

Towards full humanness

For Maslow, self-actualisation meant being fully human. 

Working towards self-actualisation means working towards full humanness. It means being the best version of ourselves, making the most of our most human capabilities.

It means listening to our inner self, knowing who we really are, and using that knowledge to live the life we are meant to live. It also means being creative, never stopping learning new things and living by our values.

An ideal world would be one where everybody, the entire population, was encouraged and had the time and everything they needed to work towards their self-actualisation. 

A better future would be one where self-actualisation was a value and a state of mind cherished by society, where we all made an effort to be the best version of ourselves.

It is a distant future, but not impossible. We are born to self-actualise, but some of us forget about it. We can build a society where we don’t forget it, and everyone is allowed to live the life they are meant to live.

Wouldn’t it be great to live in such a world? 

Definitely!

It is in our hands to build it. What are we waiting for?

Read also: Why self-actualisation is the key to building a happier world

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Stoicism was a school of philosophy created in Ancient Greece more than 2000 years ago, but many of its precepts are still relevant today.

Modern men and women can find solace, tranquillity, and happiness if they follow some of its teachings.

I am not a Stoic, and I will not pretend to be one, but I like many of the elements forming this philosophy, so I have incorporated them into my personal philosophy. I don’t believe in labels and categories or in calling yourself a Stoic, an Epicurean, or a Communist if that means having to subscribe to all the elements forming one of these -isms. We should be able to pick and choose whatever fancies us and build our own personal philosophy of life, mixing different ideas.

For a long time now, Philosophy, with a capital letter, has confined itself to the dusty offices of universities and academia, with no practical use in real life. Many of today’s philosophers spend their days discussing linguistic tricks with no real practical life utility, but it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be so. 

When Zeno created Stoicism

When Zeno of Citium created Stoicism in the early 3rd century BC in Athens, it was to be a philosophy of life. Its purpose was to help its adherents to conduct a happy and fulfilling life. It was competing with other philosophy schools like the Cynics, the Epicureans, the Sceptics, and the Peripatetics. 

Back then, philosophy dealt with the topic of what it meant to live a good life. This is one of the main questions of life, it’s the meaning of life itself, and I believe we haven’t been able to answer it correctly yet, more than two millennia later, because there is no single answer. 

Each of us must find meaning in our lives, and it’s not always easy.

Stoicism can be helpful in that you can find in it some of the elements that could be part of your own personal meaning. They are definitely part of mine. 

How to be happy, the Stoic way

Stoics were very successful in Ancient Greece, where philosophers like Zeno and Epictetus shone, but it was also notoriously popular in the Roman Empire.

Some of its principles fit well with the values present in the Roman high classes. Thinkers like Seneca, who was a very wealthy individual, similar to a modern-day investment banker and had influence over a few Emperors, and Marcus Aurelius, who was a Roman Emperor himself, were some of the most prominent Roman Stoics.

One of the reasons for their success was their interest in having a good life and achieving happiness and fulfilment.

Stoics promote the search for tranquillity, above anything else, as the main source of joy. For them, happiness is not achieved by satisfying all your needs and having an exciting life but by being calm and having a tranquil and serene way of being that allows you to think, reflect and enjoy what life has to offer.

The problem with needs

One of the main insights the Stoics had was to realise that human beings are insatiable.

We are overwhelmed by constant needs: hunger, lust for sex, need to be loved, want of money and fame, etc.

Every time we achieve something we wanted, we want more of it, or we want something new. It never ends, and it can become a constant source of dissatisfaction. Some philosophies of life focus on achieving all this, but this is a fool’s errand; it has no end.

Stoics focused instead on wanting less.

Rather than changing the outside world, their focus is on changing themselves. They focused on the inner world we all inhabit. They realised the easiest way for us to achieve happiness was to learn how to want things we already had.

This is, of course, easier said than done. 

One of the main techniques Stoics used was what the author William B. Irvine calls negative visualisation in his book A Guide To The Good Life (the Ancient art of Stoic Joy). This technique consists of imagining that we have lost things we love and cherish. We should contemplate the death of people we love and how sad we would feel, but also our own death and all the beautiful things in life we would miss. We should also contemplate the loss of possessions, wealth, and objects we like.

This technique sounds macabre and a tad masochist, but it can be very useful, as what it does is make you appreciate and value the people and objects in your life better. It increases gratitude and satisfaction for what you already have and stops you from always looking for what you don’t have yet.

The neighbour’s grass is not always greener than ours, after all.

The problem with worries

The second source of unhappiness for Stoics is that we worry too much.

We spend our lives worrying about things over which we have little or no control.

We regret our past mistakes and get anxious about future situations that haven’t happened and will most likely never happen. We, human beings, are natural worriers. This has helped us evolve and survive in the past, but in our ultra-safe current environment, this trait is more of a limiting factor than a booster.

Epictetus started his Handbook with the words: “some things are in our control and others not.” This assertion is simple but powerful.

The Dichotomy of Control

Epictetus and other Stoics introduced the concept of the Dichotomy of Control, which Irvine converted into a trichotomy, as there are three elements to consider:

1. There are things over which we have complete control, like the goals we set for ourselves, our values, opinions, and even our character (at least for people like Marcus Aurelius, who thought we had the power to shape and build our character by reflecting about it and working on it). 
2. There are things over which we have no control at all, like the weather, the stock market, or the policies of the government. A Stoic would not waste any energy on any of this, as in Marcus Aurelius’s words, “nothing is worth doing pointlessly.” Worrying about or trying to influence things we cannot control at all is pointless indeed.
3. There are things over which we have some, but not complete control, like, for example, winning a tennis match (it depends on who you play against, but your skills and practice also count) or your partner’s mood (it is their mood, but you can influence it through your actions). We should be concerned about these things, but considering that it will also depend on others and regardless of all the efforts and worries we put into it, we may still not achieve our objectives. Stoics would recommend setting up internal rather than external goals (I’ll play tennis to the best of my ability as opposed to I will win the match) so they have control over the outcome.

The Stoic approach to…

Apart from living a good and happy life, the Stoics delved into many other topics. Let’s analyse some of them here.

Death

I have mentioned above that Stoics would contemplate their own and their loved ones’ death.

Death is an essential part of life and is something we all will eventually encounter, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, famous and unknown. Death is inevitable, but we don’t like to think about it. Death can also teach us great things about living a good life.

Stoics did think about it in a way that helped them live better lives. They accepted death, they didn’t try to escape it at all costs. Many Stoics preferred to kill themselves than to live lives that weren’t worth living anymore.

Seneca probably expresses best the Stoics’ views about death when he said he had been dead already (an idea I wrote about in a recent post): 

“(I was dead) before I was born. Death is just not being. What that is like I know already. It will be the same after me as it was before me. (…) Death is all that was before us.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Fame and wealth

Stoics weren’t like Cynics, who renounced material goods and riches (the most famous Cynic, Diogenes, lived in a barrel, and his only possessions were a cloak, a walking stick, and a leather poach).

As explained above, Seneca was one of the wealthiest persons in the Roman Empire, and Marcus Aurelius was the Roman Emperor. They were both rich and famous.

Stoics won’t renounce wealth and fame, but they won’t pursue them either.

They looked for inner peace and tranquillity, and money and fame aren’t conducive to them. They usually disturb your tranquillity. If we are too attached to our possessions or too worried about our fame or what others think about us, we stop having control over our happiness and give this control to external factors, which is something Stoics wanted to avoid. 

If you have the means to have a comfortable life, you should not relinquish it, but you should always be ready to part from your possessions. Stoics were not ascetics after all, and they were known for enjoying the little pleasures of life. They didn’t want to fall slaves to them, though.

Seneca once again explained it best when talking about wealth:

“You ask what is the proper limit to a person’s wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Essential and enough are relative concepts, of course, but regardless, I find those words to be wise. If only Seneca had followed his own advice in his personal life…

Purpose and meaning

The following is another quote from Seneca (the last one, I promise). 

“It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit. For man is a rational animal. Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy -that he lives in accordance with his own nature.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

This is one of my favourite quotes. The premise is, again, simple but powerful. We should all live in accordance with our nature, to who we really are.

We can only be happy if we listen to our inner voice, follow our dreams and live the life we are meant to live, not less, not more.

The problem is that we usually don’t know ourselves very well. That’s why the first step towards happiness and fulfilment must be self-discovery and self-awareness. Know thyself, and then live your life according to your nature, to who you really are, not to what society or others dictate.

An empowering philosophy of life

I like Stoicism because it is an empowering philosophy of life.

Its basic premise is that we, as human beings, have all the necessary tools to live a fulfilling life. It all depends on us. There is nowhere to hide, nobody to blame.

I find this liberating and empowering.

Stoicism doesn’t pretend to change the world, only the individuals populating it.

We don’t need to change the world to be happy, only our mindset and outlook towards it. You can suffer and have considerable drawbacks, we all have them, but still be happy if you look at things the right way.

Stoicism helps you do this.

For an ancient philosophy in vogue more than two thousand years ago, it is today more relevant than ever. It has the necessary elements to continue being relevant and helpful for centuries and millennia to come. It will continue being relevant and valuable as long as humans are around, as it touches upon some of our most basic human needs to achieve a fulfilling and happy life.

Become a modern Stoic, and you will be happier and more content for it.

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“Be the change you want to see in the world”

Mahatma Ghandi

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. 

Today I am wise, so I am changing myself”

Rumi

I love these three quotes. Well, I love these two quotes and the song, although the latter could also be a quote of wisdom from a wise philosopher instead of a song by the King of Pop himself. These three quotes have something fundamental in common. They all highlight the virtues of personal responsibility and self-actualisation and are a desperate call for action to change the world, starting with oneself. 

The three of them are conveying the same message: the world is changed by every one of us, by our actions, so if you want the world to change, don’t wait for others (governments, the UN, NGOs, corporations, actors, singers, writers, philosophers, your friends) to change the world, but start with yourself. If all of us started with ourselves and changed for the better, becoming wiser, more compassionate, more generous, and kinder, and sharing our vulnerability, the world would become a much nicer place to live.

If you change yourself and nobody else follows you, maybe the world will not have changed so much, but at least your world will have changed, you will be able to live with yourself, and you might even become a role model for others.

This is a compelling message, so it is worth repeating: don’t wait for others to change for the better; start with yourself first.

Personal responsibility and self-actualisation

These quotes talk about changing the world, but I don’t think that’s the most important message. They also talk about personal responsibility, taking ownership of your own life, and changing yourself. 

In his famous work hierarchy of needs, Maslow listed self-actualisation as the need of the highest order, the one sitting at the top of the pyramid (although Maslow himself never showed these needs in a pyramid). Self-actualisation is about the realisation of one’s full potential, of achieving everything we can achieve, of being everything we can be. As Maslow put it, “what a man can be, he must be.” 

Self-actualisation can mean pursuing one’s creative instincts and expressing ourselves through art, but it can also mean achieving our life goals, being the best parent or partner we can be, or excelling at work.

We all need to find out who we are, accept ourselves the way we are, and then be the best possible versions of ourselves. We will be grateful for it, and the world will be thankful for it.

Excellence vs. Exigence

I associate self-actualisation with the search for excellence, not for exigence. Both sound similar but are very different and can have different consequences on our effectiveness and mental wellbeing. 

The search for excellence means trying to be the best version of yourself but accepting your shortcomings, knowing you are not perfect and being OK with that. It’s giving your best shot at it, trying your best, and being happy knowing you are reaching your maximum potential. You focus on what you have done and what you are good at, and it usually brings happiness and contentment.

When we live in exigence mode, we aim for perfectionism and are always focusing on what is lacking and what we aren’t doing well. We are always missing the target, as we haven’t reached our unachievable and unrealistic goals. Exigence brings constant dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

It is a fine line between the two, and it is not always easy to navigate.

Is purpose the secret to happiness?

When I was younger, I was a bit of a hedonist, and I would identify myself with the Epicureans. I thought happiness was the result of having pleasurable experiences and avoiding suffering as much as possible. As I grew older, I distanced myself more and more from this line of thought, and I’ve become more of a Stoic. I still like and enjoy the pleasures of life, but I understand suffering and pain are also part and parcel of it. I embrace them fully and try to learn from them.

If pleasurable experiences and lack of suffering aren’t the secret to happiness, what is it?

The secret of happiness is a very complex and subjective topic and would merit much more than a blog post, but I think one of the main elements has to be purpose. We are goal-oriented creatures, and if we don’t have a purpose, something to strive for, something to dream about, or something to redirect our efforts towards, then it will be impossible to be fully happy. 

One of the great stoic masters, Seneca, put it nicely more than two thousand years ago:

“Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy – that he lives in accordance with his own nature.”

Seneca, “Letters from a Stoic”

This sounds simple and obvious, but it is profound. How many of us have stopped to think about what our true nature is and what we want from life? Are we true to ourselves in our choices of career, partner, and life goals? How many of us know, really know, who we are and what we want to achieve in life?

I don’t know about you, but I am now a middle-aged man, and I am still grappling with these questions.

Find out who you are, define your purpose in life, and go for it. You will have walked the first step towards happiness.

Let’s change the world

What I like about the three quotes above from Michael Jackson, Ghandi and Rumi is that they combine personal growth and self-actualisation, focused on the individual, with changing the world, focused on the collective. The first step in order to change the group is to change oneself.

Our world has improved a lot, and living standards are better than ever, but it is still a highly unequal and unfair place, with many global issues menacing our existence and the quality of our lives. It needs changing, but it won’t change itself. 

We shouldn’t be waiting for others to change it for us. These three quotes remind us that we have the agency, the power, and the capacity to change the world if we start with ourselves. If you become the best version of yourself, you will live a happier life, you will make your small contribution to changing the world for the better, and you will become a role model for others. 

Next time you look at yourself in the mirror, think about what type of human being you want to be, who you really are, and who the best version of yourself is. Think about what change the world needs, and be that change.

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The post I’m starting with the man in the mirror appeared first on Humane Future of Work.

The former UK Prime Minister Theresa May famously said in 2016:

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means.”

These words sparked a big controversy at the time, and many even compared her speech to Hitler (here and here, for example). It is not my intention to restart an old debate here, but I do believe that the concept of us all being “citizens of the world” can be a positive force for good. I would like to use this post to explain why.

I am a proud citizen of the world

I am from the Basque Country in Spain. We speak one of the oldest languages in Europe, Basque (which is not related to Spanish or any other language of Indo-European origin), and we are famously proud of our traditions, customs, and culture. Many people in the Basque Country feel neither Spanish nor French (part of the Basque Country is also in France) and would like to have more autonomy or live in a completely independent state.

Apart from my native Bermeo and San Sebastian, both in the Basque Country, I have also lived in Barcelona, London, Paris and Singapore, I have travelled extensively, and I speak several languages. I consider myself a proud citizen of the world, and I wish more people were feeling the same.

I love the Basque Country, our traditions and spending time there. I think it is a great place to live, and I am pretty sure I will end up living there again, but the world is full of amazing places and if I were born and raised in, say, Mumbai, Shanghai, Houston or Bogotá, I am sure that I would love them and I would think they were excellent too. We human beings end up loving the culture in which we are raised because that’s what makes sense to our world, but no culture is intrinsically better than any other, and where we are born and raised is a question of randomness and chance.

Looking at the situation people are in today in many countries in the world, I was lucky to be born in Bermeo. That’s one of the reasons I feel like a citizen of the world. I want all my fellow human beings to have better lives, not only my countrymen, family members, friends or acquaintances. Why them and not others?

Globalism vs Localism, a false dichotomy?

Internationalism is not the same as globalism, the same way that localism is different from nationalism. The first two would be at one end of the spectrum, the one favouring further integration between countries and their economies and cultures, with nationalism and localism at the other end, the one fostering difference and the value of proximity.

These things usually depend on who you ask and how you precisely define each term, but globalism and nationalism would usually have the most negative connotations of these terms.

I’m not too fond of labelling and categorising myself or others, hence I won’t select one of these for myself. I believe academics often like to create false dichotomies and spectra to classify concepts and people, but I don’t think we should all be put into boxes.

I agree with localists in that we usually forge our most essential relationships locally and that what matters to us usually happens also locally. I can also see that unfettered globalisation has increased inequality in many places (it has also raised out of poverty millions, mainly in China and East Asia). Many in other regions of the world perceive it as trying to impose a liberal economic model based on Western culture.

Globalisation, as an economic model, has created a lot of wealth, but it has also created plenty of inequalities. Still, I don’t think rising trade barriers is the solution. This post’s goal was not to support economic globalisation based on a neoliberal capitalist model in which everything goes but to promote a culturally and politically globalised world in which we feel increasingly closer to each other and can solve global problems globally.

The origin of nations and cultures

Tribalism and localism are natural processes and make sense from an evolutionary perspective. For millennia, our ancestors lived in small groups of 50 people, where they knew and trusted each other and worked together towards the survival of the group. This meant building a strong group spirit, in opposition to anybody else outside that group: we against them. Opposition to THEM helps create a sense of US.

Like Yuval Noah Harari explains in Sapiens, when we started building cities and then nations with thousands and then millions of citizens, we built narratives around religion and nationalism that allowed us to continue functioning as groups, even if we no longer knew everybody else in that group. Those groups were still based on a strong group spirit, built upon anthems, legends, a flag, a king, a god, and many other common symbols, and in opposition to other groups. Again, it was WE against THEM.

This group spirit has made sense throughout all history until we got to the 20th Century, where the two World Wars, the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation should have made us think about whether this is still a good working model.

Now we are facing a global pandemic, a much bigger problem in the form of climate change, rising global inequality, terrorism, wars raging in some countries, health problems linked to obesity in some countries and malnutrition and hunger in many others, the advent of AI and increased automation… and the list goes on, but the two greatest powers in the world are embarked in a trade war, and there doesn’t seem to be any global agreement on how to tackle all these problems.

We need global solutions to global problems, but as The Economist wrote recently, globalisation is receding, and we don’t know what will take its place. If it is greater nationalism and localism, it is unlikely to create a better world.

Towards a One-State World?

In Our Kind, a book published more than 30 years ago, the anthropologist Marvin Harris argued that the number of sovereign political units reached their peak around 1000 BC when there were around 500,000 bands, villages, and chiefdoms in the world. Now there are about 200 independent countries, and if we follow the curve of calculations, there will be one only after the year 2300, which, if you ask me, is a bit too late.

Sadly, the primary means to achieve this consolidation has been warfare. I am not sure we would survive a global war between several regional powers with the destructive capacity we have today. Luckily there are glimmers of hope in some examples of voluntary and pacific integration of some countries into a region, the main one being the European Union.

The EU and the creation of the United Nations after World War II are good signs towards integration and the eventual arrival of a Global State in which sovereignty resides in all humanity and not in a particular nation, and different regions can solve their differences peacefully and democratically. However, I am afraid we are still centuries away from this state of affairs.

The sooner, the better

I am a proud Basque citizen of the world. I love being Basque and loved growing up in the Basque Country, where I feel alive. However, rather than build walls between nations and peoples and look at what makes us different, I prefer to look at what I have in common with other people, be it English, Chinese or Iranian.

Call me naïve, but I wish there were no political barriers between countries, and we were all citizens of the world, citizens of one single political entity, where every citizen of the world would have the same rights and obligations across the globe. We could have something like the Principle of Subsidiarity. This EU treaty article defines that the EU does not take action unless it is more effective or makes more sense than an action taken at the national, regional, or local level. This way, government responsibility would lay as close to the people as possible, but global problems would be solved globally.

In this world, we would keep our languages, cultures, and different ways of living our lives. Still, we would all feel like citizens of the same entity and solve our problems through collaboration, not confrontation.

In this world, there would be no wars, and there would be no nuclear weapons left, as they would all be redundant. We would enact a concerted response to the next pandemic, and we wouldn’t be scraping amongst ourselves to see what country gets the vaccine first. We would have an integrated and coherent approach to fighting climate change. We would have a global strategy to fight inequality and redistribute wealth fairly. People would be free to move across borders, and all countries would be more multicultural and open.

Call me naïve, but wouldn’t you like to live in a world like this? I definitely would, but then again, I am a citizen of the world and a very proud one at that.

Read more: The beauty of leveraging cultural differences

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The post I am a proud citizen of the world appeared first on Humane Future of Work.