According to Maslow’s hierarchy, basic needs like food and shelter come before higher needs like a sense of meaning. For Victor Frankl, who lived through the Holocaust, this is not quite true. A sense of meaning is a biological need without which we cannot survive in dark times.
I wouldn’t universally say that the fulfillment of basic material needs are a prerequisite for spiritual growth, but they are hellpful because they free up space in the mind. A life of material precariousness, in which the loss of a paycheck, an unexpected bill, a ticket and towed car that prevent someone from going to work, produce a lot of anxiety and fear (in the parents and also in children that are around it). It causes stress and that stress changes what we think about. I say this not coming from that world, but in relaying what I’ve learned from people who have. I marvel, actually, at the depth and spiritual richness that some friends of mine have who were raised in pretty brutal poverty, but they themselves always say that they are the exception from a pretty dreary rule. I do think that struggle and setbacks are helpful for existential health, but I worry that I romanticize or otherwise excuse poverty if I justify it by its existential possibilities. The life of the monk or ascetic is often chosen. Diogenes threadbare cloak was not because he wanted a velvet robe but couldn’t afford one, but was a chosen way of life and conscious rejection of his former life as a merchant. On the other hand Aristotle was known to walk around in expensive purple clothing and was something of an aesthete. Trappist monks produced delicious beer, and going to (or sending your children to) a monastery was historically as much an economic decision as a spiritual one.
From personal experience what I find the greatest impediment to my existential growth is (1) that time becomes more scarce and if you sell your time for a living it becomes harder to carve out time (and I become a bit of a morning and weekend warrior) for the existential bit, (2) there’s a path dependency to bourgeois economic thinking and planning, the more you enter the world of money the more money and material goods enter your thoughts and surround you, it’s the thing people care about, talk about, think about - it’s not hard to be an existential contrarian in this world with the right training and mindset, but one also wants to have big wins and hunt big economic game as well and that requires smart thinking too and in this way material focus is a distraction from existential focus (3) ideally one would like to combine an existential focus that is also materially rewarding such that eating from both tables is not preconditioned to leading a mixed life but is part of an integrated life. I don’t particularly have heroes on this score, other than Churchill who I think was a marvelous mix of both (he had large taste and actually had to produce books to help support it) and I see it sometimes in surgeons or people who are driven by a cause and start companies to solve a problem that matters to them. in the American context I wonder how Wallace Stevens kept it up - was it that there was just a more humane work day, that technology wasn’t as ubiquitous and interrupting? Are there other people like Wallace Stevens?
I wouldn’t universally say that the fulfillment of basic material needs are a prerequisite for spiritual growth, but they are hellpful because they free up space in the mind. A life of material precariousness, in which the loss of a paycheck, an unexpected bill, a ticket and towed car that prevent someone from going to work, produce a lot of anxiety and fear (in the parents and also in children that are around it). It causes stress and that stress changes what we think about. I say this not coming from that world, but in relaying what I’ve learned from people who have. I marvel, actually, at the depth and spiritual richness that some friends of mine have who were raised in pretty brutal poverty, but they themselves always say that they are the exception from a pretty dreary rule. I do think that struggle and setbacks are helpful for existential health, but I worry that I romanticize or otherwise excuse poverty if I justify it by its existential possibilities. The life of the monk or ascetic is often chosen. Diogenes threadbare cloak was not because he wanted a velvet robe but couldn’t afford one, but was a chosen way of life and conscious rejection of his former life as a merchant. On the other hand Aristotle was known to walk around in expensive purple clothing and was something of an aesthete. Trappist monks produced delicious beer, and going to (or sending your children to) a monastery was historically as much an economic decision as a spiritual one.
From personal experience what I find the greatest impediment to my existential growth is (1) that time becomes more scarce and if you sell your time for a living it becomes harder to carve out time (and I become a bit of a morning and weekend warrior) for the existential bit, (2) there’s a path dependency to bourgeois economic thinking and planning, the more you enter the world of money the more money and material goods enter your thoughts and surround you, it’s the thing people care about, talk about, think about - it’s not hard to be an existential contrarian in this world with the right training and mindset, but one also wants to have big wins and hunt big economic game as well and that requires smart thinking too and in this way material focus is a distraction from existential focus (3) ideally one would like to combine an existential focus that is also materially rewarding such that eating from both tables is not preconditioned to leading a mixed life but is part of an integrated life. I don’t particularly have heroes on this score, other than Churchill who I think was a marvelous mix of both (he had large taste and actually had to produce books to help support it) and I see it sometimes in surgeons or people who are driven by a cause and start companies to solve a problem that matters to them. in the American context I wonder how Wallace Stevens kept it up - was it that there was just a more humane work day, that technology wasn’t as ubiquitous and interrupting? Are there other people like Wallace Stevens?