Personal Security: How Do You Find It?

Growth doesn't stop at a certain age. It keeps going for as long as you're alive, and somewhere in that process you end up asking a plain question: what do I actually need in order to feel secure? Anyone who sat through an intro psychology class remembers Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that pyramid splitting human needs into five tiers: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. I want to walk through each one and ask what it takes to feel settled at every level.

At the base sit the physiological needs we all share. Food, water, warmth, rest. Water is mostly still free, at least for now, which leaves the other three. Any roof counts as a kind of luck, even a bed in a homeless shelter. It won't feel lucky while you're there, but circumstances pile up on people and sometimes that's where you land. People who have gone through it tend to stop being fussy about where they live once they get an income and move on.

Rent eats the biggest chunk of most budgets, so the simplest path to financial breathing room is finding the cheapest place you can genuinely tolerate. Get resourceful with food. Buy in bulk, cut back on eating out, and the grocery money goes further while feeding you better. Lower spending means lower stress, and lower stress means you actually rest. Odd as it sounds, people with higher incomes often feel less secure, because a big salary tends to come with a mortgage, car payments, and a stack of debt. Live simply and you can end up with more room to breathe than someone chasing a bigger paycheck, mostly because you need so much less to get by.

The next rung up is about safety. We want to be somewhere that feels safe, because that feeling takes a load off and steadies us. The catch is that neighborhoods labeled affordable often carry higher crime, since affordable means open to everyone, including people you'd rather not live next to. Still, you can hunt around. Decent, low-crime areas exist within a modest budget, and the folks living in them are frequently grounded and easygoing, people who work hard and don't put on airs.

Climb to the middle of the pyramid and you reach what gives life its weight: relationships. Nobody's deepest hunger is money or any physical thing. What people crave most is to be loved and accepted. That's the real story behind so many kids who go wrong early and drift into gangs. They never felt wanted, and often came out of homes that had already fallen apart. Get involved in your neighborhood or a church and relationships start to form. That's where meaning comes from. Viktor Frankl made a version of this point: we discover our own meaning partly by helping other people find theirs.

Fewer people reach the esteem level, the second from the top, though in some fashion everyone is somewhere on this ladder whether they notice or not. This tier fills up through feeling established in your work and roughly where you wanted to be. Plenty of people show up to a job only for the paycheck, and they tend to miss the point if the bank balance is all they've got. Money by itself can't hold you steady, because it can vanish overnight. People who have to scrape for their bread know how hard that is, and they respect what money is worth. They're also less inclined to chase it into debt, and they can meet their esteem needs through ordinary service work that pays less.

The top of the triangle rarely gets reached. Self-actualization is being truly content with where you are, feeling like you've lived a full life. It's the happiness everyone says they're after and few arrive at, usually because growth never made it onto their list of priorities. You don't have to run a company or carry a title to get there. What it takes is the ability to make a comfortable living for yourself and the people you love while doing some good in the world around you.

Reaching those growth goals has nothing to do with rank. Every person is built differently, and there's a version of this for everyone. Someone raised with very little might feel as secure in a shelter, briefly, one hopes, as a CEO does, maybe more so, given the weight an executive carries. Self-actualization is simply being at peace with who you are and what you're doing with your days. - Erwin Bishop