Posted 1 year ago
Fundamental Needs and a Creativist Culture
What is the difference between being a consumerist and creativist?
Olivia Sprinkel shared the following in her excellent ChangeThis Manifesto: The Creativist Manifesto: Consumer or Creativist?
Being a consumer means accepting a passive role in our life, one in which
we seek fulfillment through the accumulation of stuff, whether it be material goods, a high status job, or even in terms of our relationships.
We all know that lifestyle. We passively await the next new-new stuff to consume, and acculmulate around our lives as a buffer, even using our stuff as a comfortable sedative like soma in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World.
Being a consumer has proved so popular because of the pretty shiny things we’re constantly fed, dazzled with and sedated. It is easy. We’re spoon-fed our reality. And we’re spoon-fed a reality that effectively fails to satisfy our human needs but does make us dependent on those whose hands hold the spoon.
Olivia went on to offer an alternative:
Be a creativist. Reclaim the right to our individual identities; Play an active role in shaping and in creating our lives from the inside out; Reconnect to our own identities, and then we can connect with and be part of our communities and act collectively.
How do we do this?
What if discussed our human needs? What if we were able to regularly discuss our human needs and our roles as Consumerist or Creativist in fulfilling them?
And in this process we can expedite the process of moving from the former to the latter. And our conversations could form the seeds of our communities to collectively…fulfill our human needs.
Grand plan, maybe?
Let’s take a small step. Let’s define our terms. Let’s define our list of fundamental human needs.
Abraham Maslow is famous for his Hierarchy of Human Needs. They are:
• Self-actualization
• Esteem
• Love and belonging
• Safety needs
• Physiological needs
But perhaps a more complete list is from Manfred Max-Neef. His list of fundamental human needs includes:
- subsistence
- protection
- affection
- understanding
- participation
- leisure
- creation
- identity
- freedom.
What if we did this:
1 A short post published weekly that discussed one of these 9 fundamental human needs. This would serve only as a conversation starter. That first post will be published on November 8 here. The topic will be the first of these 9 fundamental needs: Subsistence.
In subsequent weeks a new post will be published on each Monday to begin the discussion of the next fundamental human need and how it is fulfilled more elegantly and sustainably as a Creativist.
2. The conversation can begin in the comments section for this post. Questions, opinions, differing viewpoints, data, links and yes, even agreement can begin to be shared in the comments for each of these weekly posts.
3. We, all of us, can expand that conversation to include more participants, more ideas and more interaction with a chat on Twitter.
The first such Twitter chat will take place on Friday, November 12, at 4 PM CEU, 3PM UK and 9:00 AM Central. The hashtag that organizes our tweet stream will #creativistchat. We recommend the very simple, easy-to-use Twitter application TweetChat to follow and participate in these weekly chats.
The topic for this first Twitter chat will be the first post on Subsistence. To organize the discussion we will look to the comment section for guidance on how we can further explore the topic of the weekly post.
And then each following week on Fridays at 4 PM CET, 3PM UK and 9:00 AM Central we can chat on Twitter chat to share our ideas, questions, answers, solutions inspired by the post on the next fundamental need published Monday of that same week.
Each week the schedule would be:
- Monday: blog post to begin the conversation
- Friday: Twitter chat to expand the conversation.
Now. You’ve consumed this post. Now let’s create a conversation. What do you think?
Notes