Are You a Metagrumbler?

If so, Congratulations! You're happier than you realize. Years ago advice columnist Dear Abby received a letter from Irene Lehman of Pompano Beach, Florida. She write, "I am sending you [a poem] written by my grandson, Jason Lehman. He is 14 years old and lives in New Haven, Connecticut. I hope you think it's worth printing."

Abby, impressed by the youngster's writing, had doubts a 14-year-old could write such an marvelous poem. Abby telephoned Jason and told him she planned to publish it but if he didn't originate it, "to please fess up or the repercussions could be very embarrassing." Jason assured her that he was, indeed, the author. Here's that poem:

Jigsaw Name Puzzles

Present Tense

It was spring,
But it was summer I wanted,

The warm days,
And the great outdoors.

It was summer,
But it was fall I wanted,

The colorful leaves,
And the cool, dry air.

It was fall,
But it was winter I wanted,

The gorgeous snow,
And the joy of the holiday season.

It was winter,
But it was spring I wanted,

The warmth,
And the blooming of nature.

I was a child,
But it was adulthood I wanted,

The freedom,
And the respect.

I was 20,
But it was 30 I wanted,

To be mature,
And sophisticated.

I was middle-aged,
But it was 20 I wanted,

The youth,
And the free spirit.

I was retired,
But it was middle age I wanted,

The nearnessy of mind,
Without limitations.

My life was over.

But I never got what I wanted.

You're working long hours to earn what writer Stuart Wilde calls "biotickets" to pay your bills. Yet, take home pay is becoming a misnomer as less and less of what's supposed to be taken home is production it to your address.

It seems we're also putting in a lot of time searching for that elusive word Happiness and happiness seems to be the one thing that's eluding us these days. Too many citizen I know feel they're losing their lives in the process of trying to live them!

So, let's pause and reflect more on how happy we are, or is that easier said than done? Could you identify happiness in a police lineup? We talk about happiness but so often haven't a clue what the happiness we seek looks or feels like. We merely know we want it.

We must learn to live, as my college professor Howard Clark, told us in speech class one day, with a "restless contentment." And this phrase brings us to the writings of Dr. Abraham Maslow who published a much quoted paper on the human hierarchy of needs in 1943. Later Dr. Maslow wrote about what he termed "Low Grumbles, High Grumbles, and Metagrumbles," all part of the human condition and tied to our never-ending desires for More - no matter how much we already have (even if that includes good health).

Because a satisfied need ceases to be a motivator of behavior, Dr. Maslow, speaking about gratified basic needs such as hunger, sex, protection and protection (among many others), said that "All the basic needs which have been fully gratified tend to be forgotten by the private and to disappear from consciousness." What does this mean? That for awhile, until the previously satisfied need begins to press on us to satisfy it again, "what the person is craving and wanting and wishing for tends to be that which is just out ahead of him in the motivational hierarchy. Focusing on this particular need indicates that all the lower needs have been satisfied, and it indicates that the needs which are still higher and beyond what the person is craving for [self-esteem, recognition, appreciation, self-actualization] have not yet come into the realm of possibility for him," so we don't even think about them when our lower level or "deficiency" needs seem illustrious and pressing in our consciousness or biology.

"In an authoritarian, industrial situation," Maslow writes, "lower-level complaints means complaints about cold and wet and danger to life and fatigue and poor protection and all of these basic biological necessities." On the safe bet side, Maslow indicates that "these complaints relate a wish or craving out ahead of what is currently available." Being fired arbitrarily, for example, fits here.

So, what are low grumbles? "I think we can call low grumbles those grumbles which come at the biological and at the protection level," Maslow points out, "perhaps, also, at the level of gregariousness and belonging to the informal, sociable group."

The higher-need levels would be "mostly at the level of esteem and self-esteem, where questions would be complex of dignity, of autonomy, of self-respect,, of respect from the other; feelings of worth, of getting praise and rewards and due for one's accomplishments and the like."

The metagrumbles "are the metamotivations which hold in the self-actualizing life." These, Maslow says, "might be complaints about not being given the full truth, blocks in the free flow of communication, complaints about inefficiency and imperfections, etc." What's keen about complaints or grumbles at this leve is that citizen who have the luxury of complaining about safe bet systems in place at work, injustice, grumbles about not being rewarded for the time one has spent on a project, about villainy being rewarded, is this: these are much higher levels of grumbles than those we expect to hear from a person who is anxious about their protection and survival.

What this indicates, Maslow writes, is that "human beings will always complain. As soon as we get used to our blessings, after introductory delight, we forget about them and start reaching out into the hereafter for still higher blessings, as we restlessly comprehend how things could be even more perfect than they are at this moment."

Which brings up an keen point. We've heard over and over that we ought to count our blessings, but once we've counted them we tend to lose interest in what we now know and will likely move on to higher and higher levels of discontent - reaching for what is out ahead of us, what we have not yet attained yet desire.

This is why those who advocate the religious doctrine of what Maslow calls "enlightened management" are often disillusioned and disappointed as the complaint level rises when good conditions come in. "Disappointed by the lack of gratitude, by the continuation of complaints, their anger seemed justified in light of the money and efforts that went into production improvements in the work conditions."

"I assumed that there were hierarchies of frustration and that keen from a low-frustration to a high frustration level is a sign of blessedness, of good fortune, of good collective conditions," Maslow writes. "To complain about the orchad programs in the city where I live...indicates the height of life at which the complainers are living. To complain about rose gardens means that your belly is full, that you have a good roof over your head, that your furnace is working, that you're not afraid of bubonic plague, that you're not afraid of assassination, that the police and fire departments work well...and many other preconditions that are already satisfied."

This brings us to Maslow's key point: "The high-level complaint is not to be taken as naturally like any other complaint: it must be used to indicate all the preconditions which have been satisfied to make the height of this complaint theoretically possible."

Maslow claims that an enlightened supervision "will expect that revising in conditions would raise the complaint level and raise the frustration level as outlined above, rather than expecting that improved conditions will make all complaints disappear." What we must look for in any setting, he indicates, is "Have these complaints gone up in motivational level?" In other words, from low grumbles, to middle grumbles, to metagrumbles? Money, it appears, can mean roughly anyone in the motivational hierarchy; it can mean low or middle or high values or metavalues as well, depending on the level of frustration or satisfaction/contentment with which a person is living his or her life.

Here are some examples of nothing else but bad conditions: prisoner-of-war camps, attention camps, poorly managed companies, and frankly all too often, our collective school system, nursing home systems that warehouse the elderly rather than honor, value, and respect them. Maslow cites the example of an unpholsterer who was always upset because his boss whistled for him instead of calling him by name. A complication of good conditions, we should note, is that they do have a safe bet supervene on some people, a bad and catastrophic supervene on others - especially authoritarians who cannot handle free time and trust.

"Don't think good conditions invariably make all human beings into growing, self-actualizers," Maslow writes. For example, some citizen repress their desire to steal until the bank goes liberal, removes guards, and institutes trust. "The honor law still cannot be used ordinarily in situations where the temptations are too great, where the stakes are too great."

Maslow even observes that "The same thing is true for a marriage and might even turn out to be a way of judging the goodness of the marriage," as, for instance, when a wife is complaining about her husband forgetting to bring her flowers, putting too much sugar in his coffee, etc. This type of complaint is at a dissimilar level from the wife who complains that her husband broke her nose or knocked her teeth out. "The one thing to remember is that no matter how good the marriage or the college or the school or the parents, there will be perceived ways of enhancing the situation, i.e., there will be complaints and grumbles." This, while we may not want to admit it, is the essence of human growth and improvement.

"...there will be very quick and sharp complaints about any more basic gratifications which are taken away or threatened or jeopardized even though the person doesn't observation these gratifications or takes them for granted entirely when they are nothing else but available." An example of this is that "If you ask a person what's good about his place, he won't think to tell you that his feet don't get wet because the floors aren't flooded, or that he is protected against lice and cockroaches in his office, or the like. He will naturally take all of these for granted and won't put them down as pluses. But if any of these taken-for-granted conditions disappears, then of policy you'll hear a big howl. To say it another way, these gratifications do not bring appreciation or gratitude, even though they do bring violent complaints when they are taken away." safe bet grumbles, by contrast, "are ordinarily comments about what is just higher in the hierarchy of motivation, what is just out ahead, what is the next wish wished for."

In collecting examples of bad conditions in the extreme, Maslow suggests that "collecting this sort of treatment...might be the basis for production up a checklist in order to make...workers more aware of their blessings (which normally they won't even notice, which they will take for granted as normal). That is, instead of asking them to volunteer complaints, it might be desirable to have a checklist of nothing else but bad conditions and ask them if any of these things happen; for instance, if there are any bugs or if it's too cold, or too hot or too noisy or too perilous or if corrosive chemicals spatter on them or if they are physically hurt or attacked by anyone or if there are no protection precautions on perilous machines, etc....Any man presented with a check list of two hundred such items could then comprehend that the absence of all these two hundred bad conditions was itself a safe bet good."

"Tucked away in our subconscious is an idyllic vision," Robert J. Hastings writes in The Station. "We see ourselves on long trip that spans the continent. We are traveling by train. Out of the windows we drink in the passing scene of cars on around highways, of children waving at a crossing, of cattle grazing on a distant hillside, of smoke pouring from a power plant, of row upon row of corn and wheat, of flatlands and valleys, of mountains and rolling hillsides, of city skylines and hamlet halls.

"But uppermost in our minds is the final destination. Bands will be playing and flags waving. Once we get there our dreams will come true, and the pieces of our lives will fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. How restlessly we pace the aisles...waiting, waiting, waiting for The Station.

"'When we reach The station that will be it!' we cry.

"'When I'm 18.'

"'When I buy a new 450Sl Mercedes-Benz.'

"'When I put the last kid straight through college.'

"'When I have paid off the mortgage.'

"'When I get a promotion.'

"'When I reach the age of retirement, I shall live happily ever after!'

"Sooner or later we must realize," Mr. Hastings writes, "there is no station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip. The station is only a dream. It always outdistances us."

Perhaps Howard Clark, my college speech professor was uncanily accurate. Rather than telling ourselves, "I'm dissatisfied," and grumbling all the time about this or that, how much more fun life will be if we live with that marvelous metagrumble he called "a sense of "restless contentment."

"To voyage hopefully is a good thing than to arrive." - Robert Lewis Stevenson

Are You a Metagrumbler?