I keep coming across charts that look like this:
It's fair to say that Maslow's Hierarchy is central to the internet world of happiness. People often reference it as a way to think about universal human needs. But the conversation about his hierarchy has been floating around in popular culture for decades now. And when ideas become popularized, they get passed around year after year, like a game of telephone, except with occasional nods back too the original source. That means that the edges get sanded down, and oversimplifications set in. When you oversimplify a good, complex idea, you don't just get get a simpler version of it. You end up with a misleading idea that seems deceptively useful. So I wanted to nod back for myself, and take a look at the source the idea. I discovered that what Maslow was doing was actually quite different from what we normally associate with his hierarchy – including the fact that he didn't really mean for it to be a hierarchy.
You can find out what he was doing, and what he was saying about universal human needs, and what we learn from our cultures and circumstances here. Give it a look.