The phenomenological perspective discusses a “real self” that is often neglected, but that must be accepted if we are to become self-actualized. What’s often hard for people to understand is that this real self is not the same as “success” as we usually understand it. So there is a tension between success and self-actualization. Imagine two people at work: one success-motivated, and the other driven by self-actualization. How would they work differently?
The difference between success-motivated people and self-actualized people is the person(s) that they want to please. A success-motivated person tries to learn what other people think of a successful and then mimic the behavior of the person(s) that have attained the level of success that will please the greatest amount of people. For example, most of us in our society are taught that a college education will get you the good paying job, a better lifestyle, money that can permit you to do and buy more things than people without money. A college education leads to working with one’s brain at a comfortable desk rather than using your hands in some dismal warehouse or factory or fast food restaurant. Once most people graduate from college and find a job that sustains their lifestyle then they spend the rest of their life maintaining this lifestyle. This maintaining of lifestyle is maintaining the appearance of success that others find desirable or at least more desirable than what others may find comfortable at subsistence living. We are our drives and motives, if we can satisfy our drives and motives at the level we are functioning on then why bother finding other levels to function on.
The self-actualized person needs to function on a higher level than simply pleasing and maintaining the good relations of others. I believe the self-actualizing person who is “accurate in perceiving reality” perceives this reality will end someday and is aware of this fact more so than other people (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 335). The self-actualizing person is “concerned with eternal philosophical questions” and experiences “a sense of oneness with nature that transcends time and space” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 335). A self-actualizing person has a “childlike and fresh creativity and inventiveness” while maintaining “an inner detachment from the culture in which they live” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 335). A self-actualized person appears to be “strong, independent, and guided by their own inner visions that they sometimes appear temperamental and even ruthless” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 335). A self-actualizing person is thus a person who is not trapped by the limitations of trying to please other people at their levels, is not satisfied with the entertainment that the media markets to us as our culture, and realizes that life is a limited period of time to learn, to explore, and to produce something out of it. That is why I think most self-actualizers tend towards being scholars and academics who hope to discover new knowledge like Einstein, or artists who try to give the world another way of perceiving and thinking about their world like Picasso.
The difference in how the two would work is that the unself-actualized person is content to go to work eight hours a day, forty hours a week, to go through the motions of a job to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. They play these social games with others to maintain a comfortable existence at home and at work, live life through video games, television, movies, Facebook, the bar scene, etc.
The self-actualized person is more interested in giving purpose to their limited time on this earth and probably is not focused on being great at a job, but continuing what allows the person to keep the job for the advantages it gives them. For instance, when one finishes their work they could then use their time to surreptitiously research their real interests, i.e. science, the arts, etc. The self-actualized person may even cause themselves problems by entertaining their interests rather than entertaining their bosses.
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