[ 🤟 ] Balancing Family & Opportunity: Moving Back to Brazil
[ 🤟 ] Balancing Family & Opportunity: Moving Back to Brazil
How Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs can help us make big decisions
Question
from Juliana:
I'm married and have two children, ages 3 years and 3 months.
We've lived in the US for nearly a decade, but since the birth of our second child, we've been contemplating a move back to our hometown in Brazil — primarily to be closer to family.
After so long in the US, it's challenging not to consider how this move might affect our children's future and their opportunities if we stayed in America.
Yet, we recognize that today's globalized world offers access to information from anywhere.
I chose "connect" because connection is the main driver for this potential move. The quality of our relationships back home far surpasses what we have in the US.
For some reason, this consideration weighs heavily on us now. We'd appreciate your thoughts on approaching this life decision and determining what's best for our children.
Answer
BEN: I love that she’s not just accepting the default answer of, We’re here; our kids have great opportunities with education, so we're going to make the obvious choice so they can get better jobs.
I love that she’s weighing and measuring those things against the value and role of those meaningful relationships with her family.
The first thing I think about is Heather’s ex-husband. We’re really close with him; he’s the athletic director at an incredible private school and makes these service trips. He’s done four or five to Rwanda.
We were hanging out last week, and I asked him what he thinks he might do when he retires. He’s not close to that, but he told me that he’s thinking about spending more time there.
He started telling me about how the people there are so grateful. They have such incredible relationships with each other. In many ways, they’re just a better expression of what humanity is supposed to be. And when he came home from those trips, he said he just didn’t feel that way here, that it seems like we’ve just got the whole thing backward.
So, this question resonates for me, just based on that conversation with Alex.
And the way I might start thinking about it is in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
BEN: And if we think of it in terms of that framework, maybe we can shed some light on what we should lean towards when it comes to a big decision like this.
So, in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the idea is that until you have these bottommost needs met, there's no sense in chasing anything above them.
It's a stair-stepping type of thing.
There’s the foundation, which is physical needs. Then, as you move up, you cross from needing safety to needing love and belonging to needing self-esteem to, finally, self-actualization.
So when someone like this asks if they should move back to Brazil where they have more love and belonging, although they have more opportunities for esteem, status, and recognition here, I think it could go in two different directions.
Can you have the opportunity for that status, recognition, and achievement respect there?
If you can, see ya, pack your bags, problem solved. Juliana mentioned that information is everywhere now, and we’re so much more connected than ever.
So, is that a real option?
The other way you can look at it is, can you create the kinds of relationships here that you have there, where you have that level of friendship, family, community, connection, and intimacy?
Maybe it's just with your tight little family.
You know, in the town over from where I’m sitting now is Framingham, which has a huge Brazilian population. If you were there, I think you'd feel probably a big sense of connection.
I don't know whether she should move to Brazil, but I think this framework might help her make the right decision.
It might help you go, Okay, of all these needs we have, what is available to me in each of these different places?
PATRICK: I think one of the interesting things you said is that these are steps. You don't get to go to the second one if you’re not sure you’ll eat today, get drinkable water, and sleep somewhere safe from the elements.
And I think one of the things that happens is we want so badly to skip that third one - the need for love and belonging - so we can get to the fourth one. So that we can have our self-esteem needs met.
And then we get stuck in an endless loop, waiting for that fourth thing to solve the problem or to usher us into the fifth one of self-actualization.
And it doesn't because we skipped over the third step.
We don't get to skip it, leave it behind, and solve it in another way.
We’ll just continue to hit the ceiling of satisfaction, of fulfillment, of happiness, of all of these other things that we talk about all the time.
And it's only until we recognize that we’ve got to take the three steps back to take the one step forward again.
But we so quickly want to skip over this connection, this love, this relationship, this family.
And, to your first point, that's the game society wants us to play.
It wants us to believe that self-actualization, that fulfillment, that happiness all come from status and self-esteem.
But while culture might be rewarded by better jobs and more money and fancier schools, it’s not actually what we get rewarded by.
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