Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness

TLDR: I’m outrageously excited.  I attempted to “fix” Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and ended up with a new direction and a new model.  I never thought I’d say something like that. 🤯

I’ve been writing a Communication 101 series on my other site, KinkyPoly.com.  As part of the overall topic, I was talking about how our emotions become elevated when one or more of our needs are not being met.

I wrote a whole section on needs which includes: unmet needs, spiraling emotions, what are valid needs, and how we can unconsciously avoid getting our needs met or even self-sabotage our chances at real happiness.

While doing so, I realized Maslow Hierarchy of Needs is missing a whole category of needs as well as some interdependence needs!  I just spent the last couple weeks digging into which human needs are valid and fixing Maslow’s model… but the Wikipedia page for Maslow’s theory is headed in a slightly different direction so, I had to break away entirely.

I started off thinking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was basically the gold-standard for human needs and I thought I’d just reference it.  Then I thought, “oh, he missed a couple, I’ll just drop them in and make them italics.”  By the time I was finished, I was adding and renaming categories and I thought, well, I guess I should name it something so I can refer back to it.  Then it really hit me, I think I might have just added to the collective human body of knowledge about achieving human happiness and valid human needs. 🤯

If you want to see/read the progression and reasoning from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to Burbol’s hierarchy of happiness, here’s the article on needs where that happens.

Here is the detailed breakdown of Burbol’s hierarchy of happiness which has a breakdown of needs included in each category.