This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What drives us? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
When I was in my last year studying economics at the University of Cambridge, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do after I graduated in 1972: continue my education at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. But after participating in a Cambridge Union debate on the changing role of women, I received a letter from a publisher asking if I’d like to write a book on that subject.
“I cannot write,” I replied.
“Can you have lunch?” he wrote back.
By the end of lunch, I ended up with a book contract and a modest advance. The book turned into an international best seller.
After the surprising success of that first book, I got many offers to write other books or host television shows on similar subjects. They were lucrative, but I turned them all down. And at the time I wasn’t sure exactly why I did (nor was my agent), but I felt the urge to push myself to explore a different topic. I can now see that I was tapping into that drive we all have — the drive to keep learning, growing, exploring and evolving.
So instead of revisiting the same themes, I wrote a book about our post-Enlightenment reliance on intellect at the expense of the human spirit. The manuscript was rejected by almost 40 publishers before one said yes. It didn’t have many readers, and the book’s disappointing reception caused me to become even more introspective.
Three books later, my need to understand this deeper drive led me to write a book about what I call the fourth instinct. Throughout modern history, biologists, psychologists and social scientists have tried to explain what drives humans through three core instincts: survival, sex and status/success. But there is an equally powerful, though much less understood, fourth instinct we all share: our need to find meaning and purpose and to evolve through self-discovery and self-knowledge. The fourth instinct manifests through every aspect of our lives, including relationships, religion, community, art and pain.
In his famous hierarchy of needs theory, the psychologist and philosopher Abraham Maslow placed self-actualization as the highest drive. But in the final years of his life, he concluded that this did not fully encompass human motivation, and he added “transcendence” to the top level. Maslow is quoted as saying, “The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human.” In today’s secular culture, this sentiment has mostly fallen out of favor.
At 36, I experienced the harshest way to relate to the fourth instinct when my first child was stillborn. I had been desperate to have a child, so desperate that I’d left a man I loved because he didn’t want children. The pain from the loss of my child was unlike any I’d ever experienced, and it seemed like it would never end.
The significance of the fourth instinct also intensified when my mother died. She had lived life so attuned to the fourth instinct that she became, almost mystically, the keeper of this drive for me. After her death, I felt compelled to carry that drive forward myself, with varying levels of success.
When I launched The Huffington Post in 2005, I was so determined that this unlikely start-up would succeed that I completely neglected my health. Two years in, I collapsed from exhaustion and sleep deprivation, hitting my head on my desk and breaking my cheekbone on the way down.
The diagnosis? Burnout. As I began studying burnout, I realized that it was not just my personal problem, but one that manifested in the lives of about half of the global work force. Many of us are in the grip of our cultural delusion that burnout is the price we must pay for being completely committed to a job or a goal. But deeper meaning does not come from identifying so strongly with our work that we forget everything else. Paradoxically, I discovered that when I changed my life and started taking care of myself — my sleep, my stress, my most important relationships — I was able to be more productive, more creative and more intuitive.
What I learned about burnout became an essential pillar of my next start-up, Thrive Global. It is a technology company that uses artificial intelligence’s power of hyperpersonalization to help people improve their health by creating better habits across five key daily behaviors: food, movement, sleep, stress management and connection. Plus, we now have a growing mountain of evidence validating the ancient wisdom that a good life includes not only embracing the third instinct of finding status and success, but also prioritizing our health and nurturing our capacity for wisdom and wonder.
Today, looking inward feels more urgent than ever. Because for the first time, we are building machines that may surpass us in the avenues that we once believed made us uniquely human.
With the idea that A.I. could exceed humans in intelligence, we are forced to reckon with the question of what defines us beyond our I.Q. scores. This is a question we’ve been wrestling with since the Enlightenment, when science began to be seen as fundamentally in conflict with religion and spirituality. When A.I. demonstrates that our intelligence is not what makes us unique, it puts into starker relief the quality that does set us apart: our drive to grow, evolve and explore — not just outer but inner frontiers.
Every turn in my life — the unexpected opportunities, the rejections, the successes and the failures — was pointing me toward the same truth: that our strongest drive is not just toward achievement and success, but toward understanding our deepest essence and becoming who we truly are.
Arianna Huffington is an author and the founder and C.E.O. of Thrive Global.
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