Knackered today. Little One’s sick. She needed tending last night. The police were round at the building again at 3 in the morning to sort out another fight. This time it was in the 2nd floor flat, which is shared by about 20 or so people who are charged a fortune by someone who knows they haven’t got papers. That’s what El Plodo (Guillermo el viejo) told Maria (5th floor), who told Carmen (3rd floor), who told Monica (6th floor), who told Wifey. Coexistence is never easy.

The floor plan of Maslow Towers (continued)

As a teenager I had a hunch that things were not inherently satisfying. Sex always seemed as if it would be (and continues to appear that way as long as it is an uncontrollable behaviour-driving force, i.e. I am ruled by my dick – how else would the world’s animal population keep renewing itself?) until orgasm, the starting point for post-coital depression.

Disappointed and increasingly suffocated by nihilism, I grew depressed. However, despite any feelings of hopelessness, I must have had an inkling of optimism because I escaped, blamed my environment for my dull sense of desperation and went off to other countries seeking misfortune; either running away from nihilism or looking abroad for something whose identity was lost to me.

Sadly, despite all the interesting people I met and fascinating things I saw, I confirmed my earlier hunch and came back.

Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Perhaps the answer lay neither in Serengeti nor the Birmingham Bullring, but was to be found internally. But can meaning be found internally without first establishing what the “self”, “I” or “ego” is or is that like kneading water into a baguette shape?

Fine, but there is no doubt that I (and, I assume, other beings) have needs. I have heard my 3 year-old nephew tell his mother that he needs an ice-cream. She replies, “You don’t need an ice-cream, you want one!”. Doesn’t that mean the Maslow Building should be a bungalow?

From a physical and genetic perspective, my birth was the result of interaction between my mother’s ovule and father’s sperm. My parents’ births were, in turn, the consequence of their parents’ sexual interaction, and so on. This applies to all animals the sexual reproduction of which involves a male and a female of the species. Beyond that, my hermaphrodite and earlier unicellular ancestors probably go back to the warm, humid squelchiness that was the beginning of life, unless life originated at more than one time.

For this process to continue, I need to eat food, which has been grown (farmer, soil maintenance, fertilisers, seeds, agricultural equipment) prepared and cooked (chefs, gas, electricity, pots and pans, metallurgy, furnaces, extrusion, etc.) packaged (cardboard, trees, petrochemicals, oil wells, tankers) and transported (shipping, vehicles, motorways, logistics, offices) by other people and has involved innumerable factors. If I eat meat, I consume another being, which also has an ancestral chain and an environment upon which it has depended. In other words I am only a tiny spec in the whole picture (a spec whose sense of I preconditions its universe). Food is just an example. There are also clothes, medicine, education, housing and an infinite host of other areas and the endless number of people and factors involved.

I, me, mine and my therefore all depend on an infinite number of interdependent factors.

So, finding an “intrinsic” meaning of life and a notion of a sharp-around-the-edges self is as tail-chasing an endeavour as finding extrinsic meaning in a football match. However, that does not mean there is no meaning. It just means I can’t find it, very probably because it inevitably defies being encountered.

Anyway, I need to stop and head down to the basement of Maslow Towers to hacer mis necesidades, or “do my needs”, as they might say in Spanish.