In our hyper-connected world, we often confuse visibility with self-actualization.

Abraham Maslow's self-actualizing people prized solitude and an inner life that didn't depend on being seen.

Visibility is a poor indicator of an actualized life; online connectivity can often disguise its absence.

The real indicator is "Being-cognition": the capacity to be fully present in the moment.

In the late 1950s, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow set out to study the people he thought were doing the most fully human version of being human. He wasn’t looking for the happiest or the most accomplished. He was looking for what he called the “self-actualizing person.”

He cataloged what he found: sixteen characteristics, more or less, including a clear and accurate perception of reality, acceptance of self and others, spontaneity, and creativeness. In 2018, I published an update in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology called “Self-Actualizing People in the 21st Century,” where I found that 10 of the sixteen held up under the scrutiny of the modern scientific method.

But buried in his 1962 book Toward a Psychology of Being, and again in the 1971 posthumous Farther Reaches of Human Nature, is an observation that should have changed how an entire era understood human flourishing. It didn’t. Maslow’s self-actualizing people, he wrote, had a strong need for privacy and solitude. They were comfortable being alone in a way the average person was not. They didn’t need constant social input to know who they were.

The........

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