Personally I’m fundamentally disconnected from any meaningful relationships with living things (people, animals, plants, the landscape) and addicted to the internet as a replacement. The only times I haven’t felt the way you described is when I had social scaffolding around me. (And the wherewithal in terms of time and energy to pursue “self-actualisation.”)

I don’t know, I always think about an extremely competent woman living a self-sufficient traditional lifestyle with all the skills to survive who just stopped eating after her grandchildren had to run away abroad. A life is a complex thing and it takes a lot of things to be tuned just right for a person to be functional. It’s even too simple to say “we find meaning in social relationships” or whatever, we just need the right system of incentives and comforts and pleasure and pain and there’s no single formula.

I was self-actualising when I had love, understanding, time, and money. Now I’m missing some parts of that package, and none of them are things you can just will into existence, especially not at the cost of other things.