I like Manslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" and Erikson's "Stages of Development" okay, but I'm a bigger fan of George Carlin's "Life in Reverse" ideas. 

I can't find the video but he said something like: that life should begin with the agony of death and get all that pain and suffering over with. Then life should continue in this happy reverse trajectory and end as we all began, with the ecstatic culmination of the socks act.