Life vs.Lifestyle: How to Have Quality from Both
Life vs.Lifestyle-You Can Have Both
There is a difference but what constitutes a life and what constitutes a lifestyle is pretty ambiguous. One thing that seems pretty clear to me is that lifestyle is apparent while a life can have many internal aspects to it.
A lifestyle can include people, material things, environments, how we spend our time, energy, and money. A life includes things like our beliefs, our values, our commitments, our dream, and our visions. If you choose a lifestyle first you could wind up with an empty existence. If you choose life first, you will design your lifestyle to support life.
Since most of us already have a lifestyle that we are accustomed to, and a default life, we usually have to do some redesigning. (kind of like The Matrix) Choose a life and then redesign your lifestyle. It is possible that the lifestyle you currently have will never support the life you truly want to live. It is possible the lifestyle you currently have has many supporting structures and only minor renovations need to occur. It is possible that you are a highly intuitive person and your lifestyle is in perfect alignment. I know very few people who fall into that category.
I notice that younger generations are not accustomed to having transformational conversations, so learning is a very different process for them. Everything is abbreviated or “fast” learning in my opinion. The fact that we have e-courses and teleclasses and magazines and tons of books online that are created to help people learn to live more meaningful and personally fulfilling lives represents a shift from how things used to be. And the obvious one; Social Media. It shows people what they really think they want, materialistically, when in fact, it could all be gone tomorrow. And then, what type of life would you have, especially since your lifestyle has changed.
As we evolve, we begin to look at various aspects of our lives for similarity to our values and commitments. The divergence shows up with exclamation marks behind them and sometimes our response is discouragement and self-disappointment. We act as if we should have known better when the truth is how could we have known better? So the first thing to get over is “I didn’t know” and then after we get over that, we come to “but I know now, now what”?
It takes a courageous and brave person to see this and then set their intentions on bringing integrity into their life so that their lifestyle gives them a life that serves their higher self, not just the material self. You will notice some people trying to work around it, pretending it doesn't matter that their lifestyles don’t measure up to their core values. They are fooling themselves…
The real problem is once you see the inconsistency, not doing anything actually makes things worse and you lose yourself really fast. It will cost you big time to keep that inconsistency in place. You can’t be with yourself and be at peace in your life. It wears you down like water will wear down a mountain over time. Your life will devolve instead of evolving. If that is not a price that’s too high to pay, I don’t know what is. Just think about it and choose wisely the path you will follow.
Now, don’t get me wrong, if you have the means to do both, then ABSOLUTELY do it. This article is for those that try to perpetrate or “fake-flex” when they really can’t…
A well-designed life will include health, wealth, love, work you love, and much more including a lifestyle that pleases you.