Is Lifestyle Dead?
I am trying to think about when I first heard the word “lifestyle,” and I can’t pinpoint the exact time. I suppose when the TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” was popular in the 1980’s, the word “lifestyle” had crept into everyday usage. But I do remember a very funny incident when I first moved into my New York apartment.
A friend of mine from the health club, Leonard Levi, came up to see the new place. He was a pretty smart guy as I recall. Both of us were pretty wet behind the ears and recently out of graduate school. He stepped out onto the wraparound terrace that looked over Manhattan and said: “Bob, I remember when people didn’t have a lifestyle!” I laughed pretty hard when he said that, but there was a lot of truth to what he said. When he and I grew up, people just had “lives,” not “lifestyles.” And I wonder if the current economic “fluctuations” will compel people to have lives again, and not focus so much on enhancing their “lifestyles,” whatever that meant.
And that’s the thing: as the word “lifestyle” crept into the language, I was perplexed as to what it really signified. And when I was fortunate enough in recent years to travel to some remote parts of the world considered by some to be “third world,” I was surprised and heartened to find that people still had “lives” there, that they seemed incredibly genuine and sincere, and often had no agenda up their sleeves designed to further their position or “lifestyle.”
Am I saying that there is something wrong with striving to achieve the ultimate “lifestyle,” however one defines that? I’m really not sure, but I can say this: when your focus is mainly on obtaining all the toys that you think will make you happy, your energy is not in harmony with some other goals, such as providing emotional support for the people in your life who need it, nor are you inclined to appreciate all the things you already have. What kind of society is created when the “lifestyle” goals are dominant? You are living in it, and it is not a very pretty picture when these “things” start getting taken away from people who value them so much.
It could be that something vey good will come out of the economic “fluctuations” we see today: people may realize that the things they coveted so much are really not all that important, that their “lifestyle” was never everything they thought it was anyway. People may rediscover how great just having a healthy, productive “life” can be.
