Lifestyle Design

Sometimes I have difficulty explaining to people my experiment in lifestyle design – both what it is and why I’m doing it. This is probably as much my fault as it is theirs. Because both sides of the conversation are operating from different baselines, there is bound to be some confusion. So for future discussions, please consider this post to be my starting point.

I’m a firm believer that everyone wants the same thing. On the surface, this statement appears to be untrue – if you ask a million people what they want they’ll tell you a million different things. But there’s one thing that is underlies all of their answers. And this is at the core of my experiment in lifestyle design.

I believe that, at the bottom, people want the ability to spend their time in a meaningful way.

After much reflection, I’ve come to realize that this is what I seek. It lies at the foundation of all the other things I want to do.

I’m sure this concept isn’t groundbreaking. There’s got to be some Greek guy who figured this whole thing out a long time ago but his primitive blogging software prevented him from reaching a wider audience.

And he was writing in Greek.

The reason I think it’s important to remember this concept is because it increases the likelihood that any proposed solutions will attempt to solve the underlying problem. At a minimum it will ensure that any life situations you encounter will get looked at from a different perspective.

There’s a whole other part of this equation that I haven’t discussed and that is, “how does one determine what is “meaningful?” but I think I’m going to save this for a later post. I can’t solve all the world’s problems in one day. That would be unfair to the problems.