Ryu's Blog

This is the title of an advertisement I came across recently (drawing above). It portrays an ideal lifestyle. Work hard in a job we love and good at, gather with friends and family over a decent meal and a cup of coffee on weekend, or travel outside the city for a holiday break are some lifestyles people idealized, not to mention the more materialistic ones.

So why don’t more people actually living the lifestyle they want instead of idealizing something better in the future? Are time and money the constraints? Besides the highly monetary and status/recognition-related desires, most idealized activities are not hard to do. Perhaps we don’t enjoy them as much as we think. Or perhaps we want something to look forward to, and having an idealized future is a way to deceive ourselves to believe that future could be better. Or because once the ideal becomes attainable, it loses its glamour and hence our actual lifestyle never match the ideal one.

Having an ideal makes good evolutionary sense as it drives us to work hard and could give us a sense of purpose in life, even though the ideals always remain elusive. People who are satisfied with their life are either good self-deceiver (in a positive sense) or who’ve think through what they want to associate themselves with and live a life that’s consistent with those stories.

Since lifestyle is a habit, I don’t think it can be changed easily even if one suddenly becomes very rich and has lots of time. Instead of the unrealistic view that someday in future we’d attain our ideal lifestyle, I think it makes more sense to improve one’s quality of life step by step by shifting our mental view and lifestyle gradually toward the ideal one. We might not be able to change our personality much (and it’s likely to be an important determinant of one’s satisfaction with life), but we could gradually change our mental states, living styles, and habits to better match them with our ideal lifestyle. When the two match, will we be satisfied? Or we will we be dreaming of other ideals? Either way our life should have improved.