Obtaining a Sustainable Lifestyle

Oklahoma - Texas border region.

A few years ago, a teacher of mine asked her class; what do you want your life to look like? Of all the life planning questions I’ve heard over the years, all the advice I have heard from various sources, that question stuck with me as the right one. It’s a question that can yield information from which you can build a plan supported by a tangible set of actions. In essence, once you know what you want your life to look like, you can more confidently remove all those things that are not helping you reach your goal. And add things that do.

In my teacher’s case, it was important for her to live near work, but to also have a place near salt water, because she found the ocean to be restorative. It was important to have personal, quiet space. It was important to be near a source of healthy fresh food. Generally speaking, her life goals were mostly about her personal health and well-being. Anything that she would allow to be part of her life, had to serve the purpose of providing the life she imagined for herself. It all supported what she wanted her life to “look like” to her, not to others. What others think does not matter.

What we want our lives to look like changes regularly for most people. Rarely are the goals you set for yourself after finishing high school or college relevant twenty, thirty, or forty years later. Things change. People change. The world changes. So must your goals.

I have found, pretty consistently, that the older we get the more we begin to realize that family, lifestyle, and life experiences become more important than career advancement and money. There are many studies that suggest there is little connection between how much money someone has and happiness. There is even some evidence to suggest people are less happy the more money they have. Their lives become about the money more than enjoying life itself.

When you begin the exercise of designing what you would like your life to look like, it usually becomes an exercise in paring down. The premise requires you to think about what is essential to your happiness. Where you live is probably important. Financial resources are important. What you do, if anything, for work is important. How much personal time you have to pursue meaning and happiness is important.

Once you have your vision of the perfect life you need to take a second look and decide whether the path you have chosen is sustainable. I’ve chosen a few paths in my life that I later found to be unsustainable in terms of the energy required to see them through. The ambition was there at the start of the journey, but once I got going I found myself asking, “Can I keep doing this?” When the answer came back, “no,” or “yes, but at what cost?,” I had to change direction.

Financial sustainability is the biggest concern for most people, but there are non-traditional ways to think about finances that are worth considering. In conventional terms, most of us find a job that pays our bills and during the life of our working career, we seek raises, promotions or new jobs that pay progressively more - until we reach a tipping point where we have piled up enough resources that full time work is no longer necessary. This used to be called retirement. In today’s terms I prefer to think of it as; that point in time where you have more money available to you then you need to spend in the years you have left to live. But what if we turn that model around?

Another approach is to design your lifestyle first and then find the means to finance that lifestyle. The lifestyle you choose and little more. You would want a line item for emergency savings, or a future that does not require regular work, but it is possible to design a pay-as-you-go life that does not demand that you spend all your efforts amassing more wealth than you actually need to reach your goals. This is difficult for many people to consider, because it runs counter to what we are told, early in life, that we must do to be considered a success. 

There are lots of stories in the popular press about trends in personal finance. Some feature older Americans who have decided to downsize, end their conventional career and take lower paying jobs that provide just enough income to cover expenses and little more. The subjects of these articles have usually acquired some wealth that they have in reserve in case they need it, but the goal is to remove the stress of a conventional career in favor of devoting more time and energy to activities that lead to personal happiness.

Another trend story you will come across features a young person, or a young couple, deciding to live as inexpensively as possible in their 20s and 30s so that they can completely retire from conventional work by the time they are forty. This is an extreme lifestyle choice that is not meant for everyone, but people do it and it works for them. It is possible to grab some of the principles of downsizing and extreme savings and apply them to a lifestyle choice that works for you.

Relationships take energy too and the wrong relationships can pull you away from your personal goals. I have no advice here, just the observation that people who are smarter on this issue than I am often suggest that you take a regular inventory of your relationships and pull away from the ones that you feel are holding you back. I have mixed feelings on this advice, because I can see it being used the wrong way and I can see it leading to isolation for those who take it too literally. If we are constantly pulling away from people who don’t “serve our needs” we soon end up by ourselves. Everyone is on their own journey. It is unreasonable to think that everyone we interact with is going to put supporting us first.

I have watched relatives and work colleagues throw the kill switch on relationships for minor infractions. I call it the “you’re dead to me now” syndrome(YDMNS). In each case, I have found the person who takes this approach to loyalty ends up standing alone. The opposite of what we should be striving for.

A few years ago I came to the realization that there are some actors in my life I will never be able to escape. There are people who have always been antagonists in my personal story, but they are members of what I call my “life class.” They were born around the same time I was born and they will always be with me, they will always be there, until they are gone or until I am gone. I can run from them, but they will always be able to reach me if they wish, even if only in my consciousness. In fact, if I choose to move to the other side of the globe to escape them, I am actually giving control of my life to my antagonists. So I have concluded, the “you’re dead to me now” policy is not sustainable. We have to find a middle way when dealing with most relationships.

A friend of mine once told me that the key to happiness is getting your career, your family, and your romantic life all in synch, but she added, fate never allows that to happen. I always took that as a warning to never become too comfortable when it looks like things are going well. Here too, I can think of a few instances when I thought I was on top of the world - and perhaps even made a bit of a show of it - only to be felled by something I never saw coming.

We are hit often by messages urging us to reach for the highest of goals, to dream big, and never give up. There’s nothing wrong with that. Taking risks is the best way to improve your chances of a big reward. Once success is achieved, the question becomes whether it can be sustained, and that’s where designing a life based on your definition of happiness becomes more important than following a conventional path to success. Conventional success is more likely to impress others than deliver happiness to you.