‘ve always had a grimace in my heart for the word Lifestyles.

Your life, your one time through this passage of existence, is really what you make of it. We all have different opportunists and situations. A person born of majority race and wealth has a bit of a leg up over a poor minority child saddled with leukemia (especially in times when tax cuts for the wealthy and open beatings for the downtrodden are a popularity political stance (fucking fascists)). It’s what it is. You play your hand as best you can.

Which is why I dislike the idea of lifestyle. You are what you are able to make of yourself. Your true self is not poised or considered or selected off a menu. You are, as the wise old sailor says, what you are. If you make it otherwise, it is artificial. It means nothing. And ergo, you mean nothing. You are simply a background for those with real lives.

A lifestyle choice is a expensive piece of exercise equipment in the garage. A life is the thing that you are, the reactions and outlooks you contain, the being you have become as you move along the mortal coil.

Example: I like pocket watches for many reasons. One; I used to be bored shitless at work. Having a watch right in front of me made it worse. But a pocket watch removed the temptation to look. Two; Railroad conductors checked their watch before giving the highball signal to the engineer. That’s just cool. Here’s a person in command of an entire train, knowing how it fits in four dimensions (three in the physical, on the the temporal). He calls the shots. And Three; the motion of pulling out a watch and one-handedly snapping it open for that glance is almost a moment of Zen, an act that suspends the world around us while we check our movement in that (again) temporal axis and knowingly nod. Yes, pocket watches are cool.

But I didn’t just go out and buy five of them at Walmart and wear each on a different day, coordinating them with my clothing or with the friends I’m hanging out with this particular day. No, I considered it. I looked at the offerings in thee jeweler’s case, I looked at the mark the wrist watch left me with, I bought one, I tried it, I liked it, and it became part of me.

It wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was just something I adapted on my passage through this reality.

Okay, so much for that. The other “life” word that pisses me off (and mercifully seems to be fading (as fads do) from popular usage) is the idea of Lifehacks.

Okay, so thinking that you possess “lifehacks” is a “lifestyle choice” that pretty much indicates the crowd you run with. Life is about learning things, adapting and (as I said) making the best from your experience. I know all the traffic light cycles across Orlando. I know, when riding a bike, not to roll through a puddle (if it’s been raining, a puddle might be a pothole created overnight by bad weather and the pounding of tires yet filled with rain water, so what looks like a fractional depth piddly-puddle is actually a rim-bending drop into a craggy death trap. There are many things I have learned, and many things that I do (signalling on my bike and in my car, being very careful around phone-distracted people, not arguing politics with idiots, etc). If you walk into a door and don’t learn from it, you’ll keep walking into doors until you do.

The idea that somehow you are using a “lifehack” implies a violation of some celestial code, as if you were clever enough to debug quantum mechanics and alter the code so life works for you now. Alchemists tried to change lead into gold. You’re claiming – through lifehacks – that you have some amazing knowledge that you can use to bend reality to your desires. So if you are staring at your phone and walk into traffic and (after hospitalization) learn to look both ways, is that really a “lifehack”? Or did you finally observe enough about life to make better decisions?

I’ll conclude with this – generally “lifehacks” are coined by people who are figuring ways to beat the system. For example, putting plastic shielding over their license plates. Parking in handicap spots. Cutting in line. Not tipping. Yes, maybe you are “beating the system”. But definitively you are just a turd who thinks he’s clever.

As far as lifestyles go, lifehacks are a very lousy way of being. Nothing simpler than that.

>>>MAKE A BOOKCHOICE (NEW WORD COINED) AND BUY ONE OF MINE, DOWN THIS LINK<<<