Life or Lifestyle

I wonder how many people live a life or a lifestyle? I know that for me I realized that I have been trying to live a lifestyle as opposed to a life. But I don't feel alone. When I look around I see so many people living a lifestyle. How can we not? Independent thinking is not supported. Religion, government, society as a whole, supports, even demands, that we live a lifestyle. Especially in North America. I see it everyday at work with women. They are trying to have a career, families, large homes in suburbia, bringing in the GO Train everyday to their job to support this lifestyle they have been told they should have. They don't seem really happy. Have they really stopped and thought about what they really want from their life? I think probably not as they are too busy living their lifestyle.

Have you ever really stopped and looked at all the magazines that are currently published. We have magazines that tell us how we should dress, what are homes should look like, what kind of cars we should drive, what are bodies should look like. There are hundreds of self-help books that tell us how we should think, act or behave. And the scariest thing is society as a whole. We have an acceptable norm that we believe people should fit into. And if you don't you are shunned. I certainly felt that growing up gay. It certainly wasn't a life choice that was supported. I was never accepted into any one's inner circle. Gay people used to face the first real challenge of choosing a life over a lifestyle. It was invigorating. It was scary. It was the unknown. All that has changed over the last couple of decades. Now being gay is becoming an accepted lifestyle. For everything gained there is something lost. The ability to choose a life is slipping away in favour of a lifestyle.

But it is small shift. There is still so many lifestyles in the gay community as well. The circuit boy, the leather man, the bear. We now even have a separation by HIV status. We had a first chance to choose a life and then quickly chose a lifestyle within the gay community. We all want to belong, to be accepted. So it is easier to choose the lifestyle. I get people that say they are not into the "scene". These are the people that are choosing a life.

There is a great scene in the final season of "Sex and the City" when Miranda and Carrie have a fight over Carrie choosing to go to Paris. Carrie is making a statement that she is choosing her life over her lifestyle. It is brilliant. Miranda doesn't understand why Carries has to move away and give up her life. Carrie states that she cannot stay in New York and be single for Miranda. That she is finally choosing a life over a lifestyle. Miranda doesn't get it. Most people don't when they witness someone choosing a life over a lifestyle. It is sad that it is such a foreign concept.

It is also exists on such a bigger scale that has long term detrimental affects on the world. Right now Bush has chosen a lifestyle and trying to maintain that lifestyle over a life, many lifes.

As there is more and more chaos in the world I also see another shift. I have a sense of these buried lives trying to come out and express themselves. Or maybe the change is just in me. Either way it is a welcomed change.