Lifestyle Design: A Primer

I started thinking that I’d like to blog about Lifestyle Design, but when I thought about where to start I realized that I needed to lay some ground work.  It helps to have a few terms and know where this all began.

The Questions

In 2007 when my daughter was born and Amanda became a stay-at-home mom, the prospect of leaving them each day before 8:00 a.m. and returning home after 6:00 p.m. (depending on traffic) for five out of seven days a week and having some of the left over hours interrupted by “on call” duties started becoming less and less attractive.  I didn’t want to miss so much time with my family to provide for them, working at a job that I didn’t really like, with co-workers that were superficial friends at best.  I started asking questions like “Why am I doing this?”, “Is there another way to provide for the family?”, “Where is my career going?” and “What do I want to do with my life?”

Lifestyle Design

In his book “The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich“, Timothy Ferriss explains Lifestyle Design as a technique of the “New Rich” (NR), those that “abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.”   Now when you read “New Rich” don’t assume this is a type off nouveau riche where the goal is to scheme and steal so that one can get rich quick and hob nob at the country club all day.  A main point of the definition is realigning importance and value, or currency, to different things: time and money.  We each have 24 hours in a day, but how many of those hours are truly at your discretion and how many are sold to an employer in order to “pay the bills.”  Lifestyle Design (LD) is the design of one’s ideal lifestyle that aligns to a person’s interests and aptitudes, elimination of the irrelevant, and liberation from any single location.  Our situation is different from the classic LD since we have two kids, but many of the ideas can still be explored and applied.

Deferred-Life Plan

Ask yourself: When do you want to retire?  What do you want to do when you retire?  Does retirement represent a freedom  from work that is somewhere in the distant future?  According to LD’ers the deferred-life plan is one of the biggest modern myths – that you need to work your entire youth away in order to save for a distant future when you’ll be able to afford to sit on a beach, old and wrinkled.   Another definition of the deferred-life plan is putting off what you really want to do for what is expected of you.  College, Job, Marriage, Kids.  Doing what you have to do, in order to get to do what you want to do.  LD’ers embrace the concept that by chucking the old life recipe and re factoring their lives using unconventional methods will provide ample opportunities for personal growth, leisure, adventure, and fulfillment.

An Experiment, Not a Plan

Lifestyle Design means different things to different people, so there is no set plan of execution.  I like to think of this more as an experiment.  The good old scientific method that we all learned in high school:  Hypothesis, experiment, observation, then testing results.  I haven’t come across very many husband-of-one/father-of-two lifestyle designer, as most of the authors and bloggers tend to be single guys.  We’ve been walking down this path for almost three years and we have had some success as well as some crushing failure.  I’ll explain more about that in future posts.  That being said I look forward to discussing how we have applied the ideas of LD so far and where this will take us in the future!

Here is some further reading on LD:

Tim Ferriss’s blog: The Four Hour Workweek

Free Pursuits blog: Are You Putting Off Life Until Later?

Project Mojave’s Lifestyle Design Resources

Update: Two more blogs that are more focused on business and minimalism, but are still good reads:

Untemplater

Far Beyond the Stars