We are living in a world of buzz words. To get some fame and make a bunch of money, your “lifestyle” should be “cool”, and by “designing” it, you’re aiming to be part of a “clique” that wouldn’t mind working more than four hours a week.

See the words in quotes? Maybe it would be helpful to just forget about them and to take an approach to lifestyle design that goes beyond the gadgetry and marketing buzz that much of traditional and social media like to advocate.

In reality, lifestyle design isn’t so much about adventurous traveling and beautiful girls and ceaseless twittering and expensive phones. While all this may be part of your personal way of life, lifestyle design could be so much more, if we had higher ambitions: It could help to convert everybody’s lives into something bigger, building upon the best that both history and science fiction have to offer. It could connect art and everyday life, protest and support, happiness and anger, activism and idling, creativity and freedom. Most importantly: Lifestyle design could reach more and more people. New people. People that never knew about lifestyles and coolness and design and cliques. And about the options they have.

The goal of lifestyle design should be breaking boundaries, not cashing checks.

The Idle Musings are short posts of 300 words maximum. They are published on The Friendly Anarchist every other Tuesday. Grab the RSS feed to get them right into your reader.