Issue
Making big changes in lifestyle is difficult. Besides the obvious difficulties of habit re-formation and lifestyle disruption is the challenge of knowing whether or not a lifestyle change is a good fit for you. Not all Patterns are a good fit for every person or circumstance, and doubt as to whether or not a certain change is right for you will make it even harder to stick with the change. In part due to this, some people will plan and analyze a change beyond the amount actually useful. Social pressure also makes it difficult to adopt new permanent changes.
Action
Make a change to your lifestyle and commit to doing it for one month (or a week, or six months, or a year). At the end of the time period you will re-evaluate whether or not you want to maintain the change, revert, or try something else.
Discussion
Because you frame the activity as a ‘lifestyle experiment’ and not necessarily ‘my new identity,’ the pressure is off. You will be less likely to do too much research and analysis ahead of time, and wind up learning more faster by simply doing the thing for 30 days (or 3 months, or a year). For many, lifestyle experiments or challenges can be a fun and educational hobby of sorts.
The social pressure is also off. It’s easier to be known as someone who is always trying kooky experiments — and, if you decide to keep an experimental change permanently, it’s based on lived experience and not just some random thing you read on the internet. This is a much more socially legitimized reason for lifestyle change.
Not many have gone before us. There aren’t a lot of examples to adopt. Cultivating lives of Deep Response is a very personal and idiosyncratic process. You cannot expect to be able to simply think up your ideal Deep Response-informed lifestyle ahead of time and then implement it. You must accept a path of iteration, tuning, tweaking, guessing and checking, adaptation, and modification as you go.
The pattern of lifestyle experimentation is a great technique to frame this process.
Often what holds people back from changing their lives is a fear of commitment. It means a lot to say “I’m now a vegan; I don’t eat meat anymore” or “I’m going to work out 3x/wk.”
The reason is that the implicit but unspoken end to those sentences is: …forever.” There’s a terrifying sense that we’d be putting ourselves into a prison of our own devising and never be able to escape without losing face. Without becoming known as the person who is wushy washy.
So we spend an enormous amount of time studying, thinking about, and privately fantasizing about a lifestyle change that we never actually begin.
A solution is lifestyle experiments. Don’t become a vegan forever. Eat vegan for a month, to see what it’s like. You don’t have to change your ultimate identity as a human forever. At the end of the month, do whatever you’d like: go back to your meat eating ways or double down and go militant, or something in between.
Further Reading
- The no buy year is a form of lifestyle experiment.
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