Lifestyle 

is often more style than life

August 29, 2015|Chapter 16, Text 09

We live in a culture that hugely glamorizes lifestyle. Indeed, an entire gamut

of products are called lifestyle products – things that are not necessities, but
that we imagine to be necessities due to the cultural pressure to appear
trendy, cool, hip.

Living to possess and parade such things is a lifestyle that eats into our life,
making us into something like performing robots. Our life simply becomes
reduced to a performance for gaining some applause or at least admiration
from others. Unfortunately, the applause often doesn’t come – and certainly
not as much as we crave for it. And others’ admiration for us is more often
than not concealed envy.

The Bhagavad-gita (16.09) indicates that those who live for materialistic
purposes alone engage in activities that destroy their souls. No doubt, the
soul is indestructible, but when we live unspiritually, we deaden our capacity
for spiritual awareness. Not only that, when we live driven primarily
by lifestyle considerations, we don’t even harmonize with our actual material
talents and interests.

We truly live only when we live for a deeper purpose that resonates with our
inner being. At the core of our inner being lies the soul – the essence of who
we are. And the soul is eternally a part of God, Krishna. So the natural life of
the soul is to harmonize with the whole through pure spiritual love. We can
develop this love by rendering service to him. And such service is so
inclusive that it enables us to use whatever talents, interests and resources we
have for glorifying him. Thus, when we make awakening love for Krishna
the spiritual purpose of our life and strive to do justice to our God-given gifts
by using them in his service, we attain a fulfillment far greater than the
titillation of living a glamorized lifestyle.