Lifestyle, personality, character

My cousin, who is literally (1) half my age, just articulated a profound insight.

She said, “People think their lifestyles are their personalities. But they aren’t.”

Indeed. What we do for recreation and the manner in which we live are significant. Aristotle acknowledged that when he counted wealth among the requirements for a happy life. But “lifestyle” is not the whole, nor even the most important part, of our personality. It does not define us, except insofar as it pigeonholes us into a clique.

My studies on writing fiction have emphasized values – including the willingness to take action to protect/pursue those values – as the core of character, that is, the core of personality. And character is most revealed, best revealed (at least in fiction), when values come into conflict and must be tested. Values are those things – whether abstract principles, other persons, or physical macguffins – that we are willing to risk or sacrifice other things for.

Now, “lifestyle” is one expression of values: it is the expression of how I want to live my life when I have the resources to do whatever I want. It is the expression of values in the absence of constraint or challenge. “Lifestyle” is therefore one of the first and easiest values to be challenged, both in life and in fiction. And a character who sacrifices other values in order to maintain their lifestyle… well, that may be an interesting character, but he or she is rarely a sympathetic character. Such a character is one who invariably ends up as an object lesson or as a convert to “deeper” or “truer” values.

When my cousin stated her insight, she was describing college students – whose ranks she has recently joined. I hope that most of them mature into deeper values rather than becoming object lessons. Meanwhile, at least I have a clearer way of thinking about some character conflict in my stories.