What Really Matters in the Long Run, Location or Lifestyle?
There is a peculiar habit in modern men and women: whenever life grows tiresome, they imagine that it is their surroundings that are at fault. The man who feels trapped by his office believes he would flourish in the countryside. The woman who tires of the small town dreams of London, or Paris, or New York. In both cases, the assumption is that discontent arises from geography, as though boredom were caused by latitude and longitude. It is a childish faith, but one that persists with remarkable stubbornness.
The truth, of course, is that most people who change their surroundings discover soon enough that they have carried their same habits, same fears, and same emptiness into new rooms. A gloomy man in Croydon will be a gloomy man in Barcelona; a frivolous woman in Chelsea will be a frivolous woman in Provence. The furniture changes, the walls alter their colour, the air smells faintly of olive trees or coal smoke, but the mind remains what it was. And yet the fantasy survives, that if only one were elsewhere, one would be otherwise.
The first illusion to be examined is the belief that happiness can be purchased by a change of scenery. This notion is so deeply rooted that even the poorest man entertains it from time to time. The worker in a grey suburb dreams of green hills; the clerk in a provincial town imagines London streets aglow with opportunity; the Londoner, weary of smoke and noise, dreams of cottages with roses climbing the walls. Each is certain that misery is localised, that a shift of place will sweep it away.
It is true, of course, that one’s environment influences the senses. The sea has its tonic smell; the mountains their grave majesty; the city its nervous, exhilarating pulse. But these are stimulants rather than cures. A man who is idle, dishonest, or perpetually discontented will be much the same under olive trees as he is under factory chimneys. The sea-breeze may clear his lungs but it will not sweeten his temper.
The tourist industry thrives on this very misconception. The glossy brochure never tells you that you will be dragging your own tired body into the aeroplane, and that the same nagging voices in your head will be there to meet you when you land. Instead, it shows a beach as though it were a paradise on earth, with the implication that you, merely by standing upon it, will be transformed into someone both younger and wiser. The joke is that the locals living beside that beach long to escape from it.
The illusion of location is not new. One finds in every century the stories of men who thought they could elude their troubles by running away. The Roman poet dreamed of Arcadia; the Victorian clerk dreamed of Australia; the modern student dreams of Berlin or Bangkok. But the evidence suggests that disappointment travels faster than any train. What you bring with you, above all, is yourself.
If geography is often treated as a cure for discontent, lifestyle is treated as its proper management. The magazines, the advertisements, and the innumerable handbooks on “how to live” all suggest that one’s happiness depends not so much on where one is, but on how one spends one’s days. Diets, exercise regimes, methods of working, rituals of leisure all are offered with the promise that, if only followed faithfully, they will produce contentment.
There is some truth in this. A man who walks daily will likely feel healthier than one who does not; a household that eats simply may be freer of debt than one that chases elaborate delicacies. Yet it is easy to observe how quickly such advice degenerates into fashion. One decade instructs us to rise at dawn and meditate; the next tells us to sleep late and value “self-care.” One year condemns bread as poison; another re-invents it as wholesome and ancient. The rules alter, but the anxiety remains.
Lifestyle, in the modern sense, has become an industry. To purchase a new gadget, a new garment, or a new routine is to believe, for a week or two, that one’s existence has been improved. But soon enough the object or the habit settles into familiarity, and one begins again to search for novelty. In this way the supposed art of living becomes a marketplace, and the ordinary human being its perpetual customer.
What is overlooked in all this is that life is not arranged like a menu, from which one selects courses in order to be satisfied. The essential elements of existence, work, rest, companionship, solitude are much the same across centuries. The particular forms they take vary, but the need for them does not. A man who cannot endure his own company will suffer whether he plays tennis at a fashionable club or sits by a village pond. The problem is not the pattern of his days but the state of his mind.
When one considers location in practical terms, it is impossible to separate it from the matter of class. A man may speak loftily of his wish to live in a cottage by the sea, but if he cannot afford the rent, the dream remains precisely that. To most people, location is not chosen but imposed. The miner lives where there is a pit, the clerk where there is an office, the factory hand where the tram line delivers him daily to his machine.
In England this is particularly visible. The wealthy retire to their country houses, surrounded by lawns and hedges trimmed into geometric obedience, while the poor are crowded into terraces where even a patch of grass is shared by half a street. For the prosperous man, location becomes a matter of taste; for the labourer, it is dictated by necessity. One may say, then, that geography is merely another way in which social differences are expressed.
And yet, among the poor as well as the rich, the same illusion persists that moving elsewhere will somehow repair what has gone wrong. The difference is only that the wealthy man may act on his fancy, while the poor man may only dream of it. This disparity shows how location, rather than being a personal choice, is in most cases the outward sign of one’s position in society.
If location is largely a question of class, lifestyle is more closely tied to values. Here, too, money plays its part, but within any income there are choices to be made. A man may spend his earnings on comforts, or on drink, or on nothing at all. A household may pursue elegance and display, or settle for thrift and decency.
The smallest details often reveal the deepest truths. To prepare a proper meal from simple ingredients shows a sense of care, both for oneself and for others. To neglect such things in pursuit of some new fashion is to abandon stability for the sake of novelty. Consider the plain cup of tea, properly brewed: its virtue lies not in extravagance but in steadiness. It is a modest pleasure, yet it speaks of order, patience, and respect for tradition. In such small habits lies the essence of a genuine way of life.
A society that forgets these values preferring the glamour of the new over the quiet satisfactions of the old will always find itself restless. No matter how ingenious the lifestyle trend, no matter how dazzling the advertisement, the craving for more cannot be satisfied by arrangement alone. The problem is not that we have chosen the wrong routine, but that we have mistaken routine itself for meaning.
It must be said plainly that neither location nor lifestyle will shield us from the fundamental conditions of existence. A man will age whether he lives in a palace or a hut. A woman will feel loneliness whether she eats in a fashionable café or in her own kitchen. Death comes to the busy streets of the city and the silent fields of the countryside alike.
It is tempting to think that the right choice of house, of diet, of daily rhythm might allow us to outwit these realities. But this is another illusion. The hardships of life are not external problems to be solved; they are woven into the fabric of human experience. The question is not whether one can escape them, but how one faces them.
In the end, what matters is not the map one lives upon, nor the schedule one follows, but the honesty with which one confronts life itself. To live decently in whatever place one is given, to maintain clarity in one’s thoughts, to hold fast to simple values of fairness and truth these are the things that endure when fashions of lifestyle and fashions of geography have faded.
The man who seeks happiness in another town will remain unsatisfied until he learns to live at peace in his own. The woman who changes her habits with every season will remain restless until she understands that contentment is not bought but cultivated.
Location alters the view from the window; lifestyle alters the order of the hours. But neither, in the long run, determines the quality of a life. That depends upon something more stubborn, and more difficult: the character with which one meets the unchanging facts of being human.
