This blog is largely an exploration of intentional living. Since I intend to write about it quite a bit, I thought I’d explain what I consider intentional living to be about, and why it matters.
To me, intentional living is the process of exerting conscious control and planning over different aspects of life in order to improve your overall wellbeing. I see it as being founded on two core beliefs.
The first is that life is better when you direct it. This breaks down to managing your external environment and internal resources. Everyone’s environment – their country, their job, their lifestyle, their friends – is a balance between order and chaos. Having a very ordered environment or a very chaotic environment can be good or bad, depending on the needs of each person. Order can mean stability, but it can also mean staleness and stagnation. Chaos can mean adventure and possibility, but also overload and mayhem. Most people don’t want their environments to be on the extremes of that scale between order and chaos. They want the equilibrium in the middle, with enough structure to manage the challenges life brings, and also enough chaos to bring new possibilities into their lives.
However, without finding what the right balance is for you, and making adjustments, it is unrealistic to expect the perfect mixture to arise spontaneously. There are lots of outside forces pushing at the amount of order and chaos in your life. Jobs, relationships and living situations can all cause the seesaw to swing more in one direction or another. Therefore, part of intentional living is determining what environments allow you to live the best life and changing those environments to bring reality gradually closer to the ideal.
The second aspect of directing life is managing your own resources. This includes things like time, energy, and money. The fact that everything us humans have comes only in limited supply can be an uncomfortable one to face up to. We want to believe that anything is possible. Especially when thinking about who we could become. And whilst I believe that the goal of seeking more of these resources is generally admirable (such as eating healthier to gain more energy during the day), it is important to realise that the total amount of things we can achieve in our lifetime is still infinitesimally smaller than the total amount of things there are to do. There is only time to learn a fraction of all the skills, see a fraction of all the sights and talk to a fraction of all the people that exist. Even when we aren’t thinking about it, every day we’re prioritising how we spend our limited resources by choosing some things over others. So, bearing in mind that we are making these trade-offs already, doesn’t it make sense to make the trade-offs that best suit living a good life? For example, you might benefit from spending less time at work and more with your kids. Or less energy looking at your phone and more on exercising. If you don’t decide that these changes need to happen, they won’t. Your boss wants you to work more. Social media companies want you to scroll more. If you don’t choose how you want to spend your resources, others will choose for you.
The second fundamental belief of intentional living is that people are capable of changing themselves and their situations. It may sound obvious that you must believe you can change in order to succeed, but it is often overlooked. A significant proportion of intentional living is proving to yourself that you are capable of sticking to hard things – that you are capable of changing who you are and how you do things. Without it, none of the changes you try to make are likely to stay)
Intentional living is the process of pulling on different levers in your life to change what surrounds you and how you interact with it. This can take many forms. It might look like moving jobs, or even country. It might be thinking carefully about which friends push you to live better and which push you to live worse. It might be changing your routines or habits. Each individual knows best what their life needs. To live a good one, we all have to take personal responsibility for getting it.