Top 10 Things People Want for a Healthy Lifestyle

Paul Clitheroe in his book The Road to Wealth explains the dichotomy of human endeavour by first listing results from a survey asking “What people wanted” and then matching that with “What people spent most of their time chasing”.

Searching for a Healthy Lifestyle

10 Things People Want

1. Love
2. Connection
3. Fun
4. Peace
5. Freedom
6. Security
7. Growth
8. Self-expression
9. Adventure
10. Able to contribute

Now compare this list with the things we chase after…

The Things We Spend Most Of Our Time Chasing

1. Money
2. Fame
3. Sex
4. Recognition
5. Power
6. Responsibility
7. Achievement
8. Big House
9. New Car
10. Swimming Pool

Not surprisingly Yahoo! Finance wrote a piece on Making the most of the money we have that was followed up by a poll on Lifehacker gauging reader’s views one defining “Affluence”.

Lifehacker posed these three scenarios;

• Lots of money, but not necessarily a lot of time
• Lots of time, but not necessarily a lot of money
• In a perfect world, I’d like to be a happy medium between the two

of which the third option was by far the most desired while almost 4 times as many respondents wanted more time than money.

So, that being the case why do we still chase after the things that don’t help us enjoy a healthy lifestyle?

Greed. Bad Priorities. Inability to retain focus on what’s important.

Society continually perpetuates the notion that we should be dissatisified with what we have and yearn for more. Why do we need a new OS for our PC’s? That new car we bought 4 years ago has now been superseded by a new shape and more gadgets. And, it’s no longer good enough to have an MP3 player – it has to be an iPod.

It’s no surprise that Laura Rowley’s article cites;

The group who most desired time rather than the money? Men age 45 to 54, with 61 percent reporting they would make the tradeoff.

Why this age group? Because they’ve settled for every materialistic whim since they began their careers and have now realised they were trying to grasp the wind with greasy hands.

Can a healthy lifestyle be attained by chasing the things we listed as the top things we wanted?

Sure. Provided we tune out to societies continual lust for more and allow ourselves to be ourselves…

Photo source: 416style