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.

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