2 of 10 tips on leading a balanced life

Here are two of the 10 tips on leading a balanced life from Allen’s blog Life is a Journal or Self Help and Personal Development for Lazy People. I liked these two tips because I happen to agree with them and I point them out because I haven’t seen them listed anywhere before in regards to living a balanced life.

5) Don’t buy into the culture around you if you don’t want to.


24-7 News (mostly bad news), the pressures of work, the go go go of modern life - this is what the media likes to tell us about our culture. That is not MY culture. I don’t agree with it and I don’t buy it. I am a human being and unique with my own feelings and needs - I don’t have to buy into something if it violates my values.

I hardly ever watch the news on TV (probably because I hardly ever watch TV). I hear snippets of it on news radio and I read current events on line and sometimes the newspaper headlines at work, but I control what I read and how often. Twenty-four hour news is too much. I think it is creating a paranoid society.

The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden RuleMichael Shermer, in his book The Science of Good and Evil says,

“An asymmetry on our moral observations about what people are really like comes from the fact that we have a tendency to focus on extreme acts of immorality and ignore the fact that most of the time, most people are gracious, considerate, and benevolent. For every act of violence or deception that appears on the nightly news. there are 10,000 acts of kindness that go largely unnoticed. In fact, violence and deception make the news precisely because they are so unusual in our daily experience.”


6) Create your own sub-culture involving your friends and family.


Surround yourself with people you like and who like you back. Create you own subculture of activities. Leave the couch and TV and go out and meet people be it through reading groups, charity work, nature rambles and more!

This goes along with my own personal policies:

  • I hang around people who love me for who I am, who accept me as I am.



  • I do not hang around people who are shaming.

Life is too short to hang out with people you don’t like. It is also too short to drink cheap wine. So, find a good bottle of wine and meet your friends and have a good time.

Anything you want to add?


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