soft life

Living the soft life conjures up for us lolling about on a deckchair beside a pool with a martini in one hand and a plate of oysters in the other.  Not just for a day or two but for ever.  This new sense of soft life does not involve idleness. It was arrived at by contrast with a hard life, one of strain and trouble and stress.  The choice to soft life means that you remove all causes of stress and anxiety but only so that you can pursue the things that you want to do and that you do with pleasure.

The soft life movement has been created by Black Americans involved in the wellness movement so it is different from the wellness sought and promoted by white American women which often involves lots of health cures and special diets and possibly meditation.  Soft lifers have reacted against the hustle culture that has demanded that people work insane hours, the dream being that they end up being entrepreneurs by the age of 30 at which point they can presumably catch up on the leisure that they had to forego in the hustle years.

The soft life movement says that a better way to live your life and, indeed, to achieve success, is to focus on doing the things that make you happy (the corollary being don’t do anything that makes you suffer).  This does not mean that you are lazy or self-indulgent but just that you prioritise your life in favour of what you like doing (and are good at doing).  It is possible that this is one of the lessons learnt in the slowdown of life during the pandemic.