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Concept
Personal life
Summary
Personal life is the course or state of an individual's life, especially when viewed as the sum of personal choices contributing to one's personal identity.
Apart from hunter-gatherers, most pre-modern peoples' time was limited by the need to meet necessities such as food and shelter through subsistence farming; leisure time was scarce.
People identified with their social role in their community and engaged in activities based on necessity rather than on personal choice. Privacy in such communities was rare.
The modern conception of "personal life" is an offshoot of modern Western society. Modern people tend to distinguish their work activities from their personal life and may seek work–life balance.
It is a person's choices and preferences outside of work that define personal life, including one's choice of hobbies, cultural interests, manner of dress, mate, friends, and so on. In particular, what activities one engages in during leisure-time defines a person's personal life. Religious authorities, moralists, managers and personal-development gurus have seized on the concept of an individual life as a fulcrum for potential control and manipulation.
People in Western countries, such as the United States and Canada, tend to value privacy. Privacy includes both information privacy and decisional privacy; people expect to be left alone with respect to intimate details of their life and they expect to be free from undue control by others.
In the past, before modern technology largely alleviated issues of economic scarcity in industrialised countries, most people spent a large portion of their time attempting to provide their basic survival needs, including water, food, and protection from the weather. Humans needed survival skills for the sake of both themselves and their community; food needed to be harvested and shelters needed to be maintained. There was little privacy in a community, and people identified one another according to their social role. Jobs were assigned out of necessity rather than personal choice.
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