Personal life

Personal life is the course of an individual's life, especially when viewed as the sum of personal choices contributing to one's personal identity.

In ancient past, most people's time was limited by the need to meet necessities such as food and shelter and there was not much leisure time. People identified with their social role in their community, and engaged in jobs based on necessity rather than personal choice. Privacy in such communities was rare.

The modern conception of personal life is an offshoot of modern Western society. A modern person tends to distinguish one's work from one's personal life. 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, and so on. In particular, what activities one engages in during leisure-time defines a person's personal life. For instance, a typical American has about five hours of leisure time per day, more than half of which is spent on watching TV.

People in Western countries, such as the United States, 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.

Furthermore, individuals in many ancient cultures primarily viewed their self-existence under the aspect of a larger social whole, often one with mythological underpinnings which placed the individual in relation to the cosmos. People in such cultures found their identity not through their individual choices—indeed, they may not have been able to conceive a choice which was purely individual. Such individuals, if asked to describe themselves, would speak of the collective of which they were part: the tribe, the Church, the nation. Even in the 21st century, survival issues dominate in many countries and societies. For example, the continents of Africa and Asia are still largely mired in poverty and third-world conditions, without technology, secure shelter, or reliable food sources. In such places, the concepts of a "personal life", "self-actualization", "personal fulfillment", or "privacy" are often unaffordable luxuries.

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Wikipedia