Life’s progression from birth to death is not a mere succession of moments. Many people give definition to their lives by clarifying their life purposes, and separating their actions toward the achievement of these into discrete strands:
– their intellectual lives,
– their working lives (career planning),
– their family lives (family planning),
– their sex lives and
– their spiritual or religious lives.
In the interim, those who can afford to pause and to do so may adopt a lifestyle or assess their quality of life. Exceptional lives may, at least in part, find literary reflection in a biography, an autobiography or a memoir.
An individual who is inclined to be introspective may reflect on his or her life choices. One may be told by friends and acquaintances to “get a life” – in the sense of promoting fuller participation in socially approved activities, often outside the private sphere. More broadly, certain modern cultures, some defined by state or corporate agencies, encourage individuals to submerge the personal identity in a greater whole: communism or other totalizing ideologies, mass movements, and even sports fandom are manifestations of this phenomenon, though differing vastly in degree. In this way, the ancient sensibility, which viewed collective identity as more important than personal identity, is returning to prominence in contemporary life.
(This brief look at human life is part of a longer essay on Personal Life at Wikipedia.)