Dating, walking, working out, watching a movie at home, watching a movie in the theater, thrift shopping, grocery shopping, meal prepping, playing trivia, making coffee, drinking coffee, consuming alcohol, making friends, making plans with friends, playing the guitar, journaling, arguing, reading, thinking, scrolling, breathing.
You can just do all of these things. Or you can do them “intentionally,” as a growing chorus of lifestyle gurus, influencers and perhaps slightly overtherapized people you may know personally are preaching lately.
It’s a practice whose meaning most can agree on even as they apply it in vastly different ways. Consider a pair of videos on TikTok, both claiming to display an intentional lifestyle: In one, a young woman takes viewers through her Sunday of “slowmaxxing,” carefully selecting a Carole King record to listen to on a turntable, watering her plants and turning on various low-watt lamps around her home. In another, a working mother shows how she “intentionally” spends the four hours between the time she arrives home and when she goes to bed — cooking, cleaning up the kitchen and helping her children with their homework in a sped-up, one-minute blur.
A close linguistic relative to mindfulness, living intentionally suggests being present and self-aware. Your words and actions are in near-perfect alignment. Possibly, you’ve meditated recently. True to its literal definition, being “intentional” also implies a series of deliberate choices.
Those can feel hard to come by these days, when even mundane, everyday decisions appear more readily shaped by large political forces and faceless algorithms than by any sort of individual volition. One can’t help but feel that the word expresses a wider feeling of being disempowered and adrift.
“Think of how natural it is to pick up your phone when you’re bored,” said Jackie Garbe, a 28-year-old yoga and meditation instructor in Ridgewood, Queens. “In this world, we tend to be in our heads and be in autopilot, which is OK, it’s natural, but intentionality gets us out of that and into our present moment.”
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