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Essay on Healthy Lifestyle

The top secret of being physically fit is adopting a healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle includes regular exercise, a healthy diet, taking good care of self, healthy sleep habits, and having a physically active daily routine. Lifestyle is the most prevailing factor that affects one’s fitness level. A person leading a sedentary lifestyle has a low fitness level whereas living a healthier life not only makes a person fit but also extends life. Good health has a direct impact on our personality. A person with a good and healthy lifestyle is generally more confident, self-assured, sociable, and energetic.

A good and healthy lifestyle allows one to relish and savor all the pleasures in life without any complications. Even all the wealth is less valuable when compared to sound health. Having all the luxuries in the world does not fulfill its purpose when one is continuously ill, depressed, or suffering from a significant health complication. A healthy person has a clear and calm perception of everything without prejudice. His actions and decisions are more practical and logical and are hence more successful in life.

A good habit is a key factor for a healthy lifestyle. To maintain a stable body and mind, one needs to inculcate good habits. Waking up early in the morning, regularly exercising or a good morning walk helps to keep our body energetic and refresh our mind. Maintaining a balanced and nutritious diet throughout the day is vital for maintaining a good lifestyle. Too much indulgence in alcohol or smoking excessively is not at all appropriate for a healthy lifestyle.

Self-Discipline

Self-discipline is important for maintaining a good lifestyle. When we are self-disciplined then we are more organized and regular in maintaining good health. A disciplined life is a regulated life. A man without discipline is a ship without a rudder. Discipline needs self-control. One who cannot control himself can seldom control others. The level of discipline and perseverance largely determines a person’s success. Self-discipline is the act of disciplining one’s own feelings, desires, etc. especially with the intention of improving oneself. It strengthens our willpower. The stronger our will power the positive will be our decision. It enables us to conquer our own self.

Punctuality

Punctuality is the habit of doing things on time. It is the characteristic of every successful person and everyone must observe punctuality in order to win success in life. Punctuality is necessary for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It should become a habit with us. A punctual person is able to fulfill all his responsibilities and hence is treated with respect in society. It is needed in every walk of life.

Diet is an important component for overall fitness and works best in combination with exercise. A balanced diet and exercise regularly help to maintain good health. It is necessary to reduce weight if one is overweight or obese, failing which one cannot be physically fit for long. For people with obesity, more exercise and a strict regime are necessary, preferably under guidance. There are many ways of making the diet healthier.

Use less sugar and salt while cooking food.

Use less oil while cooking. Avoid deep-frying as much as possible. 

Eat more fruits daily. They provide more vitamins and minerals to our bodies.

Add sprouts of gram and moong dal to at least one meal in a day. Add fiber to your diet. Use whole grains instead of polished cereals. Eat lots of salad and yogurt.

Eat fermented food regularly. Fermented food contains many useful bacteria that help in the process of digestion.

Prevention of Lifestyle Diseases

By adopting a healthy lifestyle one can avoid lifestyle diseases. The following are some ways in which we can prevent lifestyle diseases.

Eat a balanced diet that contains important nutrients. One must include more fresh fruits and green vegetables in the diet. Refrain from eating junk food. Stay away from foods that contain large amounts of salt or sugar.

Exercise regularly. Spend more time outdoors and do activities such as walking, running, swimming, and cycling.

One must avoid overindulgence in alcohol, junk food, smoking, and addiction to drugs and medicines.

Avoid spending too much on modern gadgets like mobile phones, laptops, televisions, etc. Spend time on these gadgets for short intervals of time only.

Set a healthy sleeping routine for every day. Waking early in the morning and going to bed early at night should be a daily habit. Lead an active life.

Unhealthy Lifestyle

Bad food habits and an unhealthy lifestyle such as less or no physical activity may lead to several diseases like obesity, high blood pressure or hypertension, diabetes, anemia, and various heart diseases. An unhealthy lifestyle reduces productivity and creativity in a person. It also adversely affects moods and relationships. It leads to depression and anxiety in human beings.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle not only makes a person confident and productive but also drives him to success. A person with a healthy lifestyle will enjoy both personal and social life.

FAQs on Healthy Lifestyle Essay

What Do You Understand about a Healthy Lifestyle?

A healthy lifestyle is a lifestyle that includes regular exercise, a healthy diet, taking good care of self, healthy sleep habits and having a physically active daily routine.

How is Punctuality Important for Maintaining a Healthy Lifestyle?

Punctuality is the habit of doing things on time. It is the characteristic of every successful person and everyone must observe punctuality in order to win success in life. It should become a habit with us. A punctual person is able to fulfil all his responsibilities and hence is treated with respect in society. It is needed in every walk of life.

What Happens When One Does Not Maintain a Healthy Lifestyle?

When one does not maintain a healthy lifestyle then several diseases like obesity, high blood pressure or hypertension, diabetes, anaemia and various heart diseases can occur. An unhealthy lifestyle reduces productivity and creativity in a person. It also adversely affects moods and relationships. It leads to depression and anxiety in human beings.

What are the Main Factors that Determine a Good and Healthy Lifestyle?

In order to maintain a good and healthy lifestyle, one must be self-disciplined, self-motivated, maintain punctuality and have good habits like waking early in the morning and maintain a regular fitness regime and a balanced and nutritious diet.

Is writing an essay hard?

Essay writing is a difficult task that needs a great deal of study, time, and focus. It's also an assignment that you can divide down into manageable chunks such as introduction, main content, and conclusion. Breaking down and focusing on each individually makes essay writing more pleasant. It's natural for students to be concerned about writing an essay. It's one of the most difficult tasks to do, especially for people who aren't confident in their writing abilities. While writing a decent essay is difficult, the secret to being proficient at it is reading a lot of books, conducting extensive research on essential topics, and practicing essay writing diligently.

Why is it important for one to aspire to have a healthy lifestyle?

A healthy lifestyle is an important way for reducing the occurrence and impact of health problems, as well as for recovery, coping with life stressors, and improving the overall quality of life. An increasing collection of scientific data suggests that our habits have a significant impact on our health. Everything we eat and drink, as well as how much exercise we get and whether we smoke or use drugs, has an impact on our health, not just in terms of life expectancy but also in terms of how long we may expect to live without developing chronic illness. A large proportion of fatalities are caused by conditions such as heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, joint disease, and mental illness. A healthy lifestyle can help to avoid or at least delay the onset of many health issues.

How to download the Essay on Healthy Lifestyle from the Vedantu website?

The Essay on Healthy Lifestyle, which is accurate and well-structured, is available for download on the Vedantu website. The Essay is accessible in PDF format on Vedantu's official website and may be downloaded for free. Students should download the Essay on Healthy Lifestyle from the Vedantu website to obtain a sense of the word limit, sentence structure, and fundamental grasp of what makes a successful essay. Vedantu essay is brief and appropriate for youngsters in school. It is written in basic English, which is ideal for kids who have a restricted vocabulary. Following the Vedantu essay ensures that students are adequately prepared for any essay subject and that they will receive high grades. Click here to read the essay about a healthy lifestyle.

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The Essay on Healthy Lifestyle designed for the Vedantu is created by a group of experts and experienced teachers. The panel of experts has created the essay after analyzing important essay topics that have been repeatedly asked in various examinations. The Essays that are provided by Vedantu are not only well-structured but also accurate and concise. They are aptly suited for young students with limited vocabulary. For best results, the students are advised to go through multiple essays and practice the topics on their own to inculcate the habits of time management and speed.

What constitutes a healthy lifestyle?

Healthy life is built on the pillars of a good diet, frequent exercise, and appropriate sleep. A healthy lifestyle keeps people in excellent shape, it also gives you more energy throughout the day, and lowers your chance of developing many diet-related chronic diseases. Healthy living is considered a lifestyle choice that allows you to enjoy more elements of your life. Taking care of one's physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being is part of living a healthy lifestyle.

Good Nutrition, Eating Right and proper diet.

Getting Physically Fit, Beneficial Exercise and working out often.

Adequate rest and uninterrupted sleep.

Proper Stress Management.

Self-Supportive Attitudes.

Positive Thoughts are encouraged.

Positive Self-Image and body image.

Inner Calmness and peace.

Openness to Your Creativity and Self-care.

Trust in Your Inner Knowing and your gut feeling.

Essay on Healthy Lifestyle

Students are often asked to write an essay on Healthy Lifestyle in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Healthy Lifestyle

Introduction.

A healthy lifestyle is a way of living that lowers the risk of being seriously ill or dying early. It’s not just about eating fruits and vegetables, but also about regular exercise and positive thinking.

Healthy Eating

Eating a balanced diet is crucial. Include a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins. Avoid junk food and sugary drinks.

Regular Exercise

Exercise boosts your mood, strengthens your body, and reduces the risk of diseases. Aim for at least 30 minutes of physical activity every day.

Positive Mindset

A healthy mind is as important as a healthy body. Stay positive, manage stress, and get enough sleep.

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250 Words Essay on Healthy Lifestyle

The concept of a healthy lifestyle is not just about eating nutritious food and engaging in physical activities. It is a holistic approach to wellbeing that includes mental, emotional, and social health.

Importance of Balanced Nutrition

Nutrition plays a pivotal role in maintaining health. Consuming a balanced diet rich in proteins, vitamins, minerals, and fiber helps in boosting immunity, energy levels, and overall physical health. However, it’s not just about what you eat but also how and when you eat. Mindful eating and maintaining a regular eating schedule can significantly contribute to a healthy lifestyle.

Physical Activity and Its Impact

Physical activity is another cornerstone of a healthy lifestyle. Regular exercise helps in maintaining a healthy weight, reducing the risk of chronic diseases, and promoting mental health. It does not necessarily mean spending hours in the gym; even simple activities like walking, cycling, or yoga can have profound benefits.

Mental and Emotional Wellbeing

Mental and emotional health is often overlooked in the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle. Stress management, sufficient sleep, and nurturing relationships contribute to emotional health, which in turn impacts physical health.

Social Health: An Integral Part

Social health is about maintaining healthy relationships and having a sense of connection and belonging. It involves balancing personal needs with those of the community and environment, fostering empathy, and building strong support systems.

In conclusion, a healthy lifestyle is a multifaceted concept. It involves balanced nutrition, regular physical activity, mental and emotional wellbeing, and social health. By adopting such a lifestyle, one can significantly enhance their quality of life and longevity.

500 Words Essay on Healthy Lifestyle

The concept of a healthy lifestyle is not just about eating nutritious food and getting enough physical exercise. It encompasses a much broader spectrum of behaviors that contribute to physical, mental, and social well-being. A healthy lifestyle is a conscious choice that one makes and is a crucial step towards a fulfilling life.

The Pillars of a Healthy Lifestyle

The foundation of a healthy lifestyle rests on four pillars: a balanced diet, regular physical activity, adequate rest, and mental well-being.

Regular physical activity is another cornerstone of a healthy lifestyle. It can help prevent chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, and stroke. It also promotes mental health, reduces stress, and improves sleep.

Adequate rest is often overlooked in discussions about a healthy lifestyle. However, it is just as important as diet and exercise. Lack of sleep can lead to a range of health problems, including obesity, diabetes, and even heart disease.

The Role of Mindfulness in a Healthy Lifestyle

Mindfulness is a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. It is a powerful tool to help manage stress, enhance emotional intelligence, and improve overall health. Incorporating mindfulness into daily routines can significantly contribute to a healthy lifestyle.

Challenges and Solutions

Despite the known benefits of a healthy lifestyle, many individuals face challenges in maintaining one. These challenges include lack of time, inability to stick to a routine, lack of motivation, and limited access to healthy foods or fitness facilities.

In conclusion, a healthy lifestyle is a valuable asset to one’s life. It not only improves physical health but also contributes significantly to mental and social well-being. Despite the challenges, with determination, discipline, and a positive outlook, everyone can lead a healthy lifestyle. It is a journey, not a destination, and each small step towards it is a step towards a healthier, happier life.

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Healthy Lifestyle Essay | Essay on Healthy Lifestyle for Students and Children in English

February 12, 2024 by Prasanna

Healthy Lifestyle Essay:  A healthy lifestyle involves a lot of things under it, including a nutritional diet, daily exercise, adequate sleep, being happy, and thinking positively. When we do all the necessary elements to have a healthy lifestyle, our lives are going on the right path. Living a healthy life is vital for you to be happy and feel good in your present life and for the future. Once you choose to live a healthy life, it lasts all your life. It not only helps you live longer but also better and less prone to sickness and diseases. A healthy lifestyle is the kind of lifestyle that we should all strive for.

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Long and Short Essays on Healthy Lifestyle for Students and Kids in English

Given below are two essays in English for students and children about the topic of ‘Healthy Lifestyle’ in both long and short form. The first essay is a long essay on a Healthy Lifestyle of 400-500 words. This essay about Healthy Lifestyle is suitable for students of classes 7, 8, 9 and 10, and also for competitive exam aspirants. The second essay is a short essay on Healthy Lifestyle of 150-200 words. This one is suitable for students and children in class 6 and below.

Long Essay on Healthy Lifestyle 500 Words in English

Below we have given a long essay on Healthy Lifestyle of 500 words. This long essay on the topic of healthy lifestyle is suitable for students of classes 7,8,9 and 10, and also for competitive exam aspirants.

Having a healthy lifestyle is all about choosing to live your life in the most healthy way possible. There are a few things you have to do to start living your life in this way, i.e., the healthy way. This means doing some amount of exercise daily, such as jogging, yoga, playing sports, etc. Adding to this, you must also have a balanced and nutritional diet with all the food groups. It would be best if you were taking the right amount of proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and fats to help you have a proper diet. Grouped with these two essential aspects (diet and exercise), a healthy person also maintains the same sleep cycle, which should consist of around 7-8 hours of sleep.

However, we must remember that a healthy lifestyle not only refers to our physical and mental health. Maintaining a balanced diet, exercising daily, and sleeping well are essential parts of a healthy lifestyle. But feeling happy is also a big part of a healthy lifestyle. To enable happiness, thinking positively is a must. When a person does not feel happy or good about themselves, they are not entirely healthy. Thus we must do our best to think positively so that we can feel happy rather than sad.

We have talked about what all entails a healthy life, so now we must speak of what all does not. There are several things that one must avoid in order to live a healthy lifestyle. These include the kind of practices and habits that are harmful to us and also to the people around us, i.e., society. Such practices and habits include gambling, smoking, drinking, illegal drugs, or any other things that can turn into an addiction. These habits are harmful to not only you but for all the people around you, as addiction causes unhealthy attitudes and behaviors. Other unhealthy practices include skipping meals and eating junk food.

The benefits of a healthy lifestyle are manifold: living a healthy life allows you to live longer, which means that you get to spend more time with your family. Exercising daily will enable you to release endorphins and helps you feel happier. Regular exercise also improves the health of your skin and hair, bettering your appearance as well. Healthy lifestyles also primarily reduce your risk of life-threatening diseases such as cancer, diabetes, etc. and also reduce your susceptibility to cardiac arrests.

Short Essay on Healthy Lifestyle 200 Words in English

Below we have given a short essay on Healthy Lifestyle of 200 words. This long essay on the topic healthy lifestyle is suitable for students of classes 1,2,3,4,5 and 6.

A healthy lifestyle is a vital part of our lives. There are some things that we must do to live a healthy life. The first thing to do is to ensure that you eat three meals a day. These meals should have the right amount of all the food groups, which are carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins. You should not eat any junk food, which is unhealthy for you.

The next thing is to exercise daily to maintain a healthy lifestyle. This can be jogging, running, playing sports, dancing, or even walking for a minimum of 30 minutes. Exercise is essential not only for health but also for your skin and hair to look more delightful.

For a healthy lifestyle, you should also get the right amount of sleep at night. The proper routine is to sleep early and wake up early, with a 7-8 hour period of rest. It is crucial to get enough sleep, but not too much or too little, as it can affect your concentration and your abilities.

A healthy lifestyle helps you live longer and have a better and happier life. It is essential to living a healthy life to make the best out of it.

10 Lines About Healthy Lifestyle Essay

• Exercise daily by running, jogging, playing sports, dancing or brisk walking
• Eat three nutritional meals a day with all the food groups (carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals)
• Make sure to get enough sleep, i.e., 7-8 hours per night
• Don’t sleep too much or too less, because either can lead to fatigue
• Mental health is as important as physical health for a healthy lifestyle
• Once you start living a healthy lifestyle, there’s no turning back to old, unhealthy ways
• Avoid harmful habits like smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling, etc.
• A healthy lifestyle helps you live longer
• Healthy living reduces your risk of life-threatening diseases like cancer and diabetes, among others
• You will be grateful later in life for practicing a healthy lifestyle as well as now

FAQ’s On Healthy Lifestyle Essay

Question 1. What are some tips for living a healthy life?

Answer: Exercise regularly, eat all your three nutritional meals a day, sleep enough, refrain from engaging in unhealthy practices which can cause addictions, and be positive to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Question 2. What benefits do I get from a healthy lifestyle?

Answer: A healthy lifestyle helps you live longer and have a better life with less risk of high fatality illnesses and also reduces your risk of heart failure.

Question 3. How do I know if I have good health?

Answer: Good health means that you are free of illnesses or diseases. It means that you can work efficiently and provide for the people you care about.

Question 4. What entails a healthy lifestyle?

Answer: A healthy lifestyle is the kind of lifestyle which ensures that a person maintains good health.

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Lifestyle - Free Essay Examples and Topic Ideas

Lifestyle refers to the way one chooses to live their daily life, encompassing their habits, behaviors, interests, and values. It includes the type of food one eats, the amount of physical activity one engages in, the quality of relationships one maintains, and the way one manages their time and resources. Lifestyle choices can greatly affect one’s physical and mental health, as well as overall well-being. It is a personal choice that influences various aspects of life, such as career, family, social circle, and personal growth.

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• 🏆 Best Essay Topics on Lifestyle
• ⚡ Simple & Lifestyle Easy Topics
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Healthy Lifestyle - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

An essay on a healthy lifestyle can focus on the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of individuals. It can explore the components of a healthy lifestyle, including nutrition, exercise, stress management, and mindfulness, and their impact on longevity, happiness, and overall quality of life. A vast selection of complimentary essay illustrations pertaining to Healthy Lifestyle you can find in Papersowl database. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

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Essays About Life: Top 5 Examples Plus 7 Prompts

Life envelops various meanings; if you are writing essays about life, discover our comprehensive guide with examples and prompts to help you with your essay.

What is life? You can ask anyone; I assure you, no two people will have the same answer. How we define life relies on our beliefs and priorities. One can say that life is the capacity for growth or the time between birth and death. Others can share that life is the constant pursuit of purpose and fulfillment. Life is a broad topic that inspires scholars, poets, and many others. It stimulates discussions that encourage diverse perspectives and interpretations. 

5 Essay Examples

1. essay on life by anonymous on toppr.com, 2. the theme of life, existence and consciousness by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. compassion can save life by anonymous on papersowl.com, 4. a life of consumption vs. a life of self-realization by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. you only live once: a motto for life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is the true meaning of life, 2. my life purpose, 3. what makes life special, 4. how to appreciate life, 5. books about life, 6. how to live a healthy life, 7. my idea of a perfect life.

“…quality of Life carries huge importance. Above all, the ultimate purpose should be to live a meaningful life. A meaningful life is one which allows us to connect with our deeper self.”

The author defines life as something that differentiates man from inorganic matter. It’s an aspect that processes and examines a person’s actions that develop through growth. For some, life is a pain because of failures and struggles, but it’s temporary. For the writer, life’s challenges help us move forward, be strong, and live to the fullest. You can also check out these essays about utopia .

“… Kafka defines the dangers of depending on art for life. The hunger artist expresses his dissatisfaction with the world by using himself and not an external canvas to create his artwork, forcing a lack of separation between the artist and his art. Therefore, instead of the art depending on the audience, the artist depends on the audience, meaning when the audience’s appreciation for work dwindles, their appreciation for the artist diminishes as well, leading to the hunger artist’s death.”

The essay talks about “ A Hunger Artist ” by Franz Kafka, who describes his views on life through art. The author analyzes Kafka’s fictional main character and his anxieties and frustrations about life and the world. This perception shows how much he suffered as an artist and how unhappy he was. Through the essay, the writer effectively explains Kafka’s conclusion that artists’ survival should not depend on their art.

“Compassion is that feeling that we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives. When we know that there is someone that really cares for us. Compassion comes from that moment when we can see the world through another person’s eyes.”

The author is a nurse who believes that to be professional, they need to be compassionate and treat their patients with respect, empathy, and dignity. One can show compassion through small actions such as talking and listening to patients’ grievances. In conclusion, compassion can save a person’s life by accepting everyone regardless of race, gender, etc.

“… A life of self-realization is more preferable and beneficial in comparison with a life on consumption. At the same time, this statement may be objected as person’s consumption leads to his or her happiness.”

The author examines Jon Elster’s theory to find out what makes a person happy and what people should think and feel about their material belongings. The essay mentions a list of common activities that make us feel happy and satisfied, such as buying new things. The writer explains that Elster’s statement about the prevalence of self-realization in consumption will always trigger intense debate.

“Appreciate the moment you’ve been given and appreciate the people you’ve been given to spend it with, because no matter how beautiful or tragic a moment is, it always ends. So hold on a little tighter, smile a little bigger, cry a little harder, laugh a little louder, forgive a little quicker, and love a whole lot deeper because these are the moments you will remember when you’re old and wishing you could rewind time.”

This essay explains that some things and events only happen once in a person’s life. The author encourages teenagers to enjoy the little things in their life and do what they love as much as they can. When they turn into adults, they will no longer have the luxury to do whatever they want.

The author suggests doing something meaningful as a stress reliever, trusting people, refusing to give up on the things that make you happy, and dying with beautiful memories. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

7 Prompts for Essays About Life

Life encompasses many values and depends on one’s perception. For most, life is about reaching achievements to make themselves feel alive. Use this prompt to compile different meanings of life and provide a background on why a person defines life as they do.

Take Joseph Campbell’s, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning, and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer,” for example. This quote pertains to his belief that an individual is responsible for giving life meaning. 

For this prompt, share with your readers your current purpose in life. It can be as simple as helping your siblings graduate or something grand, such as changing a national law to make a better world. You can ask others about their life purpose to include in your essay and give your opinion on why your answers are different or similar.

Life is a fascinating subject, as each person has a unique concept. How someone lives depends on many factors, such as opportunities, upbringing, and philosophies. All of these elements affect what we consider “special.”

Share what you think makes life special. For instance, talk about your relationships, such as your close-knit family or best friends. Write about the times when you thought life was worth living. You might also be interested in these essays about yourself .

Life in itself is a gift. However, most of us follow a routine of “wake up, work (or study), sleep, repeat.” Our constant need to survive makes us take things for granted. When we endlessly repeat a routine, life becomes mundane. For this prompt, offer tips on how to avoid a monotonous life, such as keeping a gratitude journal or traveling.

Many literary pieces use life as their subject. If you have a favorite book about life, recommend it to your readers by summarizing the content and sharing how the book influenced your outlook on life. You can suggest more than one book and explain why everyone should read them.

For example, Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” reminds its readers to live in the moment and never fear failure.

To be healthy doesn’t only pertain to our physical condition. It also refers to our mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being. To live a happy and full life, individuals must strive to be healthy in all areas. For this prompt, list ways to achieve a healthy life. Section your essay and present activities to improve health, such as eating healthy foods, talking with friends, etc.

No one has a perfect life, but describe what it’ll be like if you do. Start with the material things, such as your house, clothes, etc. Then, move to how you connect with others. In your conclusion, answer whether you’re willing to exchange your current life for the “perfect life” you described and why.  See our essay writing tips to learn more!

English that goes straight to the heart

Healthy Lifestyle Essay

Wealth matters, but, is not as important as health. Money is the source to carry on with a healthy life however good health is the source of living a happy and peaceful life.

“Healthy Lifestyle Essay” will make you understand everything.

Healthy Lifestyle Essay (500 Words)

In today’s fast-paced and demanding world, maintaining a healthy lifestyle has become more important than ever. A healthy lifestyle encompasses a variety of choices and habits that prioritize physical, mental, and emotional well-being. However, recent studies have revealed that the stress and demands of modern life can lead to various medical conditions, such as heart problems and neurological disorders.

The Value of Health over Wealth:

The saying, “The greatest wealth is our own health,” holds true as no amount of material riches can compensate for the absence of good health. While a healthy body has the potential to amass wealth, the reverse is not necessarily true. Prioritizing one’s health allows individuals to approach work and life with a positive attitude, fostering success in all aspects of life.

The Impact of Lifestyle on Health:

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The fast-paced nature of modern life often leaves individuals with little time for self-care. Unhealthy eating habits, such as consuming junk food for taste and neglecting balanced diets, have become commonplace. A healthy lifestyle, on the other hand, reduces stress levels, supports mental well-being, and enables individuals to face life’s challenges with vitality.

The Importance of a Balanced Diet:

A healthy lifestyle starts with a balanced and nutritious diet. A healthy diet is a cornerstone of maintaining good health. It should consist of essential nutrients such as proteins, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, and adequate calories. Emphasizing the consumption of fresh fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs, and yogurt contributes to overall well-being. Additionally, adhering to fixed meal times, consuming the right quantities, and avoiding unhealthy and fried foods is vital.

Engaging in Physical Activity:

Regular physical activity is the foundation of a healthy lifestyle. A healthy body requires regular physical activity. Daily exercise promotes physical fitness, boosts energy levels, and improves mental clarity. Engaging in activities such as walking, jogging, or participating in sports not only enhances physical well-being but also strengthens the immune system, making individuals more resistant to infections and diseases.

Rest, Hygiene, and Environment:

Adequate rest and sleep, personal hygiene, and a healthy environment are integral to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Sufficient sleep rejuvenates the body while maintaining cleanliness and hygiene safeguards against illness. Fresh air, clean water, and a positive living environment contribute to overall well-being and help prevent various health issues.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, adopting a healthy lifestyle is paramount for individuals seeking to lead fulfilling lives. While wealth may hold its own importance, it pales in comparison to the value of good health. A healthy body enables individuals to perform optimally in all aspects of life, from personal relationships to professional endeavors. By prioritizing a balanced diet, regular physical activity, adequate rest, and a clean environment, individuals can ensure their physical, mental, social, intellectual , and financial well-being. In essence, good health is the foundation for a happy and prosperous life, and it is incumbent upon each individual to embrace and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

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Healthy Lifestyles and Ageing Essay

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Introduction

Factors that affect ageing, theories of ageing, importance of healthy nutrition and physical exercises, other factors that affect a healthy lifestyle.

Ageing is a biological process that one cannot avoid; it is often related to diseases. A healthy lifestyle helps a person to live healthy even in old age. A healthy lifestyle is a way of living that tries to eliminate occurrence of a disease as well as reducing the risk of dying. It involves social, mental and physical health.

There is thus a relationship between ageing and lifestyle. Lifestyle refers to choices that one makes including diet, physical exercises, smoking and alcohol intake. A healthy lifestyle makes a person to enjoy his life and avoid health complications. This article will discuss the correlation between a lifestyle and the quality of life that a person lives as he/she grows old.

Ageing is determined by social lifestyle of a person; this comes as a result of ones experiences and environmental interaction in which one is exposed to. Several theories have been developed to explain the ageing process: activity theory, disengagement theory, social cognitive theory among others. Biologically, ageing is caused by the destruction of cells, “metabolic stress, oxidative stress and inflammation” (Rahelu, 2009, p. 232).

Depression contributes much in ageing. People with depressed mood indirectly quicken their ageing. Depression may be caused by an unfavorable environment. A depressed person is likely to engage in unhealthy lifestyle such as smoking, alcohol abuse, less physical exercises which will likely result to development obesity. Smoking of cigarettes and taking of alcohol are associated with many diseases some of which include cancer and diabetes. Most chronic diseases are attracted to people with depressed moods (Gool et al ., 2007).

Social differences are related to the level of exercise engagement. From a research carried out to support ecological theory, it was seen that women who earned a lot of money engaged more in physical exercises while those with high level of education engaged less in physical exercises. In men, money and level of education did not affect the level of physical exercise. Among those who engaged in physical exercises, there were few blacks compared to whites (Grzywacz, 2001).

Experience determines the social approach to life. In young unmarried relationships, love is not much a commitment like in older people. How we live our lives is also determined by other factors, such as race, gender, ethnicity and environment. For example, some people marry early in life while others marry late. According to a psychologist Daniel Levinson, transition begins when one gets into adulthood. Moving away from parent’s residence marks a significant point of one’s life.

At around the age of 40 years, there is the midlife transition which is the second stage. In many people, it is characterized by midlife crisis. This is a stage where individuals feel that they have not made it in life according to the goals they had set for themselves. The stage is characterized with stress and this can have negative effects on the individual. The crisis can also be due to many responsibilities that a person gets, such as taking care of the children and the parents at the same time (Society, n.d.).

Activity Theory

Activity theory bases its argument on activity as a person continues to age. To have a healthy ageing process, one must continue doing many activities that he/she did while he/she was young. Alternatively, one can substitute these roles so as to maintain high body activity.

Activity theory argues that people who are active even in their old age live a more satisfying life than those who do not engage themselves in any activity. Many people who retire and become idle tend to get health problems compared to those who are involved in some activity (Bohl, 2010). The inactivity state can be caused by disease, environmnent, retirement and dependency on the children or other people.

There are also old people with sound health but they tend to be inactive. This is why this theory is opposed because even old people without any problem tend to remain inactive. They are said to be self imposed activity limitation which is “an incremental process of self determined, self initiated, and self reinforced constraints on physical, mental or social actions by a person who has control over a situation and the capacity of performing an action” (Guo & Philips, 2010, p. 358).

From a study, it was observed that older people who lived in isolation were at a higher risk of dying (Grzywacz, 2001). This necessitated the need for the elderly people to be involved in various activities. Social networks have been associated with positive effects on the elderly people making them to live longer. People who have remained active in their old age live longer than those who remain inactive (Grzywacz, 2001).

Activity theory has an implication in healthy lifestyle because research proves that activities are physical exercises and they help to improve the quality of life.

Disengagement Theory

According to disengagement theory by Cummings and Henry in 1961, as people get old, they tend to stop many activities that they used to engage in. The theory argues that old people cannot have the same desires as they used to have when they were young. Older people stop working; engage in less volunteer work, and less spouse hobbies.

Activities such as going to swim are left for the younger people. The society also separates the aged from the rest of the society. The old are taken to nursing homes and they are not given opportunities in employment. Old people in the world represent about 7% population which is more than 453 million people (Society, n.d.).

This theory was challenged because it was only effective when the society isolated the old people and prevented them from performing their duties. It was disapproved because research showed that most of the old people enjoyed being part of activities which are carried out in the society.

It showed that it helped majority of those people who were involved in activities. A research revealed that there were a fewer number of deaths in those people who did volunteer work than those who did not. Old people who live with their families have higher life expectancy than those who live in isolation. Involvement in social work of an old person develops the social ability. (Hinterlong, 2006) People who engage in learning activities have been seen to have lower number of visits to the hospitals.

Ecological Theory of Ageing

This theory explains that the ability of a person to cope with ageing depends more on his/her environment as well as the inner strength. There are environmental factors that are related with ageing: “interpersonal, psychological, familial, social network, community, institutional, societal and cultural as well as physical, ecological and historical” (Bandura, 1998, p., 29).

An Unfavorable environment does not encourage personal growth and can impair the functioning of a person’s body. This is influenced by the habitat in which he/she lives. The environment tends to determine the “social distance, intimacy, privacy, and other interpersonal processes” (Bandura, 1998, p. 30). An unfavorable environment leads a person to neglect him/herself in many ways such as the diet he/she takes and engaging in physical exercises.

Ecological theory is applicable in ones lifestyle because the environment determines the kind of lifestyle that a person lives. An environment can highly determine many physical exercises and the type of diet and other behaviors such as smoking.

Social Cognitive Theory

This theory explains that each person gets some patterns of behavior which are more determined by the inside person other than the environment. It upholds that people are responsible for their own behavior because, they are responsible for their motivation, behavior and development which are closely related to each other.

These behavioral patterns outcomes are not molded by the environment in which a person lives. A person is supposed to modify the environment and make it favorable. The environment includes social and physical environments.

The social environment is made up of the family, friends and people of the same age group. The physical environment refers to the place where one stays and the characteristics such as temperature, humidity, and the food a person eats. The environment is used to determine a person’s behavior in certain circumstances. In this theory, mental perception of environment affects a person’s behavior. The environment and behavior affects each other.

The theory explains how behaviors are coordinated in a person. They can be acquired through observation. When one acquires the skills to perform an action he/she is known to have behavioral capability. This theory also considers the expectations which are results that a particular behavior brings.

A rewarding behavior is likely to be reinforced, while a punishing behavior is eliminated. A person can also regulate his/her behaviors by having self control. There is also an emotional way that individuals behave to handle difficult emotional situations. This is used to know the best way to cope with difficulties (Twente, 2010).

Social cognitive theory is applicable because a person’s experience highly determines what kind of lifestyle they lead. Healthy habits such as engaging in physical exercises, encouraging happy moods and eating healthy diet result in a healthy lifestyle. It creates a good basis of research since ageing is determined by long term behaviors.

Taking a diet with a lot of vegetables, little salt, saturated fat and wine and engaging in physical exercises are a good way of increasing life expectancy. This kind of diet is beneficial because it eliminates cholesterol and lowers the blood pressure. Physical exercise and healthy nutrition reduces the risk of obesity. Excessive weight is related to complications such as, “ high blood pressure, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, obstructive sleep apnea, depression and osteoarthritis” (ADAM, 2010, p. 1).

Physical exercise is also important in that it helps to keep healthy and strong bones. In adulthood, men and women reach their peak bone mass by but it starts wearing out when one starts ageing. Women usually lose bone mass at a higher rate than men during menopause at the rate of 1-2%. Physical exercises such as running, jogging and cycling have been known to increase bone mass while preventing them from wearing out.

Physical exercises also reduce the risks of osteoporosis because it increases the strength of muscles, synchronization, flexibility and stability. Sufficient intake of calcium and vitamin D are also important in strengthening bones. It is therefore important for old people to get outside and have frequent exposure to sunshine other than remaining indoors throughout the day.

This reduces the incidences of Vitamin D deficiency. Those who have vitamin D deficiency can take vitamin D supplements. Strong bones reduce the risk of bone fractures. Fruits and vegetables help to maintain the bones in a healthy condition. Enough intake of vitamin A helps in normal growth of bones.

Older people have a challenge of being able to take food efficiently. Majority of old people live on drugs and this may cause poor health of their teeth. If the teeth are affected, a person’s ability to chew and taste the food decreases (Rahelu, 2009). Older people’s stomachs tend to accommodate small quantities of food which may be insufficient.

They also have increased cases of constipation especially if one does not include fruits and vegetables in the diet (Davies, 2011). Lack of strong teeth can determine the type of food a certain person is able to eat and may force him/her to eat. Healthy diet promotes healthy skin (Rahelu, 2009).

Mental health is enhanced by physical activities. It is more appropriate to engage in physical exercises than to use drugs for mental wellbeing. Social prescribing is helpful in maintaining mental health. It creates opportunities for people to engage in arts, creativity, physical exercises and adventures as well as learning new skills. When the mind is involved, it hardly gets depressed (Davies, 2011); “social support reduces vulnerability to stress” (Bandura, 1998, p. 5).

Healthy lifestyle increases the life expectancy of a person. Cigarette smoking reduces life expectancy but there are notable advantages of stopping to smoke cigarettes because it lowers the risks of occurrence of diseases which are caused by cigarette smoking e. g cancer.

Lifestyle drugs are taken by people to increase the value of life. The drugs are meant to enhance good appearance, physical and mental ability. They are not taken because a person is ailing from any disease. This is the reason why many physicians are faced with many challenging situations when healthy people demand for lifestyle drugs; which may have a negative effect on their health.

Lifestyle drugs are of two types: “Drugs approved for a specific lifestyle indication and drugs approved for specific indications but used for other purposes” (Harth, Seikowsky, & Hermes, 2009, p. 14). Old people tend to use them so as to appear younger.

A healthy lifestyle helps men to maintain high levels of testosterone hormone even in their old age. From a research which was based on men’s behaviors of smoking, diet and physical exercises there was a strong relationship of lifestyle and levels of testosterone. Those who had higher scores of lifestyle, i. e. had not smoked, engaged in physical exercises and were consistently taking healthy diets were found to have higher levels of testosterone (Yeap et al ., 2009).

Healthy lifestyle involves healthy diet, engaging in physical exercises and social and psychological health. Research on healthy lifestyle has shown many benefits. Encouraging people to live on healthy diet and engage on physical exercise has improved the quality of lives in many people.

Physical activities have also been beneficial because they prevent depression and loneliness increasing the social ability of individuals. Social factors such as staying with the family can influence the quality of life and the economic status in ageing, the effects of lifestyle drugs can be done. Abstaining from alcohol and cigarette smoking have shown a significant relationship with the quality of life led by old people. The age of giving birth in women is also crucial in determining the lifestyle of a woman.

A healthy lifestyle is determined by the friends that one has. Peer influence is one of the major reasons why young people engage in alcoholism taking and cigarette smoking. Many social groups tend to have people with common behaviors. Cigarette smokers and excessive alcoholics are at higher risks of depression (Gool et al ., 2007).

In women early motherhood has been associated with a decrease in life expectancy in many cases. Girls who give birth in their teenage mostly have lower social economic status which makes them have an unhealthy lifestyle. Their physical health is usually poorer and there is a higher rate of mortality. To start with early mothers get mentally affected because they get so much duties to perform which are beyond their strength.

They may drop out of school or have a lower perfomance in education compared to others. When their education is affected, the consequences are likely to be carried on to adulthood, because they do not get well paying jobs whereas they have the responsibility of taking care of the children. This causes depression which makes them vulnerable to many health complications (Henretta, Grundy, Okell, & Wadsworth, 2008).

Low social economic status cause people to take unhealthy diets, low physical activity and to engage in health deteriorating behaviors such as excessive alcoholism and cigarette smoking. These makes them prone to other diseases which reduce their quality of life in old age and low life expectancy.

From a reseach which was done on twins with different social economicc levels, it was revealed that white blood cell telomere was short in those of lower social economic groups. Lower social economic people were engaged in smoking, perfomed less physical exercises and majority were overweight (Cherkas et al ., 2006).

Promotion of health programs is the key factor to help in extension of life expectancy. Healthy lifestyle such as having adequate physical exercise and balanced diet, avoiding alcohol and cigarettes prevents occurrence of many diseases and thus increases the quality of life and life expectancy of life.

Nurses and healthcare providers should maximize education practices to people so as to deal with the increased cases of diseases in old people. Teaching them on healthy lifestyle is invaluable and can highly reduce the intake of drugs. More research could be done to determine how diet, lifestyle and ageing process relate to each other. This could determine the effectiveness of nutritional supplements.

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Gool et al . (2007). Associations Between Lifestyle and Depressed Mood:Longitudinal Results From the Maastricht Aging. American Journal of Public Health. 97. 5. , 887-894. From EBSCO host. Print.

Grzywacz, J. G. (2001). Social Inequalities and exercise during adulthood:Toward an ecological perspective. Jornal of Health and social behavior. 42.2 , 202. From EBSCO host. Print.

Guo, G., & Philips, L. R. (2010). Conceptualization and Nursing Implications of self Imposed Activity Limitation among community dwelling elders. Public Health Nursing. 27.4 , 353-361. From EBSCO host. Print.

Harth, W., Seikowsky, K., & Hermes, B. (2009). Lifestyle Drugs in old age. Gerontology. 55 , 13-25. From EBSCO host. Print.

Henretta, Grundy, Okell, & Wadsworth. (2008). Early Motherhood and Mental heaalth in midlife. Ageing & Mental Health. 12.5 , 605-614. From EBSCO host. Print.

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Essay on Life for Students and Children

500+ words essay on life.

First of all, Life refers to an aspect of existence. This aspect processes acts, evaluates, and evolves through growth. Life is what distinguishes humans from inorganic matter. Some individuals certainly enjoy free will in Life. Others like slaves and prisoners don’t have that privilege. However, Life isn’t just about living independently in society. It is certainly much more than that. Hence, quality of Life carries huge importance. Above all, the ultimate purpose should be to live a meaningful life. A meaningful life is one which allows us to connect with our deeper self.

Why is Life Important?

One important aspect of Life is that it keeps going forward. This means nothing is permanent. Hence, there should be a reason to stay in dejection. A happy occasion will come to pass, just like a sad one. Above all, one must be optimistic no matter how bad things get. This is because nothing will stay forever. Every situation, occasion, and event shall pass. This is certainly a beauty of Life.

Many people become very sad because of failures . However, these people certainly fail to see the bright side. The bright side is that there is a reason for every failure. Therefore, every failure teaches us a valuable lesson. This means every failure builds experience. This experience is what improves the skills and efficiency of humans.

Probably a huge number of individuals complain that Life is a pain. Many people believe that the word pain is a synonym for Life. However, it is pain that makes us stronger. Pain is certainly an excellent way of increasing mental resilience. Above all, pain enriches the mind.

The uncertainty of death is what makes life so precious. No one knows the hour of one’s death. This probably is the most important reason to live life to the fullest. Staying in depression or being a workaholic is an utter wastage of Life. One must certainly enjoy the beautiful blessings of Life before death overtakes.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How to Improve Quality of Life?

Most noteworthy, optimism is the ultimate way of enriching life. Optimism increases job performance, self-confidence, creativity, and skills. An optimistic person certainly can overcome huge hurdles.

Meditation is another useful way of improving Life quality. Meditation probably allows a person to dwell upon his past. This way one can avoid past mistakes. It also gives peace of mind to an individual. Furthermore, meditation reduces stress and tension.

Pursuing a hobby is a perfect way to bring meaning to life. Without a passion or interest, an individual’s life would probably be dull. Following a hobby certainly brings new energy to life. It provides new hope to live and experience Life.

In conclusion, Life is not something that one should take for granted. It’s certainly a shame to see individuals waste away their lives. We should be very thankful for experiencing our lives. Above all, everyone should try to make their life more meaningful.

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How to Write a Life Story Essay

Last Updated: April 14, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Alicia Cook . Alicia Cook is a Professional Writer based in Newark, New Jersey. With over 12 years of experience, Alicia specializes in poetry and uses her platform to advocate for families affected by addiction and to fight for breaking the stigma against addiction and mental illness. She holds a BA in English and Journalism from Georgian Court University and an MBA from Saint Peter’s University. Alicia is a bestselling poet with Andrews McMeel Publishing and her work has been featured in numerous media outlets including the NY Post, CNN, USA Today, the HuffPost, the LA Times, American Songwriter Magazine, and Bustle. She was named by Teen Vogue as one of the 10 social media poets to know and her poetry mixtape, “Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately” was a finalist in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 104,965 times.

A life story essay involves telling the story of your life in a short, nonfiction format. It can also be called an autobiographical essay. In this essay, you will tell a factual story about some element of your life, perhaps for a college application or for a school assignment.

Preparing to Write Your Essay

• If you are writing a personal essay for a college application, it should serve to give the admissions committee a sense of who you are, beyond the basics of your application file. Your transcript, your letters of recommendation, and your resume will provide an overview of your work experience, interests, and academic record. Your essay allows you to make your application unique and individual to you, through your personal story. [2] X Research source
• The essay will also show the admissions committee how well you can write and structure an essay. Your essay should show you can create a meaningful piece of writing that interests your reader, conveys a unique message, and flows well.
• If you are writing a life story for a specific school assignment, such as in a composition course, ask your teacher about the assignment requirements.

• Include important events, such as your birth, your childhood and upbringing, and your adolescence. If family member births, deaths, marriages, and other life moments are important to your story, write those down as well.
• Focus on experiences that made a big impact on you and remain a strong memory. This may be a time where you learned an important life lesson, such as failing a test or watching someone else struggle and succeed, or where you felt an intense feeling or emotion, such as grief over someone’s death or joy over someone’s triumph.

• Have you faced a challenge in your life that you overcame, such as family struggles, health issues, a learning disability, or demanding academics?
• Do you have a story to tell about your cultural or ethnic background, or your family traditions?
• Have you dealt with failure or life obstacles?
• Do you have a unique passion or hobby?
• Have you traveled outside of your community, to another country, city, or area? What did you take away from the experience and how will you carry what you learned into a college setting?

• Remind yourself of your accomplishments by going through your resume. Think about any awards or experiences you would like spotlight in your essay. For example, explaining the story behind your Honor Roll status in high school, or how you worked hard to receive an internship in a prestigious program.
• Remember that your resume or C.V. is there to list off your accomplishments and awards, so your life story shouldn't just rehash them. Instead, use them as a jumping-off place to explain the process behind them, or what they reflect (or do not reflect) about you as a person.

• The New York Times publishes stellar examples of high school life story essays each year. You can read some of them on the NYT website. [8] X Research source

Writing Your Essay

• For example, you may look back at your time in foster care as a child or when you scored your first paying job. Consider how you handled these situations and any life lessons you learned from these lessons. Try to connect past experiences to who you are now, or who you aspire to be in the future.
• Your time in foster care, for example, may have taught you resilience, perseverance and a sense of curiosity around how other families function and live. This could then tie into your application to a Journalism program, as the experience shows you have a persistent nature and a desire to investigate other people’s stories or experiences.

• Certain life story essays have become cliche and familiar to admission committees. Avoid sports injuries stories, such as the time you injured your ankle in a game and had to find a way to persevere. You should also avoid using an overseas trip to a poor, foreign country as the basis for your self transformation. This is a familiar theme that many admission committees will consider cliche and not unique or authentic. [11] X Research source
• Other common, cliche topics to avoid include vacations, "adversity" as an undeveloped theme, or the "journey". [12] X Research source

• Try to phrase your thesis in terms of a lesson learned. For example, “Although growing up in foster care in a troubled neighborhood was challenging and difficult, it taught me that I can be more than my upbringing or my background through hard work, perseverance, and education.”
• You can also phrase your thesis in terms of lessons you have yet to learn, or seek to learn through the program you are applying for. For example, “Growing up surrounded by my mother’s traditional cooking and cultural habits that have been passed down through the generations of my family, I realized I wanted to discover and honor the traditions of other, ancient cultures with a career in archaeology.”
• Both of these thesis statements are good because they tell your readers exactly what to expect in clear detail.

• An anecdote is a very short story that carries moral or symbolic weight. It can be a poetic or powerful way to start your essay and engage your reader right away. You may want to start directly with a retelling of a key past experience or the moment you realized a life lesson.
• For example, you could start with a vivid memory, such as this from an essay that got its author into Harvard Business School: "I first considered applying to Berry College while dangling from a fifty-food Georgia pine tree, encouraging a high school classmate, literally, to make a leap of faith." [15] X Research source This opening line gives a vivid mental picture of what the author was doing at a specific, crucial moment in time and starts off the theme of "leaps of faith" that is carried through the rest of the essay.
• Another great example clearly communicates the author's emotional state from the opening moments: "Through seven-year-old eyes I watched in terror as my mother grimaced in pain." This essay, by a prospective medical school student, goes on to tell about her experience being at her brother's birth and how it shaped her desire to become an OB/GYN. The opening line sets the scene and lets you know immediately what the author was feeling during this important experience. It also resists reader expectations, since it begins with pain but ends in the joy of her brother's birth.
• Avoid using a quotation. This is an extremely cliche way to begin an essay and could put your reader off immediately. If you simply must use a quotation, avoid generic quotes like “Spread your wings and fly” or “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’”. Choose a quotation that relates directly to your experience or the theme of your essay. This could be a quotation from a poem or piece of writing that speaks to you, moves you, or helped you during a rough time.

• Always use the first person in a personal essay. The essay should be coming from you and should tell the reader directly about your life experiences, with “I” statements.
• For example, avoid something such as “I had a hard time growing up. I was in a bad situation.” You can expand this to be more distinct, but still carry a similar tone and voice. “When I was growing up in foster care, I had difficulties connecting with my foster parents and with my new neighborhood. At the time, I thought I was in a bad situation I would never be able to be free from.”

• For example, consider this statement: "I am a good debater. I am highly motivated and have been a strong leader all through high school." This gives only the barest detail, and does not allow your reader any personal or unique information that will set you apart from the ten billion other essays she has to sift through.
• In contrast, consider this one: "My mother says I'm loud. I say you have to speak up to be heard. As president of my high school's debate team for the past three years, I have learned to show courage even when my heart is pounding in my throat. I have learned to consider the views of people different than myself, and even to argue for them when I passionately disagree. I have learned to lead teams in approaching complicated issues. And, most importantly for a formerly shy young girl, I have found my voice." This example shows personality, uses parallel structure for impact, and gives concrete detail about what the author has learned from her life experience as a debater.

• An example of a passive sentence is: “The cake was eaten by the dog.” The subject (the dog) is not in the expected subject position (first) and is not "doing" the expected action. This is confusing and can often be unclear.
• An example of an active sentence is: “The dog ate the cake.” The subject (the dog) is in the subject position (first), and is doing the expected action. This is much more clear for the reader and is a stronger sentence.

• Lead the reader INTO your story with a powerful beginning, such as an anecdote or a quote.
• Take the reader THROUGH your story with the context and key parts of your experience.
• End with the BEYOND message about how the experience has affected who you are now and who you want to be in college and after college.

Editing Your Essay

• For example, a sentence like “I struggled during my first year of college, feeling overwhelmed by new experiences and new people” is not very strong because it states the obvious and does not distinguish you are unique or singular. Most people struggle and feel overwhelmed during their first year of college. Adjust sentences like this so they appear unique to you.
• For example, consider this: “During my first year of college, I struggled with meeting deadlines and assignments. My previous home life was not very structured or strict, so I had to teach myself discipline and the value of deadlines.” This relates your struggle to something personal and explains how you learned from it.

• It can be difficult to proofread your own work, so reach out to a teacher, a mentor, a family member, or a friend and ask them to read over your essay. They can act as first readers and respond to any proofreading errors, as well as the essay as a whole.

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://education.seattlepi.com/write-thesis-statement-autobiographical-essay-1686.html
• ↑ https://study.com/learn/lesson/autobiography-essay-examples-steps.html
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201101/writing-compelling-life-story-in-500-words-or-less
• ↑ Alicia Cook. Professional Writer. Expert Interview. 11 December 2020.
• ↑ https://mycustomessay.com/blog/how-to-write-an-autobiography-essay.html
• ↑ https://www.ahwatukee.com/community_focus/article_c79b33da-09a5-11e3-95a8-001a4bcf887a.html
• ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/10/your-money/four-stand-out-college-essays-about-money.html
• ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY9AdFx0L4s
• ↑ https://www.medina-esc.org/Downloads/Practical%20Advice%20Writing%20College%20App%20Essay.pdf
• ↑ http://www.businessinsider.com/successful-harvard-business-school-essays-2012-11?op=1
• ↑ http://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/passive_sentences.htm

About This Article

A life story essay is an essay that tells the story of your life in a short, nonfiction format. Start by coming up with a thesis statement, which will help you structure your essay. For example, your thesis could be about the influence of your family's culture on your life or how you've grown from overcoming challenging circumstances. You can include important life events that link to your thesis, like jobs you’ve worked, friendships that have influenced you, or sports competitions you’ve won. Consider starting your essay with an anecdote that introduces your thesis. For instance, if you're writing about your family's culture, you could start by talking about the first festival you went to and how it inspired you. Finish by writing about how the experiences have affected you and who you want to be in the future. For more tips from our Education co-author, including how to edit your essay effectively, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Problem-solving matter

Life is starting to look a lot less like an outcome of chemistry and physics, and more like a computational process.

by David C Krakauer & Chris Kempes   + BIO

What makes computation possible? Seeking answers to that question, a hardware engineer from another planet travels to Earth in the 21st century. After descending through our atmosphere, this extraterrestrial explorer heads to one of our planet’s largest data centres, the China Telecom-Inner Mongolia Information Park, 470 kilometres west of Beijing. But computation is not easily discovered in this sprawling mini-city of server farms. Scanning the almost-uncountable transistors inside the Information Park, the visiting engineer might­ be excused for thinking that the answer to their question lies in the primary materials driving computational processes: silicon and metal oxides. After all, since the 1960s, most computational devices have relied on transistors and semiconductors made from these metalloid materials.

If the off-world engineer had visited Earth several decades earlier, before the arrival of metal-oxide transistors and silicon semiconductors, they might have found entirely different answers to their question. In the 1940s, before silicon semiconductors, computation might appear as a property of thermionic valves made from tungsten, molybdenum, quartz and silica – the most important materials used in vacuum tube computers.

And visiting a century earlier, long before the age of modern computing, an alien observer might come to even stranger conclusions. If they had arrived in 1804, the year the Jacquard loom was patented, they might have concluded that early forms of computation emerged from the plant matter and insect excreta used to make the wooden frames, punch cards and silk threads involved in fabric-weaving looms, the analogue precursors to modern programmable machines.

But if the visiting engineer did come to these conclusions, they would be wrong. Computation does not emerge from silicon, tungsten, insect excreta or other materials. It emerges from procedures of reason or logic.

This speculative tale is not only about the struggles of an off-world engineer. It is also an analogy for humanity’s attempts to answer one of our most difficult problems: life. For, just as an alien engineer would struggle to understand computation through materials, so it is with humans studying our distant origins.

Today, doubts about conventional explanations of life are growing and a wave of new general theories has emerged to better define our origins. These suggest that life doesn’t only depend on amino acids, DNA, proteins and other forms of matter. Today, it can be digitally simulated, biologically synthesised or made from entirely different materials to those that allowed our evolutionary ancestors to flourish. These and other possibilities are inviting researchers to ask more fundamental questions: if the materials for life can radically change – like the materials for computation – what stays the same? Are there deeper laws or principles that make life possible?

O ur planet appears to be exceptionally rare. Of the thousands that have been identified by astronomers, only one has shown any evidence of life. Earth is, in the words of Carl Sagan , a ‘lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark’. This apparent loneliness is an ongoing puzzle faced by scientists studying the origin and evolution of life: how is it possible that only one planet has shown incontrovertible evidence of life, even though the laws of physics are shared by all known planets, and the elements in the periodic table can be found across the Universe?

The answer, for many, is to accept that Earth really is as unique as it appears: the absence of life elsewhere in the Universe can be explained by accepting that our planet is physically and chemically unlike the many other planets we have formally identified. Only Earth, so the argument goes, produced the special material conditions conducive to our rare chemistry, and it did so around 4 billion years ago, when life first emerged.

Stanley Miller in his laboratory in 1970. Courtesy and © SIO Photographic Laboratory Collection, SAC 44, UC San Diego

In 1952, Stanley Miller and his supervisor Harold Urey provided the first experimental evidence for this idea through a series of experiments at the University of Chicago. The Miller-Urey experiment, as it became known, sought to recreate the atmospheric conditions of early Earth through laboratory equipment, and to test whether organic compounds (amino acids) could be created in a reconstructed inorganic environment. When their experiment succeeded, the emergence of life became bound to the specific material conditions and chemistry on our planet, billions of years ago.

Genetic evolution also involves problem-solving: insect wings solve the ‘problem’ of flight

However, more recent research suggests there are likely countless other possibilities for how life might emerge through potential chemical combinations. As the British chemist Lee Cronin , the American theoretical physicist Sara Walker and others have recently argued , seeking near-miraculous coincidences of chemistry can narrow our ability to find other processes meaningful to life. In fact, most chemical reactions, whether they take place on Earth or elsewhere in the Universe, are not connected to life. Chemistry alone is not enough to identify whether something is alive, which is why researchers seeking the origin of life must use other methods to make accurate judgments.

Today, ‘adaptive function’ is the primary criterion for identifying the right kinds of biotic chemistry that give rise to life, as the theoretical biologist Michael Lachmann (our colleague at the Santa Fe Institute) likes to point out. In the sciences, adaptive function refers to an organism’s capacity to biologically change, evolve or, put another way, solve problems. ‘Problem-solving’ may seem more closely related to the domains of society, culture and technology than to the domain of biology. We might think of the problem of migrating to new islands , which was solved when humans learned to navigate ocean currents, or the problem of plotting trajectories , which our species solved by learning to calculate angles, or even the problem of shelter, which we solved by building homes. But genetic evolution also involves problem-solving. Insect wings solve the ‘problem’ of flight. Optical lenses that focus light solve the ‘problem’ of vision. And the kidneys solve the ‘problem’ of filtering blood. This kind of biological problem-solving – an outcome of natural selection and genetic drift – is conventionally called ‘adaptation’ . Though it is crucial to the evolution of life, new research suggests it may also be crucial to the origins of life.

This problem-solving perspective is radically altering our knowledge of the Universe. Life is starting to look a lot less like an outcome of chemistry and physics, and more like a computational process.

T he idea of life as a kind of computational process has roots that go back to the 4th century BCE, when Aristotle introduced his philosophy of hylomorphism in which functions take precedence over forms. For Aristotle, abilities such as vision were less about the biological shape and matter of eyes and more about the function of sight. It took around 2,000 years for his idea of hylomorphic functions to evolve into the idea of adaptive traits through the work of Charles Darwin and others. In the 19th century, these naturalists stopped defining organisms by their material components and chemistry, and instead began defining traits by focusing on how organisms adapted and evolved – in other words, how they processed and solved problems. It would then take a further century for the idea of hylomorphic functions to shift into the abstract concept of computation through the work of Alan Turing and the earlier ideas of Charles Babbage.

In the 1930s, Turing became the first to connect the classical Greek idea of function to the modern idea of computation, but his ideas were impossible without the work of Babbage, a century before. Important for Turing was the way Babbage had marked the difference between calculating devices that follow fixed laws of operation, which Babbage called ‘Difference Engines’, and computing devices that follow programmable laws of operation, which he called ‘Analytical Engines’.

Using Babbage’s distinction, Turing developed the most general model of computation: the universal Turing Machine. In 1936, he imagined this machine much like a tape recorder, comprising a reading and erasing head fed with an infinitely long tape. As this tape passes through the machine, single bits of information (momentarily stored in the machine) are read or written onto it. Both machine and tape jointly determine which bit will be read or written next.

It can be difficult for outsiders to understand how these incommensurable ideas are connected to each other

Turing did not describe any of the materials out of which such a machine would be built. He had little interest in chemistry beyond the physical requirement that a computer store, read and write bits reliably. That is why, amazingly, this simple (albeit infinite) programmable machine is an abstract model of how our powerful modern computers work. But the theory of computation Turing developed can also be understood as a theory of life. Both computation and life involve a minimal set of algorithms that support adaptive function. These ‘algorithms’ help materials process information, from the rare chemicals that build cells to the silicon semiconductors of modern computers. And so, as some research suggests, a search for life and a search for computation may not be so different. In both cases, we can be side-tracked if we focus on materials, on chemistry, physical environments and conditions.

In response to these concerns, a set of diverse ideas has emerged to explain life anew, through principles and processes shared with computation, rather than the rare chemistry and early Earth environments simulated in the Miller-Urey experiment. What drives these ideas, developed over the past 60 years by researchers working in disparate disciplines – including physics, computer science, astrobiology, synthetic biology, evolutionary science, neuroscience and philosophy – is a search for the fundamental principles that drive problem-solving matter. Though researchers have been working in disconnected fields and their ideas seem incommensurable, we believe there are broad patterns to their research on the origins of life. However, it can be difficult for outsiders to understand how these seemingly incommensurable ideas are connected to each other or why they are significant. This is why we have set out to review and organise these new ways of thinking.

Their proposals can be grouped into three distinct categories, three hypotheses, which we have named Tron, Golem and Maupertuis. The Tron hypothesis suggests that life can be simulated in software, without relying on the material conditions that gave rise to Earth’s living things. The Golem hypothesis suggests that life can be synthesised using different materials to those that first set our evolutionary history moving. And, if these two ideas are correct and life is not bound to the rare chemistry of Earth, we then have the Maupertuis hypothesis, the most radical of the three, which explores the fundamental laws involved in the origins of complex computational systems.

These hypotheses suggest that deep principles govern the emergence of problem-solving matter, principles that push our understanding of modern physics and chemistry towards their limits. They mark a radical departure from life as we once knew it.

I n 1982, the science-fiction film Tron was released in the United States. Directed by Steven Lisberger, it told the story of biological beings perfectly and functionally duplicated in a computer program. The hero, Tron, is a human-like algorithm subsisting on circuits, who captures the essential features of living without relying on biotic chemistry. What we have called the ‘Tron hypothesis’ is the idea that a fully realised simulation of life can be created in software, freed from the rare chemistry of Earth. It asks what the principles of life might be when no chemical traces can be relied upon for clues. Are the foundations of life primarily informational?

Five years after Tron was first released in cinemas, the American computer scientist Christopher Langton introduced the world to a concept he called ‘artificial life’ or ‘ALife’ at a workshop he organised on the simulation of living systems. For Langton, ALife was a way of focusing on the synthesis of life rather than analytical descriptions of evolved life. It offered him a means of moving beyond ‘life as we know it’ to what he called ‘life as it could be’. The goal, in his own words , was to ‘recreate biological phenomena in alternative media’, to create lifelike entities through computer software.

Langton’s use of computers as laboratory tools followed the work of two mathematicians: Stanisław Ulam and John von Neumann, who both worked on the Manhattan Project. In the late 1940s, Ulam and von Neumann began a series of experiments on early computers that involved simulating growth using simple rules. Through this work, they discovered the concept of cellular automata, a model of computation and biological life. Ulam was seeking a way of creating a simulated automaton that could reproduce itself, like a biological organism, and von Neumann later connected the concept of cellular automata to the search for the origins of life. Using this concept, von Neumann framed life’s origins as Turing had earlier done with computation, by looking for the abstract principles governing what he called ‘construction’: ie, biological evolution and development. Complicated forms of construction build patterns of the kind that we associate with organismal life, such as cell growth, or the growth of whole individuals. A much simpler form of construction can be achieved on a computer using a copy-and-paste operation. In the 20th century, von Neumann’s insights about a self-replicating cellular automaton, a ‘universal constructor’, were deemed too abstract to help our understanding of life’s chemical origins. They also seemed to have little to say about biological processes such as adaptation and natural selection.

A computer program called Avida simulated evolutionary processes

The ALife research that followed the work of Ulam, von Neumann and Langton generated a slew of fascinating formal and philosophical questions. But, like the work of von Neumann, these questions have had a limited and short-lived impact on researchers actively working on the origins of life. At the end of the 20th century, several pioneers in ALife, including the American philosopher Mark Bedau, lamented the lack of progress on these questions in an influential paper titled ‘Open Problems in Artificial Life’. The unanswered problems identified by Bedau and his eight co-authors included generating ‘a molecular proto-organism in vitro’, achieving ‘the transition to life in an artificial chemistry in silico’, demonstrating ‘the emergence of intelligence and mind in an artificial living system’ and, among other things, evaluating ‘the influence of machines on the next major evolutionary transition of life’.

These open problems went unanswered, and this paper is coincident with the decline of the field. Following its publication, many of the authors embarked on different research careers, either jumping from artificial life into the adjacent field of evolutionary theory, or pursuing research projects involving chemistry rather than software and hardware.

Nevertheless, ALife produced some very sophisticated models and ideas. In the same year that Bedau and his colleagues identified problems, another group of researchers demonstrated the heights that artificial life had reached at the turn of the century. In their research paper ‘Evolution of Biological Complexity’ (2000), this group, led by the physics theorist Christoph Adami, wrote about a computer program called Avida that simulated evolutionary processes. ‘The Avida system,’ Adami and his co-authors wrote, ‘hosts populations of self-replicating computer programs in a complex and noisy environment, within a computer’s memory.’ They called these programs ‘digital organisms’, and described how they could evolve (and mutate) in seconds through programmed instructions. Each Avida organism was a single simulated genome composed of ‘a sequence of instructions that are processed as commands to the CPU of a virtual computer.’

A screenshot of the Avida software that simulates evolutionary processes. Courtesy Wikipedia

The Tron hypothesis seemed to hold promise. But, in the end, the work of Adami and others made more important contributions to population genetics and theoretical ecology rather than research on the origins of life. This work helped bridge fundamental theorems in computation with abstract biological concepts, such as birth, competition and death, but has not broken prebiotic chemistry’s hold over dominant conceptions of life.

In recent years, things have begun to change as new concepts from physics are expanding the standard Tron hypothesis. In 2013, the physicist David Deutsch published a paper on what he called ‘constructor theory’. This theory proposed a new way of approaching physics in which computation was foundational to the Universe, at a deeper level than the laws of quantum physics or general relativity. Deutsch hoped the theory would renovate dominant ideas in conventional physics with a more general framework that eliminated many glitches, particularly in relation to quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, while establishing a foundational status for computation. He also wanted to do all of this by providing a rigorous and consistent framework for possible and impossible transformations, which include phenomena like the movement of a body through space or the transition from a lifeless to a living planet. Constructor theory does not provide a quantitative model or offer predictions for how these transformations will happen. It is a qualitative framework for talking about possibility; it explains what can and can’t happen in the Universe in a way that goes beyond the laws of conventional physics. Deutsch’s theory is a provocative vision, and many questions remain about its utility.

Deutsch’s theory builds on von Neumann’s construction-replication model for life – the original Tron hypothesis – which in turn is built on Turing’s model of computation. Through Deutsch’s theory we begin moving away from principles of simulation as pursued through Avida organisms and silicon-based evolution, and head toward larger conceptual ideas about how life might form. Constructor theory, and other similar ideas, may be necessary for understanding the deeper origins of life, which conventional physics and chemistry have failed to adequately explain.

I t is one thing to simulate life or identify the principles inherent in these simulations. It is another thing to synthesise life. In comparison with life simulated through software, the Golem hypothesis states that a synthetic life-form can be built from novel chemical constituents different to those that gave rise to the complex forms of life on Earth. This hypothesis is named after a mythical being from Jewish folklore that lives and breathes despite being wholly made from inanimate materials, typically mud. Brought to life by inscribing its forehead with a magical word, such as emét (‘truth’ in Hebrew), the golem is a form of engineered life constructed from a process different from evolution. If Tron emphasises information, then the Golem emphasises energy – it’s a way of binding information to metabolism.

In the novel The Golem (1913-14), Gustav Meyrink wrote: ‘There is nothing mysterious about it at all. It is only magic and sorcery – kishuf – that frighten men; life itches and burns like a hairshirt.’ For our purposes, the golem is an analogy for synthetic life. It is a living thing grounded in generative mud, and an abstract representation of what is possible with synthetic biology and protocells.

In the early 21st century, interest in such ‘mud’ became more popular as the limitations of ALife inspired a renewed interest in the role of different kinds of materials and metabolism to those found on the prebiotic Earth. In 2005, the American chemists Steven A Benner and Michael Sismour described the two kinds of synthetic biologists who were working on problems of life: ‘One uses unnatural molecules to reproduce emergent behaviours from natural biology, with the goal of creating artificial life. The other seeks interchangeable parts from natural biology to assemble into systems that function unnaturally.’ If the latter are testing the Tron hypothesis, the former are testing the Golem hypothesis.

Assembly theory helps us understand how all the objects of chemistry and biology are made

One of the best examples of life-like synthetic biology is the creation of genetic systems in which synthetic DNA alphabets are supported by an engineered expansion of the Watson-Crick double-stranded base-pairing mechanism. This does not involve the creation of an alternative biochemistry in a laboratory but simply the chemical synthesis of an augmented, evolvable system. In fact, all successful efforts to date in synthetic biology derive from augmentation, not creation.

The Golem hypothesis raises important questions: if life can be made from materials unlike those that gave rise to life as we know it, what are the shared principles that give rise to all living things? What are the universal properties of life-supporting chemistry?

The recent development of assembly theory offers us a way to begin answering these questions. Assembly theory helps us understand how all the objects of chemistry and biology are made. Each complex object in the Universe, from microscopic algae to towering skyscrapers, is built from unique parts, involving combinations of molecules. Assembly theory helps us understand how these parts and objects are combined, and how each generation of complexity relies on earlier combinations. Because this theory allows us to measure the ‘assembly index’ of an object – how ‘assembled’ it is; how complex its parts are – we can make determinations about evolution that are separate from those normally used to define life.

In this framework, one can identify objects that are the outcome of an evolutionary process through the number of assembly steps that have been taken, without having a prior model or knowing the details of the process. The requirements are: first, that an object can be decomposed into building blocks; second, a minimal rule-set exists for joining blocks together; and third, sequences exist that describe the assembly of these building blocks into the object, where intermediate objects can be reused as new building blocks in the construction process. Very small assembly indices are characteristic of the pure physical and chemical dynamics that produce crystals or planets, but large indices in a large population of objects are taken as evidence for an evolutionary process – and a sign of life . In some ways, assembly theory is a version of the Golem hypothesis: through it we can potentially locate forms of life constructed from a process other than evolution. The idea is that a complex entity, such as a golem, requires a significant amount of time, energy and information to be assembled, and the assembly index is a measure of these requirements. This theory allows us to map certain computational concepts in such a way that we can find the shared signature of a problem-solving process.

The golem shows us how varied living materials are likely to be in the Universe, and how the focus on a limited set of materials is likely to be overly narrow. Assembly theory shows us how any historical process will leave universal imprints on materials, no matter how diverse those materials are.

T he Tron and Golem hypotheses are challenging and bold, but there are perhaps even more radical ideas about the origins of life. These ideas suggest that the emergence of complex computational systems (ie, life) in the Universe may be governed by deeper principles than we previously assumed. Organisms may have a more general objective than adaptation. What if life-forms arise not from a series of adaptive accidents, such as mutation and selection, but by attempting to solve a problem? We call this the Maupertuis hypothesis. It addresses how life might proliferate across the Universe even without the specific conditions found on Earth. So, what is this shared problem? The Maupertuis hypothesis suggests that, building on the second law of thermodynamics, life might be the Universe’s way of reaching thermodynamic equilibrium more quickly. It might be how the Universe ‘solves’ the problem of processing energy more effectively.

Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was an 18th-century French mathematician and philosopher who formulated the ‘principle of least action’, which explains the simple trajectories of light and physical objects in space and time. In both cases, nature reveals an economy of means: light follows the fastest path between two points; physical objects move in a way that requires the least energy. And so, according to what we are calling the Maupertuis hypothesis, life can also be understood in a similar way, as the minimisation or maximisation of certain quantities. Research into the origins of life can be thought of as a search for these quantities.

For example, evolution by natural selection is a process in which repeated rounds of survival cause dominant genotypes to encode more and more information about their environment. This creates organisms that seem to be maximising adaptive information while conserving metabolic energy. And, in the process, these organisms hasten the production of entropy in the Universe. It is possible to abstract this dynamic in terms of Bayesian statistics. From this perspective, a population of evolving organisms behaves like a sampling process, with each generation selecting from the possible range of genetic variants. Over many generations, the population can update its collective ‘knowledge’ of the world through repeated rounds of differential survival (or ‘natural selection’).

‘Free energy’ is a kind of measurement of uncertainty: the difference between a prediction and an outcome

This Bayesian thinking led to the free-energy principle, proposed by the neuroscientist Karl Friston in 2005. His principle has become foundational to what we are calling the Maupertuis hypothesis. Like constructor theory, the free-energy principle seeks to provide a unifying framework for all living systems. Friston’s principle extends ideas from Bayesian statistics (estimating parameters) and statistical mechanics (minimising cost functions) to describe any process of learning or adaptation, whether in humans, organisms or other living systems.

His framework seeks to explain how these living systems are driven to minimise uncertainty about their environment by learning to make better predictions. For Friston, ‘free energy’ is a kind of measurement of uncertainty: the difference between a prediction and an outcome. The larger the difference, the higher the free energy. In Friston’s framework, a living system is simply any dynamical system that can be shown to minimise free energy, to minimise uncertainty. A rock rolling down a hill is minimising potential energy but certainly not Fristonian free energy – rocks do not learn to make better predictions about their environments. However, a bacterium swimming along a nutrient gradient is minimising free energy as it extracts information from its environment to record the position of its food. A bacterium is like a rock that infers.

If one is willing to accept the idea that modelling the world – by extracting information and making inferences about the environment – is constitutive of life, then life should arise everywhere and rather effortlessly. Like the principle of least action, which underpins all theories in physics, Friston’s idea suggests that minimising free energy is the action supporting every candidate form of life. And this includes biological organisms, societies and technologies. From this perspective, even machine learning models such as ChatGPT are candidate life-forms because they can take action in the world (fill it with their texts), perceive these changes during training, and learn new internal states to minimise free energy.

A ccording to the Maupertuis hypothesis, living things are not limited to biological entities, but are, in a more general sense, machines capable of transmitting adaptive solutions to successive generations through the minimisation of free energy. Put another way, living things are capable of transmitting information from their past to their future. If that is true, then how do we define the boundaries of living things? What counts as an individual?

The information theory of individuality, developed by David Krakauer and colleagues from Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and collaborators from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig in 2020, addresses this question. Responding to ideas such as Friston’s free-energy principle, we proposed that there are more fundamental ‘individuals’ than the seemingly discrete forms of life around us. These individuals are defined by their ability to transmit adaptive information through time. We call them ‘Maupertuis particles’ for the way they play a role comparable to particles moving within fields in a physical theory – like a mass moving in a gravitational field. These individuals do not need to be biological. All they need to do is transmit adaptive solutions to successive generations.

Individuals are dynamical processes that encode adaptive information

Life relies on making copies, which progressively adjust to their environment with each new generation. In traditional approaches to the origin of life, mechanisms of replication are particularly important, such as the copying of a gene within a cell. However, replication can take many other forms. The copying of a gene within a cell is just chemistry’s way of approximating the broader informational function of Maupertuis particles. Even within biology, there are many kinds of individuals: viruses that outsource most of their replication machinery to host genomes, microbial mats in which horizontal gene-transfer erodes the informatic boundary of the cell, and eusocial insects where sterile workers support a fertile queen who produces future descendants. According to the information theory of individuality, individuals can be built from different chemical foundations. What matters is that life is defined by adaptive information. The Maupertuis hypothesis allows new possibilities for what counts as a living thing: new forms and degrees of individuality.

So how do we find these individuals? According to the information theory of individuality, individuals are dynamical processes that encode adaptive information. To understand how these might be discovered, consider how different objects in our Universe are detected at different wavelengths of light. Many features of life, such as the heat signatures of metabolic activity, become visible only at higher wavelengths. Others, such as carbon flux, are visible at lower wavelengths. In the same way, individuals are detected by different ‘informational frequencies’. Each life form possesses a different frequency-spectrum, with each type forming increasingly strong correlations in space (larger and larger adaptations) and time (longer and longer heredity). Even within the same chemical processes, multiple different individuals can be found depending on the choice of informational filter used. Consider a multicellular organism – a human being. Viewed at a distance (using a kind of coarse-grain filter), it is a single coordinated entity. However, viewed up close (using a fine-grain filter), this single entity is teeming with somewhat independent tissues, cells and proteins. There are multiple scales of individuality.

So, what is the shared goal of these proliferating individuals? As they each expend metabolic energy to ensure reliable information-propagation, they accelerate the production of environmental entropy. In this way, by sharing adaptive information, each individual indirectly hastens the heat death of the Universe. By solving small problems locally, life creates big problems globally.

I s life problem-solving matter? When thinking about our biotic origins, it is important to remember that most chemical reactions are not connected to life, whether they take place here or elsewhere in the Universe. Chemistry alone is not enough to identify life. Instead, researchers use adaptive function – a capacity for solving problems – as the primary evidence and filter for identifying the right kinds of biotic chemistry. If life is problem-solving matter, our origins were not a miraculous or rare event governed by chemical constraints but, instead, the outcome of far more universal principles of information and computation. And if life is understood through these principles, then perhaps it has come into existence more often than we previously thought, driven by problems as big as the bang that started our abiotic universe moving 13.8 billion years ago.

The physical account of the origin and evolution of the Universe is a purely mechanical affair, explained through events such as the Big Bang, the formation of light elements, the condensation of stars and galaxies, and the formation of heavy elements. This account doesn’t involve objectives, purposes, or problems. But the physics and chemistry that gave rise to life appear to have been doing more than simply obeying the fundamental laws. At some point in the Universe’s history, matter became purposeful. It became organised in a way that allowed it to adapt to its immediate environment. It evolved from a Babbage-like Difference Engine into a Turing-like Analytical Engine. This is the threshold for the origin of life.

In the abiotic universe, physical laws, such as the law of gravitation, are like ‘calculations’ that can be performed everywhere in space and time through the same basic input-output operations. For living organisms, however, the rules of life can be modified or ‘programmed’ to solve unique biological problems – these organisms can adapt themselves and their environments. That’s why, if the abiotic universe is a Difference Engine, life is an Analytical Engine. This shift from one to the other marks the moment when matter became defined by computation and problem-solving. Certainly, specialised chemistry was required for this transition, but the fundamental revolution was not in matter but in logic.

In that moment, there emerged for the first time in the history of the Universe a big problem to give the Big Bang a run for its money. To discover this big problem – to understand how matter has been able to adapt to a seemingly endless range of environments – many new theories and abstractions for measuring, discovering, defining and synthesising life have emerged in the past century. Some researchers have synthesised life in silico. Others have experimented with new forms of matter. And others have discovered new laws that may make life as inescapable as physics.

It remains to be seen which will allow us to transcend the history of our planet.

Published in association with the Santa Fe Institute, an Aeon Strategic Partner.

For more information about the ideas in this essay, see Chris Kempes and David Krakauer’s research paper ‘ The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life ’ (2021), and Sara Imari Walker’s book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (2024).

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My Decades-Long Journey to Curls

“My hair’s growth these years, much like mine, has been stunningly imperfect.”

When my daughter was 5—an age many parents will recognize as the peak of their children’s vulnerability to the Disney-industrial complex—she started asking me to straighten her beautiful curly hair. A girl in her Pre-K class had the sort of shiny cornsilk hair that is particularly appealing to young girls; a kind of hair my daughter ironically portmanteau’d into “belong” (blonde and long), and increasingly requested to emulate with each passing day.

“Your hair is beautiful the way it is, my love,” rolled out of my mouth with regularity, and I went about my days buying up little accoutrements that might support this thesis. An 18-by-24-inch poster of Diana Ross for her bedroom wall. Hot pink Denman brushes. Late ‘80s beaded hair ties from Goody, like the ones from my childhood, which slide swiftly out of straight hair but cling lovingly, assuringly, to textured hair.

Because yes, as a woman of biracial white and Afro-Caribbean lineage, my hair is also extremely curly. Not that my daughter would have known this at the time. The hours of labor and management that I put toward beating it into straight, limp submission each week masked even the slightest hint of texture, and she, who will be 11 this fall, had no idea that I had been performing this straightening ritual on myself since almost exactly her age.

Soon after she began asking for straightened hair, Tracee Ellis Ross launched the haircare line Pattern. Earlier that year, we had watched Mixed-ish together, a sort of TV-bonding attempt to help my daughter understand what it was like to grow up mixed race before the internet. As most people understandably do, she immediately fell in love with Ross, and I used this love as a springboard to playing with curly hair products. I ordered the entire line, I hung the marketing materials on her bedroom wall, and I showed her videos of grown women talking about their long journey to embracing and understanding their curls. It was, in its most innocuous form, a propaganda war on my part, fueled by a deep desire for my daughter to feel pride in her curls, her culture, the way her own hair grew out of her head.

Millimeter by millimeter, it grew back—first, with trepidation, clearly demonstrating an absolute lack of trust in my ability to just let it be.

I will always have time to take care of your hair , I told her, as we spent combined hours in the bathroom washing, detangling, leave-in-conditioning, gently drying, over and over. Your hair is beautiful exactly the way it is , I would say, and like most other things I say to her, I realized I was also talking to myself. And slowly—then very suddenly—she grew to love it.

When I was her age, on the cusp of my first relaxer appointment (after a hard won battle with my mom, a homeopath with a thick, majestic mane that even other white women envy), all I wanted to do was be free. My curls were variegated, heretic, like no one ever quite made a decision on what I was supposed to look like before they sent me to this earth. Caring for my hair had caused such discord in my relationship with my mother—and my own self image—that by the point we reached that salon chair I think we were both just trying to escape. I envisioned a result that would make white girls stop telling me my hair looked like Brillo and would finally transform me into the small Mariah Carey I knew myself to be. A butterfly, if you will.

It did not. Instead, it launched a many-decades-long, thankless side hustle of managing and maintaining my own hair to an obsessive degree. I gelled it to my head, pushed down the breakage, spent my after-school job money on product, and flat ironed every last drop of life out of it. I had neither escaped, nor was I free.

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I recently learned the term “presentism,” or the tendency to interpret past events through modern day values. It’s important to note that while many women still choose to relax their hair—and all people should feel free to do as they wish—in the mid-to-late ‘90s a regular relaxer, a blowout, and a flat iron, for many, felt like less of a choice and more of a foregone conclusion. It was not an indicator of self loathing as some love to call it today, it was a commonplace, practical, and fashionable solution. Through today’s eyes, when I remember emerging from the salon with fresh lye burns all over my scalp without batting an eye, I am horrified. But while I was in there, the other chairs were never empty. I was one of countless women with textured hair on a quest to flatten ourselves into a manageable oblivion.

When the natural hair movement started taking hold in the early 2010s, it did cross my mind that my hair was rehabilitatable, and I started experimenting with chopping off some of the lifeless inches at the ends. I considered the idea of going fully natural and all that it entailed: doing The Big Chop, switching up my products, making time and space to find out what my hair actually looked like after all these years. And shortly into this experimentation, I became pregnant with my daughter.

By the time she was born, any dream I had of having the time and space required to explore my natural hair disappeared when I unexpectedly became a solo parent. My weekly wash and straightening meant not having to think about my hair for the rest of the week, allowing me to work and care for a child. And I clung to that wash ritual extra hard, because that one moment each week was my single instance of self care. When everything around me felt very tenuous, there was a surety in the management of my hair. The routine was a life raft.

Two years ago, after successfully training my daughter to embrace and adore her curls, I was ready to let go. So much had happened in order to get me there, including blending families with my partner, which meant I found myself more resourced for time and support than I had ever been before as a parent.

At the start of that summer, I stopped all straightening and heat treatment, cold turkey. At first, there was not much difference; decades of abuse had trained my hair not to step out of line even if offered the chance. Millimeter by millimeter, it grew back—first, with trepidation, clearly demonstrating an absolute lack of trust in my ability to just let it be. I was irritated by how slowly it transformed, even though I realized that when you do nothing but beat something down for the majority of its natural born life it might take a while for it to feel safe enough to reveal its true self again. I realize now I was mostly irritated because its slow growth highlighted my sense of shame in how cruel I have been to my hair all these years.

So I stayed the course. I wish the story was that a few months later my hair became the sort of natural mane that dreams are made of. The process has been, at best, profoundly uncomfortable. Halting treatments on my hair opened the door to confront every insecure feeling I have ever had about my looks, some so vain and embarrassing that I felt like less of a person for even feeling them. In this process, I’ve felt messy and unprofessional, less sexy; like my cloud of hair takes up too much space, like I am not holding up my end of the bargain by having perfect straight hair or perfect curls, but rather some Frankenstein hybrid. I am still too chicken shit to do The Big Chop, and my hair is high maintenance. It demands attention, forethought, care.

Its growth these years, much like mine, has been stunningly imperfect.

In this process, I’ve felt messy and unprofessional, less sexy; like my cloud of hair takes up too much space, like I am not holding up my end of the bargain by having perfect straight hair or perfect curls, but rather some Frankenstein hybrid.

“Look under your straight hair, mommy!!” I started hearing. “You have beautiful curly hair, just like me!” This was my first summer of natural hair. We had arrived on the Amalfi Coast to some of the hottest humidity I’d experienced in my life, the air like soup, thick and boiling. In every year of my life prior, I would have been worried about sweating out my straight hair.

Stepping into the Tyrrhenian Sea was the only relief from the heat, and I waded out to my customary chest-deep position; preserving my straight hair has always been more important than submerging myself in water for recreational purposes. At this moment, I stood with my daughter clinging to me and edged out a little deeper, until it reached my neck, and a little deeper, until it lapped at my chin.

Then a wave came, submerging us both momentarily, and when we were above again, I laughed and wiped my face, my hair soaked. The next wave pulled us out, and we swam, fully submerged, the sea floor nowhere to be seen. The cool, salty water on my scalp felt otherworldly, like being incorporated into nature for the first time ever. The salt burned my eyes, my ears filled with water. I knew I would look a mess afterwards and for the first time in my life it did not matter to me at all.

Two years in, I am still uncomfortable, self-conscious, parading about trying to project a confidence I don’t honestly have. But something amazing has happened. My hair has begun to trust me. Now, down to my jaw, my original curls (all three patterns of them) are back, a little stronger and a little more insistent with every passing week. I’ve traded my heat tools for new gels, conditioners and oils, and I long for my weekly wash as a ritual the same way I used to long for the ritual of straightening.

I will always have time to take care of your hair , I tell myself, in my combined hours in the bathroom washing, detangling, leave-in-conditioning, gently drying, over and over. Your hair is beautiful exactly the way it is . And, years behind my own daughter, I have started to believe it.

This story appears in the 2024 Changemakers Issue of Marie Claire .

Anja Tyson is a twenty year fashion industry vet who specializes in developing purpose and values-driven businesses through communications, culture, and sustainability. In addition to her work in fashion, beauty and wellness, she sits on the advisory boards of non-profits involved in food justice and aid for families and children. She is a writer and a mother, and her mail gets delivered to Manhattan but her heart will always live in Brooklyn. 

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AP PHOTOS: Life continues for Ohio community after Trump falsely accused Haitians of eating pets

Alondra Nunez, left, and her sister Monserrat, second from right, sit with family members outside of The Market, where their brother owns the restaurant Chido’s Tacos, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024, in Springfield, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Karl Mattila, left, and his wife Linda, of Medway, Ohio, talk with Haitian and longtime Springfield resident Jacob Payen at Rose Goute Creole Restaurant in Springfield, Ohio, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

The sun sets behind St. Raphael Catholic church, which holds services in Creole for Haitian immigrants, in Springfield, Ohio, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

A Springfield police officer stands watch during a service in support of the Haitian community at St. Raphael Catholic church in Springfield, Ohio, Sunday, Sept. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Runners pass through Downtown Springfield, Ohio, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

A campaign sign for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz is seen in Downtown Springfield, Ohio, near the Springfield News Sun building, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

A political advertisement for Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump is painted on the side of an automotive business in Springfield, Ohio, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Springfield native Jaheim Almon, left, plays basketball with a group of neighbors in Springfield, Ohio, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Lifelong Springfield residents Lainey Bogard, left, Kelsey Fannon, center, and Kassidy Fannon sit on the front porch with their dog, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024, in Springfield, Ohio. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Kassidy Fannon stands on the front porch of her home in Springfield, Ohio, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

A man walks through Downtown Springfield, Ohio, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

A mural depicting Hattie Moseley, a Springfield Civil Rights activist who was instrumental in battling the segregation of Fulton Elementary School, is painted on the WesBanco building on East Main Street in Springfield, Ohio, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

Romane Pierre of Rose Goute Creole Restaurant in Springfield, Ohio, helps a line of customers, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

The sun rises over the city of Springfield, Ohio, Monday, Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

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SPRINGFIELD, Ohio (AP) — Their city has been in the eye of a political storm since former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance , falsely accused legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield of eating dogs and cats.

One consequence: a rash of hoax bomb threats that forced evacuations and closures of schools, government buildings and elected officials’ homes.

But the immigrants and their neighbors in this predominantly white, blue-collar city of about 60,000 have gone on with their lives – going for a run through downtown, shooting hoops with friends, gathering with family for supper at a food hall called The Market.

Some out-of-towners – seeking to show support for the Haitians – have joined locals in patronizing the Rose Goute Creole Restaurant, which features Haitian cuisine.

Undismayed by the far-flung political rancor, lifelong Springfield residents Kelsey Fannon and Kassidy Fannon sat happily on their front porch Monday evening, playing with their new puppy and celebrating how they had spent the day deep-cleaning their entire house.

Thousands of Haitian immigrants have settled in recent years in Springfield, where they have found work in factories and warehouses that were struggling to fill job openings. The sudden influx has strained schools, health care facilities and city services and driven up the cost of housing – but the mayor, civic leaders and local pastors have welcomed them.

I stayed in a $290-a-night glamping tent off the coast of Singapore to put the 'slow living' lifestyle to the test

• On a recent trip to Lazarus Island in Singapore, I spent a night in a luxury glamping tent.
• A one-night stay at Into the Woods was $290. BI covered the cost of my trip.
• I initially felt restless but grew to enjoy the concept of slow living.

As a city dweller, there's one thing that's difficult for me to do: rest.

But on a three-day trip to Lazarus Island, a small island five miles from Singapore , I was forced to slow down. I spent one night in a glamping tent on the beach.

Launched in February, Into the Woods is an accommodation that promotes slow living. My stay in the tent was 380 Singapore dollars, or $290.

Ray Lee and Sam Wong, the cofounders of Into the Woods and a married couple, said they wanted to create a space for people to relax without worrying about following an itinerary and filling their days with activities.

The founders had enjoyed camping with their kids while living abroad in the US and Australia. Despite having no hospitality or real estate background, they were eager to start something similar in Singapore.

During the pandemic, they chanced upon a government initiative to promote sustainable tourism on Lazarus Island. Lee and Wong ended up winning a three-year tender to open Into the Woods on Lazarus Island in March 2023. The couple estimates that they've invested almost $800,000 in the project — half of which was from their personal savings.

"We want guests to go home with the feeling of, 'It feels like I didn't do anything, but I feel like I achieved everything,'" Wong told me.

Can it be fulfilling to do nothing? I was about to find out.

I stayed at Into the Woods on a Sunday night in August

Upon reaching Lazarus, a staff member picked me up from the pier in a buggy. We drove past a resort that consists of tiny houses — the only other accommodation on the island, and where I spent the following night — past the island's sole convenience store and reached the glamping tents on Lazarus Beach a few minutes later.

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There are nine tents, including six that can sleep two guests and three that can sleep up to four. The tents are fully air-conditioned and perched just a couple feet from the water.

This was no ordinary tent.

It fits a queen-sized bed, a cooking station with a microwave and fridge, and has hardwood floors. The space also included essentials for a day at the beach, from a mat to complimentary snacks and a beach bag.

Slow living on the island

After unpacking, I stepped out to the beach to explore. But apart from trying stand-up paddling on the island's only water sports center, there was little to do. So, this is slow living, I thought.

I sat on the beach and took in the surroundings. It was almost 5 p.m., and the beach was full of life. Teenagers blasted pop music on their portable speakers, young kids built sand castles, and dogs ran free on the sand.

At around 6 p.m., the last ferry left the island, and apart from the sound of the waves crashing softly into the sand, the beach turned quiet. At that moment, it felt surreal; Singapore has one of the highest population densities in the world. It was strangely comforting to have such an expansive space to myself — well, and the 10 other guests on the beach.

With nowhere to eat on the island, guests can cook their own meals or pack food. I pre-ordered a barbecue meat set for around $52 from the island's convenience store. It came with enough for two to three people and included a spread of meat skewers and sausages, along with mac and cheese and otah, a grilled fishcake dish.

It was a rare opportunity to cook my own food by the beach, so I took the time to savor each bite and take in the surroundings.

As guests are encouraged to wash their own dishes, I put the dirty cutlery and pans aside to haul to the communal kitchen sink the next morning.

With no TV and a spotty internet connection, I was left to my own devices to figure out how to spend the rest of my evening. Thankfully, each room has a doodle book and reflection journal, and I was grateful for the opportunity to engage in some self-reflection.

That night, instead of the latest Netflix series droning in the background, the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore lulled me into a deep sleep.

The next morning, the beach was still empty

I spotted a couple who brought their Maltipoo and a Toy Poodle for a hassle-free getaway.

"Even though we have WiFi here, I don't feel like working or checking emails," Peiling Kong, a financial consultant in her 30s, said.

"It's a perfect place to escape from the hustle and bustle of city life," she added.

Kong is not alone in her desire to get away. Interest in luxury glamping experiences has grown after the pandemic, Mike Harlow, the general manager of the luxury travel agency Scott Dunn, told me after I returned from the trip.

"Being in highly stressed environments, usually at work, we're definitely seeing people want to experience more expansive landscapes, be more in nature, and get away from the hustle and bustle of busy tourist destinations," he said.

Glamping has gained popularity in Singapore over the past few years, with several companies offering services to set up tents on beaches and public parks. Mandai Wildlife Reserve, which manages zoos in Singapore, even offers zoo-goers the opportunity to try glamping in the wild by a lake in Singapore Zoo or by a penguin enclosure in its bird park — for around $1,300 per tent.

In the US, hotel chains have also been getting in on the action. Earlier this year, Hilton announced a partnership with AutoCamp, that allows members to use Hilton Honors points to book luxury campgrounds. Similarly, World of Hyatt members can spend points at certain Mr and Mrs Smith's properties — which include several glamping resorts around the world.

The toilet hike lacked luxury

Although the comfy beds and air-conditioned space offered an upscale camping experience, other aspects of the stay didn't feel as luxurious.

The tents, for example, did not include an en-suite toilet. Guests have to share a communal toilet a three-minute walk away. It's no hardship, but it is an inconvenience — especially at the resort's price point.

"It reminds me of my army days," a guest in his 50s jokingly told me.

When I returned from my trip, the cofounders told me they could not build en-suite toilets due to cost and time constraints. They said Lazarus Island is a "light-touch" destination, so they didn't want to disrupt its natural state by installing pipes and setting up a sewage system.

Overall, Into the Woods is a great option for those who want to try camping in Singapore without roughing it out outdoors. Just don't expect the luxury experience you'll get at a five-star hotel .

Sure, there wasn't much to do. But that was the point — I left feeling recharged and ready to return to city life.

Business Insider covered the cost of the author's stay.

Watch: Inside the most expensive neighborhoods of Singapore, home to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew

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Guest Essay

The Real Reason the Harris Twang Is Driving Republicans Crazy

By Elizabeth Spiers

Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

As is the case for many people who grew up in the Deep South but have lived somewhere else for many years, the Southern accent I once had has given way to the “nowhere man” accent that I think of as generically American. But it comes roaring back when I visit my family in central Alabama, and even lingers for a few days after I have returned to Brooklyn. It’s also a little more pronounced after a martini (or two).

No one gets offended when my Southern accent comes and goes. For Kamala Harris, it’s a different story. Figures on the political right, including JD Vance , Donald Trump and various conservative internet celebrities , have accused Ms. Harris of affecting a Southern accent on the campaign trail, and implied that it was a kind of deception.

Ms. Harris, who is not from the South, wasn’t using a Southern accent, though. As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English . There’s nothing unusual about her using Black English because to state the obvious (to everyone except Donald Trump, apparently) Ms . Harris is Black .

So what’s really bothering Republicans? The answer has nothing to do with linguistic purity. It has everything to do with cultural stereotypes — and electoral math.

Studies show that people with Southern accents are often regarded as less intelligent, even by people who have those accents themselves. It’s a learned bias that begins at a young age . There’s also a class bias; people associate deeper Southern accents with lower income, an impression that can translate into wage discrimination and fewer opportunities for professional advancement — one of many reasons people with accents may work consciously to eliminate them.

When the speaker is white, some people hear a Southern accent as a marker of racism or other forms of intolerance. “The South did not invent racism,” the country musician B.J. Barham recently told me, “but every single racist thing you’ve ever seen said in the movie usually comes with this accent.” For Mr. Barham, who has very progressive views and a deep North Carolina twang, the result is that fans who have heard his voice and seen his camo hat sometimes assume he has a certain set of political views — then get upset when they realize he’s playing a song about the dangers of toxic masculinity or about abortion rights.

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