No, if you live your real life doing things in a certain way that is a real lifestyle which actually exists by virtue of that fact.
Being consciously pursued does not make it some kind of fiction, and if someone writes in a book that it does it doesn’t change that the ways real people actually live their lives are, ipso facto, real lifestyles that exist, it just means the book is wrong.
(It may be pursued out of nostalgia or yearning for a past, foreign, or imagined lifestyle that no longer exists, cannot exist in the immediate local conditions, or never existed, and may not acheive the goals for which it is pursued, which may especially be true if those goals are things that the model lifestyle achieved for reasons related to aspects that are not replicated or of the context of the model lifestyle which are not present in the context of the real and present one, but that’s a different issue from whether the lifestyle is, in fact, a real one which exists.)
For example, Baudrillard talks about the fact that the second a primitive society is discovered and efforts are made to ensure they are undisturbed and stay stuck in their primitive culture, that culture is now simulacral. (From SAS: "Of course, these savages are posthumous: frozen, cryogenized, sterilized, protected to death, they have become referential simulacra, and science itself has become pure simulation.")
>someone writes in a book that it does it doesn’t change that the ways real people actually live their lives are, ipso facto, real lifestyles that exist, it just means the book is wrong
I'm not making normative statements about your lifestyle, I'm clarifying terminology that's very very specific to the book Simulacra and Simulation, written by Baudrillard, which is what this post is about. If you want to use a different meaning for simulacrum than Baudrillard's, then that's fine, but it would be helpful to define it.
Not yet, I will put it on my book backlog.
> Even the idea of trying to chase more off line unmediated experiences is a simulacral objective, an attempt at simulating a lifestyle that doesn't really exist now.
100% agree. It is a tenuous balance. I try to see it as figuring out which mediated experiences are life-giving/neutral vs trying to recreate a past that is gone. Sometimes that involves plenty of tech (Death Stranding 2!) and sometimes it involves avoiding short-form videos entirely.
It's very good but be warned that it's very much written in the continental philosophy style, so it can come across as inscrutable to people not used to French 20th century philosophy at times.
>vs trying to recreate a past that is gone
The real challenge is that sometimes it's like this, which a simulation. But sometimes we're trying to recreate a past that never existed, and that's when it becomes simulacral.
