Social
Living organisms including humans are social when they live collectively in interacting populations, whether they are aware of it, whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary. The word "Social" derives from the Latin word socii, it is derived from the Italian Socii states, historical allies of the Roman Republic. In the absence of agreement about its meaning, the term "social" is used in many different senses and regarded as a concept, referring among other things to: Attitudes, orientations, or behaviors which take the interests, intentions, or needs of other people into account has played some role in defining the idea or the principle. For instance terms like social realism, social justice, social constructivism, social psychology, social anarchism and social capital imply that there is some social process involved or considered, a process, not there in regular, "non-social" realism, constructivism, anarchism, or capital; the adjective "social" is used in politics, although its meaning in a context depends on, using it.
In left-wing circles it is used to imply a liberal characteristic, while in right-wing circles it is used to imply a conservative characteristic. This adjective is used much more by those on the political left than by those on the political right. For these reasons, those seeking to avoid association with the left-right political debates seek to label their work with phrases that do not include the word "social". An example is quasi-empiricism in mathematics, sometimes labelled social constructivism by those who see it as an unwarranted intrusion of social considerations in mathematical practice. In the view of Karl Marx, human beings are intrinsically and by definition social beings who, beyond being "gregarious creatures", cannot survive and meet their needs other than through social co-operation and association, their social characteristics are therefore to a large extent an objectively given fact, stamped on them from birth and affirmed by socialization processes. By contrast, the sociologist Max Weber for example defines human action as "social" if, by virtue of the subjective meanings attached to the action by individuals, it "takes account of the behavior of others, is thereby oriented in its course".
The term "socialism", used from the 1830s onwards in France and the United Kingdom, was directly related to what was called the social question. In essence, early socialists contended that the emergence of competitive market societies did not create "liberty and fraternity" for all citizens, requiring the intervention of politics and social reform to tackle social problems and grievances; the term "socialist" was used interchangeably with "co-operative", "mutualist", "associationist" and "collectivist" in reference to the organization of economic enterprise socialists advocated, in contrast to the private enterprise and corporate organizational structures inherent to capitalism. The modern concept of socialism evolved in response to the development of industrial capitalism; the "social" in modern "socialism" came to refer to the specific perspective and understanding socialists had of the development of material, economic forces and determinants of human behavior in society. It denoted the perspective that human behavior is determined by a person's immediate social environment, that modes of social organization were not supernatural or metaphysical constructs but products of the social system and social environment, which were in turn products of the level of technology/mode of production, were therefore changing.
Social and economic systems were thus not the product of innate human nature, but of the underlying form of economic organization and level of technology in a given society, implying that human social relations and incentive-structures would change as social relations and social organization changes in response to improvements in technology and evolving material forces. This perspective formed the bulk of the foundation for Karl Marx's materialist conception of history. In contemporary society, "social" refers to the redistributive policies of the government which aim to apply resources in the public interest, for example. Policy concerns include the problems of social exclusion and social cohesion. Here, "social" contrasts with "private" and to the distinction between the public and the private spheres, where ownership relations define access to resources and attention; the social domain is also contrasted with that of physical nature, but in sociobiology analogies are drawn between humans and other living species in order to explain social behavior in terms of biological factors.
The term "social" is added in various other academic sub-disciplines such as social geography, social psychology, social anthropology, social philosophy, social ontology, social statistics and social choice theory in mathematics. Social media Sociology Social network Social neuroscience Social psychology Social skills Social support Social undermining Social Work Dolwick, JS. 2009. The'Social' and Beyond: Introducing Actor Network Theory, article examining different meanings of the concept'social'
Ethics
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value, thus comprises the branch of philosophy called axiology. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil and wrong, virtue and vice and crime; as a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, value theory. Three major areas of study within ethics recognized today are: Meta-ethics, concerning the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions, how their truth values can be determined Normative ethics, concerning the practical means of determining a moral course of action Applied ethics, concerning what a person is obligated to do in a specific situation or a particular domain of action The English word "ethics" is derived from the Ancient Greek word ēthikós, meaning "relating to one's character", which itself comes from the root word êthos meaning "character, moral nature".
This was borrowed into Latin as ethica and into French as éthique, from which it was borrowed into English. Rushworth Kidder states that "standard definitions of ethics have included such phrases as'the science of the ideal human character' or'the science of moral duty'". Richard William Paul and Linda Elder define ethics as "a set of concepts and principles that guide us in determining what behavior helps or harms sentient creatures"; the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy states that the word "ethics" is "commonly used interchangeably with'morality'... and sometimes it is used more narrowly to mean the moral principles of a particular tradition, group or individual." Paul and Elder state that most people confuse ethics with behaving in accordance with social conventions, religious beliefs and the law and don't treat ethics as a stand-alone concept. The word ethics in English refers to several things, it can refer to philosophical ethics or moral philosophy—a project that attempts to use reason to answer various kinds of ethical questions.
As the English philosopher Bernard Williams writes, attempting to explain moral philosophy: "What makes an inquiry a philosophical one is reflective generality and a style of argument that claims to be rationally persuasive." Williams describes the content of this area of inquiry as addressing the broad question, "how one should live". Ethics can refer to a common human ability to think about ethical problems, not particular to philosophy; as bioethicist Larry Churchill has written: "Ethics, understood as the capacity to think critically about moral values and direct our actions in terms of such values, is a generic human capacity." Ethics can be used to describe a particular person's own idiosyncratic principles or habits. For example: "Joe has strange ethics." Meta-ethics is the branch of philosophical ethics that asks how we understand, know about, what we mean when we talk about what is right and what is wrong. An ethical question pertaining to a particular practical situation—such as, "Should I eat this particular piece of chocolate cake?"—cannot be a meta-ethical question.
A meta-ethical question is abstract and relates to a wide range of more specific practical questions. For example, "Is it possible to have secure knowledge of what is right and wrong?" is a meta-ethical question. Meta-ethics has always accompanied philosophical ethics. For example, Aristotle implies that less precise knowledge is possible in ethics than in other spheres of inquiry, he regards ethical knowledge as depending upon habit and acculturation in a way that makes it distinctive from other kinds of knowledge. Meta-ethics is important in G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica from 1903. In it he first wrote about. Moore was seen to reject naturalism in his Open Question Argument; this made. Earlier, the Scottish philosopher David Hume had put forward a similar view on the difference between facts and values. Studies of how we know in ethics divide into non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivism is the view that when we judge something as morally right or wrong, this is neither true nor false. We may, for example, be only expressing our emotional feelings about these things.
Cognitivism can be seen as the claim that when we talk about right and wrong, we are talking about matters of fact. The ontology of ethics is about value-bearing things or properties, i.e. the kind of things or stuff referred to by ethical propositions. Non-descriptivists and non-cognitivists believe that ethics does not need a specific ontology since ethical propositions do not refer; this is known as an anti-realist position. Realists, on the other hand, must explain what kind of entities, properties or states are relevant for ethics, how they have value, why they guide and motivate our actions. Normative ethics is the study of ethical action, it is the branch of ethics that investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking. Normative ethics is distinct from meta-ethics because normative ethics examines standards for the rightness and wrongness of actions, while meta-ethics studies the meaning of moral language and the metaphysics of moral facts.
Normative ethics is distinct from descriptive ethics, as the latter is an empirical investigation of people's moral beliefs. To put it another way, descriptive ethics would be concerned with determining what proportion of people believe th
England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles"; the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; the earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used; the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
Bondage positions and methods
Over the course of BDSM activities, a number of bondage positions and methods may be used. Ropes are the most common elements of these positions, although straps, chains, manacles, spreader bars, various gags and monogloves may be used; the ball tie is a bondage position in which a person is bound into a ball position. A ball position is one. Pressing the thighs against the abdomen may restrict breathing; the hands may be tied either in front or behind the back, however behind the back is more typical. If behind, there may be elbow bondage, or the arms may be in a reverse prayer position, with ropes round the arms and torso to hold the arms against the back. If in front, the arms may be tied hugging the legs, or with each wrist bound to the opposite elbow; the ankles may be tied together, as well as the knees. The ankles are tied to the thighs in a frogtie, unlike the image at right. Sometimes the bound person wears high-heeled shoes and has ropes wrapped round the heels and fixed to the wrists.
This should only be used as a supplement to other secure bondage. When tied this way the shoes cannot be removed; the head may be pulled back in some way, such as in head bondage. However, some purists argue. Alternatively, the head can be pulled forward to force the chin to press against the chest; the position is both stringent and stimulating. At the same time it is a comfortable position so that the subject may remain in it for quite some time; the ball tie is one of the positions possible in self-bondage, but mobility is so limited that several independent escape mechanisms should be used, in addition to the usual bondage safety advice. Breast bondage is a bondage technique which involves the tying of rope around a woman's breasts in a visually intricate and decorative pattern. Breast bondage most uses rope, but webbing, straps or a harness may be used. Breast bondage focuses on the decorative and erotic aspects of the result, not on immobilization of the female subject. However, breast bondage can be combined with other techniques which restrict the subject's mobility and can provide securing points for other bondage plays, such as crotch rope and breast torture.
Breast bondage can be applied over clothing or directly to the skin, can be worn under clothing or in full view. 1/4 inch rope, ribbon, or leather straps can be used. The basic breast bondage technique involves tying ropes around the base of the breasts, causing them to bulge outwards; the same rope is used for both breasts so that the rope harness is automatically held together at the front. The rope may also be fixed behind the back, to make a sort of bra. Another technique is to put a rope around the torso just above the breasts, another one just below them push the ropes together to squeeze the breasts from the top and bottom; this can be done instead as well as, the other method. A rope can be passed over the shoulders and between the breasts, drawing the rope above and below the breasts together pass back over the shoulders to the knots at the back; the primary rope can be used to place cinches between the body. Shinju is a euphemism to refer to the binding of female breasts, it has been popularly claimed that "shinju" is an authentic Japanese term for a "bikini harness".
However, no such tie called a "shinju" is found in present kinbaku. The basic or foundational kinbaku form of binding the arms and breasts is known as the Ushiro Takatekote; this basic box arm tie found in the samurai martial art of hojōjutsu or Nawajutsu, evolved into its erotic usage at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, is foundational to most other kinbaku ties. Sometimes, breast bondage is combined with other bondage techniques. For example, the woman's arms can be tied behind her back, in an elbow or box tie or in a reverse prayer position; when combined with breast bondage, bound arms force the woman's chest and breasts to protrude further. When combining breast and arm bondage, the ropes can draw the ropes above and below the breasts together at the sides of the breasts as they pass under the shoulders and behind the neck, thus resulting in rope surrounding the breasts; when bound, other BDSM tools such as nipple clamps can be used. Breast bondage can play an integral part in suspension bondage.
If the subject is being suspended in a horizontal position such as a suspended hogtie, breast bondage is used as the main supporting area under the chest. A crotch rope is a bondage technique which involves the tying of rope around a woman's waist, passed between the labia to apply painful or pleasurable pressure to the female genitals. Crotch rope most uses hemp or jute rope, but webbing, straps or a harness may be used, it can be combined with every other bondage position mentioned in this article. A crotch rope may be tied over clothing or directly onto the skin, can be worn under clothing or in full view. While crotch ropes are most intended for women, specific variations exist for males. A crotch rope can be used as an unsophisticated type of chastity belt. Ty
English law
English law is the common law legal system of England and Wales, comprising criminal law and civil law, each branch having its own courts and procedures. England's most authoritative law is statutory legislation, which comprises Acts of Parliament, regulations and by-laws. In the absence of any statutory law, the common law with its principle of stare decisis forms the residual source of law, based on judicial decisions and usage. Common law is made by sitting judges who apply both statutory law and established principles which are derived from the reasoning from earlier decisions. Equity is the other historic source of judge-made law. Common law can be repealed by Parliament. Not being a civil law system, English law has no comprehensive codification. However, most of its criminal law has been codified from its common law origins, in the interests both of certainty and of ease of prosecution. For the time being, murder remains a common law crime rather than a statutory offence. Although Scotland and Northern Ireland form part of the United Kingdom and share Westminster as a primary legislature, they have separate legal systems outside of English Law.
International treaties such as the European Union's Treaty of Rome or the Hague-Visby Rules have effect in English law only when adopted and ratified by Act of Parliament. Adopted treaties may be subsequently denounced by executive action.. Unless the denouncement or withdraw would affect rights enacted by parliament. In this case executive action cannot be used due to the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty; this principle was established in the case of Miller v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union in 2017. Criminal law is the law of punishment whereby the Crown prosecutes the accused. Civil law is concerned with tort, families, companies and so on. Civil law courts operate to provide a party who has an enforceable claim with a remedy such as damages or a declaration. In this context, civil law is the system of codified law, prevalent in Europe. Civil law is founded on the ideas of Roman Law. By contrast, English law is the archetypal common law jurisdiction, built upon case law.
In this context, common law means the judge-made law of the King's Bench. Equity is concerned with trusts and equitable remedies. Equity operates in accordance with the principles known as the "maxims of equity"; the reforming Judicature Acts of the 1880s amalgamated the courts into one Supreme Court of Judicature, directed to administer both law and equity. The neo-gothic Royal Courts of Justice in The Strand, were built shortly afterwards to celebrate these reforms. Public Law is the law governing relationships between the state. Private law encompasses relationships between other private entities. A remedy is "the means given by law for the recovery of a right, or of compensation for its infringement". Most remedies are available only from the court. Most civil actions claiming damages in the High Court were commenced by obtaining a writ issued in the Queen's name. After 1979, writs have required the parties to appear, writs are no longer issued in the name of the Crown. Now, after the Woolf Reforms of 1999 all civil actions other than those connected with insolvency, are commenced by the completion of a Claim Form as opposed to a Writ, Originating Application, or Summons.
In England, there is a hierarchy of sources, as follows: Legislation The case law rules of common law and equity, derived from precedent decisions Parliamentary conventions General Customs Books of authority Primary legislation in the UK may take the following forms: Acts of Parliament Acts of the Scottish Parliament Acts and Measures of the National Assembly for Wales Statutory Rules of the Northern Ireland AssemblyOrders in Council are a sui generis category of legislation. Secondary legislation in England includes: Statutory Instruments and Ministerial Orders Bye-laws of metropolitan boroughs, county councils, town councilsStatutes are cited in this fashion: "Short Title Year", e.g. Theft Act 1968; this became the usual way to refer to Acts from 1840 onwards. For example, the Pleading in English Act 1362 was referred to as 36 Edw. III c. 15, meaning "36th year of the reign of Edward III, chapter 15".. Common law is a term with historical origins in the legal system of England, it denotes, in the first place, the judge-made law that developed from the early Middle Ages as described in a work published at the end of the 19th century, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, in which Pollock and Maitland expanded the work of Coke and Blackstone.
The law developed in England's Court of Common Pleas and other common law courts, which became the law of the colonies settled under the crown of England or of the United Kingdom, in North America and elsewhere.
Classical liberalism
Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties under the rule of law with an emphasis on economic freedom. Related to economic liberalism, it developed in the early 19th century, building on ideas from the previous century as a response to urbanisation and to the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States. Notable individuals whose ideas contributed to classical liberalism include John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, it drew on the classical economic ideas espoused by Adam Smith in Book One of The Wealth of Nations and on a belief in natural law and progress. The term classical liberalism has been applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from social liberalism. Core beliefs of classical liberals included new ideas—which departed from both the older conservative idea of society as a family and from the sociological concept of society as complex set of social networks.
Classical liberals believe that individuals are "egoistic, coldly calculating inert and atomistic" and that society is no more than the sum of its individual members. Classical liberals agreed with Thomas Hobbes that government had been created by individuals to protect themselves from each other and that the purpose of government should be to minimize conflict between individuals that would otherwise arise in a state of nature; these beliefs were complemented by a belief that laborers could be best motivated by financial incentive. This belief led to the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which limited the provision of social assistance, based on the idea that markets are the mechanism that most efficiently leads to wealth. Adopting Thomas Robert Malthus's population theory, they saw poor urban conditions as inevitable, believed population growth would outstrip food production and thus regarded that consequence desirable because starvation would help limit population growth, they opposed any income or wealth redistribution, believing it would be dissipated by the lowest orders.
Drawing on ideas of Adam Smith, classical liberals believed that it is in the common interest that all individuals be able to secure their own economic self-interest. They were critical of what would come to be the idea of the welfare state as interfering in a free market. Despite Smith’s resolute recognition of the importance and value of labor and of laborers, classical liberals selectively criticized labour's group rights being pursued at the expense of individual rights while accepting corporations' rights, which led to inequality of bargaining power. Classical liberals argued that individuals should be free to obtain work from the highest-paying employers while the profit motive would ensure that products that people desired were produced at prices they would pay. In a free market, both labor and capital would receive the greatest possible reward while production would be organized efficiently to meet consumer demand. Classical liberals argued for what they called a minimal state, limited to the following functions: A government to protect individual rights and to provide services that cannot be provided in a free market.
A common national defense to provide protection against foreign invaders. Laws to provide protection for citizens from wrongs committed against them by other citizens, which included protection of private property, enforcement of contracts and common law. Building and maintaining public institutions. Public works that included a stable currency, standard weights and measures and building and upkeep of roads, harbors, railways and postal services. Classical liberals asserted that rights are of a negative nature and therefore stipulate that other individuals and governments are to refrain from interfering with the free market, opposing social liberals who assert that individuals have positive rights, such as the right to vote, the right to an education, the right to health care and the right to a living wage. For society to guarantee positive rights, it requires taxation over and above the minimum needed to enforce negative rights. Core beliefs of classical liberals did not include democracy or government by a majority vote by citizens because "there is nothing in the bare idea of majority rule to show that majorities will always respect the rights of property or maintain rule of law".
For example, James Madison argued for a constitutional republic with protections for individual liberty over a pure democracy, reasoning that in a pure democracy a "common passion or interest will, in every case, be felt by a majority of the whole and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party". In the late 19th century, classical liberalism developed into neo-classical liberalism, which argued for government to be as small as possible to allow the exercise of individual freedom. In its most extreme form, neo-classical liberalism advocated social Darwinism. Right-libertarianism is a modern form of neo-classical liberalism. Friedrich Hayek identified two different traditions within classical liberalism, namely the British tradition and the French tradition. Hayek saw the British philosophers Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Josiah Tucker and William Paley as representative of a tradition that articulated beliefs in empiricism, the common law and in traditions and institutions which had spontaneously evolved but were imperfectly understood.
The French tradition included Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marquis de Condorcet, the Encyclopedists and the Physiocrats. This tradition believed in rationalism and sometimes showed hostility to religion. Hayek conceded that the national labels did not correspond to those belonging to each tradition since he saw the
Personal life
Personal life is the course of an individual's life when viewed as the sum of personal choices contributing to one's personal identity. In ancient past, most people's time was limited by the need to meet necessities such as food and shelter through first hunting and gathering and subsistence farming and there was not much leisure time. People identified with their social role in their community, engaged in jobs based on necessity rather than personal choice. Privacy in such communities was rare; the modern conception of personal life is an offshoot of modern Western society. A modern person tends to distinguish one's work from one's personal life, it is a person's choices and preferences outside work that define personal life, including one's choice of hobbies, cultural interests, manner of dress, so on. In particular, what activities one engages in during leisure-time defines a person's personal life. For instance, a typical American has about five hours of leisure time per day, more than half of, spent on watching TV.
People in Western countries, such as the United States, tend to value privacy. Privacy includes both information decisional privacy. In the past, before modern technology alleviated issues of economic scarcity in industrialised countries, most people spent a large portion of their time attempting to provide their basic survival needs, including water and protection from the weather. Humans needed survival skills for the sake of both their community. There was little privacy in a community, people identified one another according to their social role. Jobs were assigned out of necessity rather than personal choice. Furthermore, individuals in many ancient cultures viewed their self-existence under the aspect of a larger social whole one with mythological underpinnings which placed the individual in relation to the cosmos. People in such cultures found their identity not through their individual choices—indeed, they may not have been able to conceive a choice, purely individual; such individuals, if asked to describe themselves, would speak of the collective of which they were part: the tribe, the Church, the nation.
In the 21st century, survival issues dominate in many countries and societies. For example, the continents of Africa and Asia are still mired in poverty and third-world conditions, without technology, secure shelter, or reliable food sources. In such places, the concepts of a "personal life", "self-actualization", "personal fulfillment", or "privacy" are unaffordable luxuries; the English philosopher John Locke figures among the pioneers in discussing the concept of individual rights. In the 17th century he promoted the natural rights of the individual to life and property, included the pursuit of happiness as one of the individual's goals; the notion of a personal life, as understood, is in part an artifact of modern Western society. People in the United States of America place a high value on privacy. Since the colonial period, commentators have noted Americans' individualism and their pursuit of self-definition. Indeed, the United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitution explicitly raise the pursuit of happiness and the expectation of privacy to the level of rights.
George Lakoff sees the metaphor of life as "a journey" as a noteworthy structuring idea in "our culture". Compare the traditional Chinese concept of tao. In modern times, many people have come to think of their personal lives as separate from their work; this 9 to 5 paradigm regards recreation as distinct. Employees have certain hours they are bound to work, work during recreational time is rare; this may reflect the continuing specialization of jobs and the demand for increased efficiency, both at work and at home. The common phrase "Work hard, play hard" illustrates this mindset. There is a growing trend, toward living more holistically and minimizing such rigid distinctions between work and play, in order to achieve an "appropriate" work–life balance; the concept of personal life tends to be associated with the way individuals dress, the food they eat, their schooling and further education as well as their hobbies, leisure activities, cultural interests. In the developed world, a person's daily life is influenced by leisure-time use of consumer electronics such as televisions and the Internet, mobile phones and digital cameras.
Other factors affecting personal life include individuals' health, personal relationships, pets as well as home and personal possessions. The way in which individuals make use of their spare time plays an important role in defining their personal lives. In general, leisure activities can be categorised as either passive, in cases when no real effort is required, or active, when substantial physical or mental energy is needed. Passive activities include watching television, listening to music, watching sports activities or going to the cinema; the individual relaxes without any special effort. Active activities may be more or less intensive ranging from walking, through jogging and cycling to sports such as tennis or football. Playing chess or undertaking creative writing might be considered as demanding as these require a fair amount of mental effort. Based on 2007 data, a US survey on use of leisure time found that the daily use of leisure time by individuals over 15 averaged 4.9 hours. Of this, more than half went on watching TV while onl
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