Living in the Urban City : Life Necessities

Living in the city presents it own set of challenges, in the last few days I was given to thinking about life's necessities and how different it is for urban life.

So, what are the necessities of life, in the past it was that a person needed Water, Air, Food and Shelter. Work was basically just how to make sure these necessities were provided and maintained. Entertainment then meant a whole different thing, as just a way of spending (or wasting) time between sundown and sleep. Even with the invention of light, there is no nightlife, with it being spent reading or just watching television.

In these modern times, urban life, has taken life's necessities to a whole new concept. While water, air, food and shelter are still life's basic necessities, modern poeple have added many sub categories to each of these and also have added some extra necessities to life. These new categories of necessity for urban life include :

A multitude of Entertainment; from Hobbies to travel to various pleasures
Transport and Locomotion; we urban people have a wide reach and a vast network so we need to get to places near and far, gone are the days of the one street hamlets, ours is a vast city
Communication; where would we be without our mobile phones, PDAs, laptops, internet, wireless access, satellite television and radios
Taxes; the new urban need, we pay many types of taxes as we have passed on the responsibility
of maintaining our shelters and distributed supplies to others

Work now, for the urban person, meant not just providing for these necessities but also to make more to be generate value to the society we are part of and to distribute our knowledge and wealth to the network we establish for ourselves. Work has started to take on a meaning akin to a career, where one considers it one's interests or life work. And with the extension of available time, now we have a night life, be it more work, more life work, more things to do or just more entertainment.

Life is good and better now, but with it comes new challenges of adapting and balancing one's wants and needs and how to meet one's life objectives without getting into trouble. This is life in the urban city.

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