Lifestyles, Big Families, and Rotational Gameplay

I turned lifestyles off in my game settings, have reloaded the game, but all that seems to have done is hide them from the UI. My sims still get moodlets associated with lifestyles, they’re still gaining them and I’m still getting notifications that some are at risk of being lost. I just tried using testingcheats to remove the one that was available to remove (it didn’t show the newly gained one as an option to remove). What a mess.

I still have the lifestyle on, my current main sim became an adrenaline junky during his selvadora trip. Now he is settled with wife and son and became bored quite often, until he discovered the bees, now he is caring about them, who gave him enough thrill.

Only the single and loving it lifestyle I find that it comes too early for me, but that's because of my custom made sim lifes and had nothing to do with the lifestyle itself, so all my teenagers have that lifestyle, I don't want them to have a boyfriend or girlfriend or go for the hunt of them as soon they aged up to teenager, when I do consider them as only twelve or thirteen years old.

After a lot of hesitation I turned the lifestyles on for my main save. I play over 30 households, but irregularly so I have time to focus on their lifestyles if I wish to. I've only got one sim who has gained all three as the progress is quite slow. Near everyone gains people person and I don't even bother removing it since it would just come back (they know over three sims as family and relatives count). Currently I actually like the lifestyles although I wish they were tuned a little.

Is this why my Sims are always sad. It says someone near them is sad, which makes them sad, which makes other people sad...

"imhappy;c-17834772" wrote:
Is this why my Sims are always sad. It says someone near them is sad, which makes them sad, which makes other people sad...

I think that is a feature from the sentiments system, it gives the moodlet “shared sadness” (from seeing a loved one suffer). I actually like that feature and I thinks it gives a little depth to relations (= empathy).

I only managed to get one lifestyle one time when the feature first came out. I never get them anymore, but I do fill up the daily limit a lot. I don't know what I'm doing to fill it up but it does. I forgot that we could turn them off.
I play rotation too but I'm trying to have one to three main households to play while the other households' babies age up.
I like the baby life stage but it's hard to play with them when they're just an object and some of the time they don't cry so I don't know that they're hungry until I get a warning message saying they're going to get removed if I don't feed them.

Sentiments don't make much sense to me because I get sometimes get sentiments for just having two Sims start talking to each other and I often don't know what it's for and I don't see any changes besides maybe a moodlet.