Lifestyle needs discussion

How often do you try to fulfill them, and when do you start doing so?
For which reason? I have identified three:
a) Get a bit more population (for different reasons, optimization or scaling up)
b) Get a bit more money
c) Completionist approach: it can be done, so I do it.

Currently, I'm mostly interested in (b), as I'm still early in the game with some difficult settings for me, so I need more cash. Looking at the wiki, I see that, say, flour for farmers can give me at best 41x0.6 = 24 gold (low-income version), so it's not worth it. But then, looking at soap, we are talking about 285x1.5 ~ 420 gold, such a difference!

So, I'm a bit lost somehow on the design intent of the devs; why do some lifestyle options seem lousy while others seem great, all other things considered (i.e., even factoring the cost and availability of the resource)?