Daniel Ingeniero

Lifestyle (sociology)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Way of life" redirects here. For other uses, see Way of life (disambiguation).

Lifestyle is a term to describe the way a person or an animal lives. A set of behaviors, and the senses of self and belonging which these behaviors represent, are collectively used to define a given lifestyle. The term is defined more broadly whenused in politics, marketing, and publishing.

A lifestyle is a characteristic bundle of behaviors that makes sense to both others and oneself in a given time and place, including social relations, consumption, entertainment, and dress. The behaviors and practices within lifestyles are a mixture of habits, conventional ways of doing things, and reasoned actions.

Individual identity

Alifestyle typically also reflects an individual's attitudes, values or worldview. Therefore, a lifestyle is a means of forging a sense of self and to create cultural symbols that resonate with personal identity. Not all aspects of a lifestyle are entirely voluntaristic. Surrounding social and technical systems can constrain the lifestyle choices available to the individual and the symbols she/he is ableto project to others and the self.

The lines between personal identity and the everyday doings that signal a particular lifestyle become blurred in modern society For example, "green lifestyle" means holding beliefs and engaging in activities that consume fewer resources and produce less harmful waste (i.e. a smaller carbon footprint), and deriving a sense of self from holding these beliefs andengaging in these activities. Some commentators[who?] argue that, in modernity, the cornerstone of lifestyle construction is consumption behavior, which offers the possibility to create and further individualize the self with different products or services that signal different ways of life.

Lifestyle may include views on politics, religion, health, intimacy, and more. All of these aspects playa role in shaping someone's lifestyle.

Lifestyle Intervention

Intervention may include a creating a healthy lifestyle, by exercising, not drinking or smoking, and leading an active life. This would be known as a positive lifestyle. An unhealthy lifestyle may include smoking, drinking, drug use, and a passive life. This would be known as a negative lifestyle. An unconventional lifestyle mayinvolve doing things against the norms of society, such as being part of subcultures including homosexuality, religious groups, and more.

Politics

The term lifestyle in politics can often be used in conveying the idea that society be accepting of a variety of different ways of life—from the perspective that differences among ways of living are superficial, rather than existential. Lifestyleis also sometimes used pejoratively, to mark out some ways of living as elective or voluntary as opposed to others that are considered mainstream, unremarkable, or normative.

Within anarchism, lifestylism is the view that an anarchist society can be formed by changing one's own personal activities rather than by engaging in class struggle.

Advertising and marketing

In business,"lifestyles" provide a means by which advertisers and marketers endeavor to target and match consumer aspirations with products, or to create aspirations relevant to new products. Therefore marketers take the patterns of belief and action characteristic of lifestyles and direct them toward expenditure and consumption. These patterns reflect the demographic factors (the habits, attitudes, tastes, moralstandards, economic levels and so on) that define a group. As a construct that directs people to interact with their worlds as consumers, lifestyles are subject to change by the demands of marketing and technological innovation.

In the magazine and television industries, "lifestyle" is used to describe a category of publications or programs.

[edit]Effects of outside sources

Each person...