What is the meaning of the word lifestyle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lifestyle is the interests, opinions, behaviours, and behavioural orientations of an individual, group, or culture.^[1][2] The term was introduced by Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in his 1929 book, The Case of Miss R., with the meaning of «a person’s basic character as established early in childhood».^[3] The broader sense of lifestyle as a «way or style of living» has been documented since 1961.^[3] Lifestyle is a combination of determining intangible or tangible factors. Tangible factors relate specifically to demographic variables, i.e. an individual’s demographic profile, whereas intangible factors concern the psychological aspects of an individual such as personal values, preferences, and outlooks.

A rural environment has different lifestyles compared to an urban metropolis. Location is important even within an urban scope. The nature of the neighborhood in which a person resides affects the set of lifestyles available to that person due to differences between various neighborhoods’ degrees of affluence and proximity to natural and cultural environments. For example, in areas near the sea, a surf culture or lifestyle can often be present.

Individual identity

A lifestyle typically reflects an individual’s attitudes, way of life, values, or world view. 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 voluntary. Surrounding social and technical systems can constrain the lifestyle choices available to the individual and the symbols they are able to project to others and themself.^[4]

The lines between personal identity and the everyday doings that signal a particular lifestyle become blurred in modern society.^[5] For example, «green lifestyle» means holding beliefs and engaging in activities that consume fewer resources and produce less harmful waste (i.e. a smaller ecological footprint), and deriving a sense of self from holding these beliefs and engaging in these activities.^[6] Some commentators 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.^[7]

Lifestyle may include views on politics, religion, health, intimacy, and more. All of these aspects play a role in shaping someone’s lifestyle.
^[8]
In the magazine and television industries, «lifestyle» is used to describe a category of publications or programs.

History of lifestyles studies

Three main phases can be identified in the history of lifestyles studies:^[9]

Lifestyles and social position

Earlier studies on lifestyles focus on the analysis of social structure and of the individuals’ relative positions inside it. Thorstein Veblen, with his ’emulation’ concept, opens this perspective by asserting that people adopt specific ‘schemes of life’, and in particular specific patterns of ‘conspicuous consumption’, depending on a desire for distinction from social strata they identify as inferior and a desire for emulation of the ones identified as superior. Max Weber intends lifestyles as distinctive elements of status groups strictly connected with a dialectic of recognition of prestige: the lifestyle is the most visible manifestation of social differentiation, even within the same social class, and in particular it shows the prestige which the individuals believe they enjoy or to which they aspire. Georg Simmel carries out formal analysis of lifestyles, at the heart of which can be found processes of individualisation, identification, differentiation, and recognition, understood both as generating processes of, and effects generated by, lifestyles, operating «vertically» as well as «horizontally». Finally, Pierre Bourdieu renews this approach within a more complex model in which lifestyles, made up mainly of social practices and closely tied to individual tastes, represent the basic point of intersection between the structure of the field and processes connected with the habitus.

Lifestyles as styles of thought

The approach interpreting lifestyles as principally styles of thought has its roots in the soil of psychological analysis. Initially, starting with Alfred Adler, a lifestyle was understood as a style of personality, in the sense that the framework of guiding values and principles which individuals develop in the first years of life end up defining a system of judgement which informs their actions throughout their lives. Later, particularly in Milton Rokeach’s work, Arnold Mitchell’s VALS research and Lynn R. Kahle’s LOV research, lifestyles’ analysis developed as profiles of values, reaching the hypothesis that it is possible to identify various models of scales of values organized hierarchically, to which different population sectors correspond. Then with Daniel Yankelovich and William Wells we move on to the so-called AIO approach in which attitudes, interests and opinions are considered as fundamental lifestyles’ components, being analysed from both synchronic and diachronic points of view and interpreted on the basis of socio-cultural trends in a given social context (as, for instance, in Bernard Cathelat’s work). Finally, a further development leads to the so-called profiles-and-trends approach, at the core of which is an analysis of the relations between mental and behavioural variables, bearing in mind that socio-cultural trends influence both the diffusion of various lifestyles within a population and the emerging of different modalities of interaction between thought and action.

Lifestyles as styles of action

Analysis of lifestyles as action profiles is characterized by the fact that it no longer considers the action level as a simple derivative of lifestyles, or at least as their collateral component, but rather as a constitutive element. In the beginning, this perspective focussed mainly on consumer behaviour, seeing products acquired as objects expressing on the material plane individuals’ self-image and how they view their position in society. Subsequently, the perspective broadened to focus more generally on the level of daily life, concentrating – as in authors such as Joffre Dumazedier and Anthony Giddens – on the use of time, especially loisirs, and trying to study the interaction between the active dimension of choice and the dimension of routine and structuration which characterize that level of action. Finally, some authors, for instance Richard Jenkins and A. J. Veal, suggested an approach to lifestyles in which it is not everyday actions which make up the plane of analysis but those which the actors who adopt them consider particularly meaningful and distinctive.

Health

A healthy or unhealthy lifestyle will most likely be transmitted across generations. According to the study done by Case et al. (2002), when a 0-3-year-old child has a mother who practices a healthy lifestyle, this child will be 27% more likely to become healthy and adopt the same lifestyle.^[10] For instance, high income parents are more likely to eat more fruit and vegetables, have time to exercise, and provide the best living condition to their children. On the other hand, low-income parents are more likely to participate in unhealthy activities such as smoking to help them release poverty-related stress and depression.^[11] Parents are the first teacher for every child. Everything that parents do will be very likely transferred to their children through the learning process.

Adults may be drawn together by mutual interest that results in a lifestyle. For example, William Dufty described how pursuing a sugar-free diet led to such associations:^[12]

I have come to know hundreds of young people who have found that illness or bingeing on drugs and sugar became the doorway to health. Once they reestablished their own health, we had in common our interest in food. If one can use that overworked word lifestyle, we shared a sugarfree lifestyle. I kept in touch with many of them in campuses and communes, through their travels here and abroad and everywhere. One day you meet them in Boston. The next week you run into them in Southern California.

Class

Lifestyle research can contribute to the question of the relevance of the class concept.^[13]

Media culture

The term lifestyle was introduced in the 1950s as a derivative of that of style in art:^[14]

«Life-styles», the culture industry’s recycling of style in art, represent the transformation of an aesthetic category, which once possessed a moment of negativity [shocking, emancipatory], into a quality of commodity consumption.

Theodor W. Adorno noted that there is a «culture industry» in which the mass media is involved, but that the term «mass culture» is inappropriate:
^[15]

In our drafts, we spoke of «mass culture.» We replaced that expression with «culture industry» in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art.

The media culture of advanced capitalism typically creates new «life-styles» to drive the consumption of new commodities:^[14]

Diversity is more effectively present in mass media than previously, but this is not an obvious or unequivocal gain. By the late 1950s, the homogenization of consciousness had become counterproductive for the purposes of capital expansion; new needs for new commodities had to be created, and this required the reintroduction of the minimal negativity that had been previously eliminated. The cult of the new that had been the prerogative of art throughout the modernist epoch into the period of post-war unification and stabilization has returned to capital expansion from which it originally sprang. But this negativity is neither shocking nor emancipatory since it does not presage a transformation of the fundamental structures of everyday life. On the contrary, through the culture industry capital has co-opted the dynamics of negation both diachronically in its restless production of new and «different» commodities and synchronically in its promotion of alternative «life-styles.»

See also

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Adorno, Th., «Culture Industry Reconsidered,» in Adorno (1991).
• Adorno, The Culture Industry — Selected essays on mass culture, Routledge, London, 1991.
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• Ansbacher H. L., Life style. A historical and systematic review, in «Journal of individual psychology», 1967, vol. 23, n. 2, pp. 191–212.
• Bell D., Hollows J., Historicizing lifestyle. Mediating taste, consumption and identity from the 1900s to 1970s, Asghate, Aldershot-Burlington, 2006.
• Bénédicte Châtel (Auteur), Jean-Luc Dubois (Auteur), Bernard Perret (Auteur), Justice et Paix-France (Auteur), François Maupu (Postface), Notre mode de vie est-il durable ? : Nouvel horizon de la responsabilité, Karthala Éditions, 2005
• Bernstein, J. M. (1991) «Introduction,» in Adorno (1991)
• Berzano L., Genova C., Lifestyles and Subcultures. History and a New Perspective, Routledge, London, 2015.
• Burkle, F. M. (2004)
• Calvi G. (a cura di), Indagine sociale italiana. Rapporto 1986, Franco Angeli, Milano, 1987.
• Calvi G. (a cura di), Signori si cambia. Rapporto Eurisko sull’evoluzione dei consumi e degli stili di vita, Bridge, Milano, 1993.
• Calvi G., Valori e stili di vita degli italiani, Isedi, Milano, 1977.
• Cathelat B., Les styles de vie des Français 1978–1998, Stanké, Parigi, 1977.
• Cathelat B., Socio-Styles-Système. Les «styles de vie». Théorie, méthodes, applications, Les éditions d’organisation, Parigi, 1990.
• Cathelat B., Styles de vie, Les éditions d’organisation, pàgiri, 1985.
• Chaney D., Lifestyles, Routledge, Londra, 1996.
• Fabris G., Mortara V., Le otto Italie. Dinamica e frammentazione della società italiana, Mondadori, Milano, 1986.
• Faggiano M. P., Stile di vita e partecipazione sociale giovanile. Il circolo virtuoso teoria-ricerca-teoria, Franco Angeli, Milano, 2007.
• Gonzalez Moro V., Los estilos de vida y la cultura cotidiana. Un modelo de investigacion, Baroja, [San Sebastian, 1990].
• Kahle L., Attitude and social adaption. A person-situation interaction approach, Pergamon, Oxford, 1984.
• Kahle L., Social values and social change. Adaptation to life in America, Praeger, Santa Barbara, 1983.
• Leone S., Stili di vita. Un approccio multidimensionale, Aracne, Roma, 2005.
• Mitchell A., Consumer values. A tipology, Values and lifestyles program, SRI International, Stanford, 1978.
• Mitchell A., Life ways and life styles, Business intelligence program, SRI International, Stanford, 1973.
• Mitchell A., The nine American lifestyles. Who we are and where we’re going, Macmillan, New York, 1983.
• Mitchell A., Ways of life, Values and lifestyles program, SRI International, Stanford, 1982.
• Negre Rigol P., El ocio y las edades. Estilo de vida y oferta lúdica, Hacer, Barcelona, 1993.
• Parenti F., Pagani P. L., Lo stile di vita. Come imparare a conoscere sé stessi e gli altri, De Agostini, Novara, 1987.
• Patterson M. Consumption and Everyday Life, 2006
• Ragone G., Consumi e stili di vita in Italia, Guida, Napoli, 1985.
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• Rokeach M., Beliefs, attitudes and values, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1968.
• Rokeach M., The nature of human values, Free Press, New York, 1973.
• Shields R., Lifestyle shopping. The subject of consumption, Routledge, Londra, 1992.
• Shulman B. H., Mosak H. H., Manual for life style assessment, Accelerated Development, Muncie, 1988 (trad. it. Manuale per l’analisi dello stile di vita, Franco Angeli, Milano, 2008).
• Sobel M. E., Lifestyle and social structure. Concepts, definitions and analyses, Academic Press, New York, 1981.
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• Valette-Florence P., Les styles de vie. Bilan critique et perspectives. Du mythe à la réalité, Nathan, Parigi, 1994.
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External links

• George Vrousgos, N.D. — Southern Cross University

Lifestyle has often been called the habits, attitudes, and behaviors of an individual, family, or community. Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler first introduced the word in his 29 original books, The Case of Miss R., with the more modern meaning of “the general character of a person as established early on.” Today the word has become much broader and refers to the way people live their lives, including their diet and their medical care, their level of involvement in community organizations, social events, leisure time, and whether they engage in risky behavior. It also includes the aspects of the social environment surrounding a person, such as neighborhood violence, gang activity, eating disorders, and the attitudes of employers, educational settings, the police, and healthcare providers.

Lifestyle science now refers to the integration of these aspects into research and policy. One of the most prominent recent trends is to use the word lifestyle content in place of the word lifestyle. Adler is credited for popularizing the term and the concept of integrating the physical, psychological, and social aspects of a person into their patterns of thought and behavior. Took the idea on twentieth-century social scientists such absences Brinkley and Murray Bowen, who wrote several texts on the subject. These ideas became the basis for much of the research done into the causes and treatment of crime.

Since then, other schools of thought have developed regarding the meaning and application of the word lifestyle. Some people refer to it as a way of life, others as a set of beliefs or behaviors, and still others as a specific practice or discipline. By adopting these definitions, we can better understand the concepts and the usefulness of the term “lifestyle.”

The most significant benefits of adopting the word lifestyle are its apparent connection with psychology and the field of personal development. The research that has been done on the relationship between these three aspects has brought about many new methods of practicing the discipline. The use of the word lifestyle in place of the word social media helps us draw a clearer picture of the practice. Instead of a vague description of individual behavior, which can be challenging to interpret, we can see a clear delineation between the behavior and the social setting.

There are many examples of lifestyles that might describe as healthy, unhealthy, or simply different. A healthy lifestyle leaves room for growth, experimentation, and self-improvement. On the other hand, unhealthy lifestyles are designed to keep people in a state of dormancy, where everything is very well defined and routine. An unhealthy lifestyle may also be characterized by an excessive focus on diet and exercise rather than another form of activity. AOnthe the other may consider a minimalist lifestyle a more functional approach to life because it leaves a larger space for creative expression.

There are many forms of these three lifestyles. While veganism is becoming increasingly popular as a lifestyle, some vegans live a more “primal” way of life. These types of vegetarians usually only eat animal products and refrain from any refined sugar. Others still go a step further and altogether eschew any processed foods. A third group on the cusp of being classified as minimalist vegetarians is followers of the Buddhist faiths, who consider vegetarianism to be a way of life detached from materialism. Whether you think yourself to be a minimalist vegetarian, a vegan, a minimalist vegetarian, a pescetarian, or some variation on this last category, the important thing is that you are taking deliberate action towards a healthier lifestyle.

A typical characteristic of a minimalist lifestyle is its reduction of possessions within the means of a single lifestyle, i.e., a reduction in the “Lifestyle footprint.” By this,s I mean that you are reducing the amount of land and resources you are using to support your chosen lifestyle. For example, living a minimalist lifestyle means that you will be using a bike instead of a car. You will be recycling instead of throwing trash into a landfill. You will be eating much more organic food than food that you have had chemicals added to it. The reduction of possessions is often referred to as “Being Bicyclical” and was popularized by the British writer and satirist Bill Bryson, whose novel The Road to Waking contains a minimalist Buddhist monk’s character, a mad man.

The other common aspect of the Lifestyle is its strong resistance to commercialism. This includes using the phrase “I am not a Corporate Human Being” to describe oneself. This phrase was popularized by the British writer Henry David Thoreau, who is said to have written to this effect: “For I am not a corporate person… I am an Iron Man.” Others who subscribe to the Lifestyle include author Richard R. Powell, British author John Burney, Canadian environmentalist Rexford Pickett, French author Albert Camus, and author John Gray.

All these people believe that by reducing our material demands on other living beings and the earth, we can increase the spiritual and emotional intelligence and make ourselves happier and more fulfilled human beings. In the book The Fabric of Reality, Charles Lake describes the Lifestyle as “the one ideal of modern human thought. He adds that the followers of this philosophy “feel that they are part and parcel of the great scheme of things, conscious of their place in the scheme of things while feeling no sense of distance or separation from it.”

• Defenition of the word lifestyle

  • The particular attitudes, habits or behaviour associated with an individual or group.
  • a manner of living that reflects the person’s values and attitudes
  • a manner of living that reflects the person»s values and attitudes

Synonyms for the word lifestyle

• • life style
  • life-style
  • modus vivendi

Hyponyms for the word lifestyle

• • fast lane
  • free living
  • vanity fair

Hypernyms for the word lifestyle

• • fashion
  • manner
  • mode
  • style
  • way

See other words

• • What is make to order
  • The definition of make specially
  • The interpretation of the word reconstructions
  • What is meant by rekindling
  • The lexical meaning sews
  • The dictionary meaning of the word sewn
  • The grammatical meaning of the word re-enactment
  • Meaning of the word sewers
  • Literal and figurative meaning of the word sewerage
  • The origin of the word vouchsafes
  • Synonym for the word vouching
  • Antonyms for the word vouchsafe
  • Homonyms for the word dependent state
  • Hyponyms for the word guarantying
  • Holonyms for the word dependent territory
  • Hypernyms for the word part of an empire
  • Proverbs and sayings for the word accustom
  • Translation of the word in other languages take to

Lifestyle is generally the attitudes, interests, behavioral orientations, and behaviors, of an individual, society, or group. The word was first introduced by Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler in his 29th book, The Case of Miss R. with the more modern term, “the basic nature of human beings as established early on in their lives”. The original meaning was to reflect upon the habits of the wild animals in the natural environment. This concept has been extended to human beings, and we refer to this as a Lifestyle.

We may divide a human’s Lifestyle into three broad categories, including vegan lifestyle, anti-vietical lifestyle, and other types of restrictive lifestyle. A vegan lifestyle may involve avoiding all animal products, including milk, eggs, honey, leather, fur, and tropical birds. A strict vegan Lifestyle could include drinking only organic or fully green juice, preparing all meals from scratch using fresh fruits and vegetables, consuming no fats, salts, sugars, or sweets, abstaining from sex until marriage, and avoiding all animal products in daily exercise and recreation. Anti-Dietary Lifestyles include restricting certain foods, including caffeine, alcohol, fizzy drinks, chocolate, fried items, peppermint, chocolates, nuts, wheat products, confectionary, junk food, soft drinks, tea, coffee, and wine. There are also other types of restrictions in the vegan and anti- vegetarian Lifestyle.

The most popular forms of these three broad lifestyles are vegetarian, vegan, and minimalist lifestyle. Vegetarian Lifestyle suggests that to be a vegetarian is to abstain from consuming meat, fish, and shellfish. Vegan Lifestyle includes eating animal-originated foods only. A vegan lifestyle may involve a degree of animal protection by refraining from animal consumption such as eating shelter animals, traveling in an automobile with animals inside, using space in one’s house for the purpose of sheltering animals, owning at least two types of pets, and keeping dead animals on your property for later use. Minimalist Lifestyles is a type of veganism that involves minimal consumption of foods, which include mostly fruits and vegetables.

As indicated by the definitions above, there are many different definitions of these lifestyles. The meaning of each of the three lifestyles can be compared through the lens of cultural psychology. Cultural psychology describes people’s responses to environmental factors and their interactions within a given culture. It further states that these factors influence our attitudes, beliefs, values, thoughts, and feelings toward other individuals and things. Since human beings are the result of several generations of living under different cultural conditions, these individual lifestyles are deeply ingrained into our thinking patterns, feelings, and behaviors.

Within the mass culture, all three life-styles can be found, except for vegetarianism. In the mass culture, people are more interested in buying products that have fast and easy results. This is why most products in the mass culture are processed and have quick effects on the consumers’ bodies. In addition, as indicated by the definitions above, meat-eating and dairy-eating are considered unhealthy and are frowned upon by the masses.

However, by examining the definitions of the three lifestyles mentioned above, it can be seen that Adorno was wrong when he claimed that “Lifestyle” does not exist. The reality of our culture is a mixture of these three lifestyles: animal-oriented, rational, and rationalistic. Our daily life can only be described as a combination of the individual’s individual life-style and the mass-culture’s predominant lifestyle, with some variations between the two.