Lifestyle is an interactive way of living that describes a community, culture, people or personal. This includes patterns of behaviour, interaction, eating, work, leisure, interaction and interests which describe the way in which a person spends their spare time. The way in which a lifestyle is lived is referred to as the “general attitude” of the people in that community. Broadly speaking, one can define it as the patterns of behaviour that individuals adopt towards other individuals and towards the world. It is a broad concept, but basically there are two components to a lifestyle:
Lifestyle, according to critical social theory, is the patterns of consumption which individuals and groups to adopt and which serve as a guide for their life-style choices. Critical analysis considers that life-styles are deeply anchored in the values and practices of a culture industry, a system of social organization. There are many different life-styles, some of which are discussed below. For ease of discussion, lifestyle is generally classified into three main aspects: Adorno’s (1947) family life-styles, situational theory and attitude-based styles.
The Adorno family life style is a pattern of direct, ritual based, social structure. Individuals adopt this particular lifestyle when they feel that their power as a functioning human being has been diluted by the existence of their parents. Adorno (19 1947) proposed that all individuals have an interest in relating to others in their everyday life. In his theory, the self is the core of private and public life; human beings have an interest in relating to other human beings in their everyday life styles, in ritualized consumption.
The perspective of situational theory is more oriented towards daily life. It makes the individual’s role in the society as a determining factor in his or her level of consumption. Individuals who decide on a different lifestyle from the mainstream mass culture tend to be introverts, not socially acceptable. This kind of person may be a statistic likeminded, or a person with a unique personality.
Attitude-based lifestyle is also called attitude-based economy or attitude economy. The idea of this type of lifestyle is that the consumer, or group of consumers, form an autonomous network. Within this group, there is a great deal of internal dynamic that shapes the decisions of the group. This type of lifestyle is based on a dialectical approach that perceives the individual as an end in itself. The dialectical approach, on the one hand, allows for freedom to choose but, on the other, the fact that it is the individual, or the group of individuals, that decides what is important. In the case of the mass culture, however, choices are imposed on the individual by the rules and values of the mass culture industry.
Mass media, including blogging, has a strong influence on the formation of this type of lifestyle. The blog provides an avenue for the expression of the writer’s attitudes and identity politics. It therefore influences the way people interpret the writer. In some ways, blogs resemble a mode of social media except that the content is more limited than in social media.
Max Weber’s definition of Lifestyle has changed significantly since he first defined it. In his original formulation, Lifestyle was a “vibe,” defining a cultural disposition toward value judgment and a rejection of mass media consumption. In this definition, all people were lumped together as “the Lifestyle” and all styles were deemed to be equivalent. Today, the word lifestyle has been expanded to include attitudes, values, and socialization patterns. It is no longer a single, decisive category but a collection of attitudes, values, and socialization patterns.
Weber’s notion of the Lifestyle is more inclusive today. It includes a variety of definitions, including: art, music, dance, food, fashion, cuisine, household behavior, family life style, and work life style. In the book, The Essence of the Cultural Religions, Weber explained that there are five aspects or dimensions of the Lifestyle that are central to its definition. These are: obligation, conformity, freedom, superiority, and spirit. In our modern secular age, most people would agree that these general aspects of the Lifestyle can generally be described as the following: freedom, individualism, mobility, communal belonging, and economic security. Weber believed that these aspects of the Lifestyle are the cornerstones of civilization.