Lifestyle is really an umbrella phrase that covers all of the different things you do without either permission or directly claiming ownership of it. For instance, you could say you have a nice lifestyle because you like good books and nice music. A lifestyle could also be quite broad in the sense that it encompasses the full scope of your thoughts and actions taken on a day-to-day basis. Lifestyle can mean your general outlook and disposition, as well as your general habits and attitudes toward things. Basically, everything that makes up your private world is called your “lifestyle.” This world includes your values, your beliefs and your personal idiosyncrasies.
Lifestyle can be separated into three main areas: personal consumption, communal consumption, and ritual consumption. Personal consumption, which could also be called “informal language consumption,” refers to how you personally experience and express the world around you. This includes your language, your customs, your attitudes and your mode of sharing. Culturally, this area of the Lifestyle usually encompasses a wide diversity of variation, from highly individualistic (or individualist) to highly communicative.
Communal uses the word lifestyle in a much more global way. The other types of Lifestyle are described above, but the word lifestyle is used in order to describe any type of life style that has a set of shared practices and attitudes among a group of people. This could be a religious community, the political community or a set of civic organizations. The communal life style can include such practices as sports clubs, work teams or labor unions, and even criminal lifestyles (such as organized crime, gang life, or prison life).
Ritual consumption refers to those habits and rituals we engage in to honor and affirm our values. Rituals might include meditation, prayer, drinking alcohol, smoking or even eating foods prescribed for a specific purpose. There are even some lifestyles that are based on their founder’s religious convictions. For example, the Christian lifestyles are known for their worship of Jesus, but there are also other religions that have similar concepts and practices.
One of the most interesting aspects of Lifestyle is the interaction between the varying concepts and ideas of the three. To begin with, the word lifestyle can be considered a relational concept, not a strict set of rules or parameters. Lifestyle is a living being, with all of its particular factors and elements. All the same, there are a few things that all lifestyles have in common: they are all about living. All of them involve various types of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual practices.
When we talk about a healthy lifestyle, we are talking about a complete approach to a person’s life. It is a comprehensive approach to one’s habits and practices that help an individual to live a productive, meaningful, dynamic, and healthy life in all aspects. The same is true when we talk about a luxurious lifestyle. A lifestyle that involve excessive consumption of food and drink, extensive amounts of exercise, excessive smoking, use of certain substances, and the like, is considered to be unhealthy by some cultures and societies.
In his book, Theodor Adorno defines Lifestyle as the process by which individuals “resemble” their everyday lives. This is so because everyday life-styles are the outcomes of the culture industry and are therefore products of the culture industry. The Lifestyle of Adorno therefore helps us to see the connections among different daily life-styles, including Lifestyle, and culture. He is of the opinion that it is possible to discover the self and the others through an analysis of Lifestyle.
In the stile di vita (also translated as the life style) the term lifestyles is used in such a way as to suggest not only a set of ideas or attitudes toward life styles, but also a set of actual physical facts and figures. It is this reality within the life style that makes it a unique and potentially useful set of tools for understanding how culture produces individual attitudes and choices. It is thus important that we approach Lifestyle with Lifestyle Analysis in mind.