Lifestyle, Suburban

Lifestyle and Consumption Practices

As a term most fully developed in relation to consumption practices, lifestyle is not simply reducible to personal consumption by individuals. Various promotional industries may present consumption in that manner, constantly orienting it around images of personal consumption, but this is somewhat misleading. First, individuals are usually part of households, and household consumption decisions are significant in terms of their environmental impact and the prospects for lessening that impact. Consumption results from both the addition of personal consumption habits, practices, and plans, and also from household consumer practices which may not be specifically oriented to any one individual in a household.

Moreover, individual consumption is not all oriented toward lifestyle. Much individual, and most household, consumption can be best defined as ordinary consumption, and is concerned with matters including convenience, habit, and individual responses to changing social contexts. Much ordinary consumption is either necessary or obligatory; food, fuel, travel, insurance, and, increasingly, services that were often formally wholly provided by the state and funded through taxation, for example, paid elements of health and social care. Lifestyle consumption, on the other hand, is generally defined as consumption in excess of, or in addition to, that ordinary consumption oriented toward satisfying basic needs.

Lifestyle consumption is also usually represented as being oriented to certain kinds of goods, including clothing, cosmetics, and the products of the culture industries. As such, lifestyles are regarded very much as self-oriented sets of consumer practices forming part of a reflexive, biographical project of identity-formation and self-presentation and based particularly upon the consumption of the symbolic dimensions of commodities. Lifestyle is seen as a sensibility—something that helps make sense of consumer choice, reduces the anxiety that flows from having to make such choices, and provides a consistent framework [Page 275]within which consumption decisions are made so that there is a consonance between the objects, services or experiences chosen and consumed. This kind of consumption is seen by some environmentalists as particularly wasteful and harmful, not simply because of the resources it uses, but because it is seen as frivolous and superfluous.

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