Lifestyle and Identity in Modern Society

In his engaging introductory book Lifestyles, David Chaney clarifies the concept of lifestyle. He blends traditional perspectives with sociological explanations, showing how the term defines modern society. More than just a sociological concept, the book examines how lifestyle shapes people’s attitudes, values, wealth, and social status in today’s world.

Chaney also discusses how society classifies lifestyle, why it has gained importance, and what it means. Is lifestyle about personal expression, or is it just another form of exploitation? Some still believe style is everything, yet academic and cultural discussions remain relatively rare.

Many do not realize that “lifestyle” has become a buzzword among cultural studies enthusiasts. However, as the term gets thrown around more and more, it starts to lose its meaning. Eventually, it becomes everything and nothing at the same time. As the saying goes, “appearance is everything,”—but social life is mostly just a series of ritualized performances.

In a way, people behave as if they are on stage, using spaces and social rituals to navigate everyday life.

John Fiske traces the word “style” back to its Greek roots—”stylus,” meaning “writing” or “handwriting.” Meyer Schapiro defines style as the consistent qualities expressed by individuals and groups. Other definitions tie style to lifestyle and cultural refinement. Alvin Toffler, however, offers a clearer take: He sees lifestyle as a tool people use to identify with certain subcultures.

A lifestyle includes a combination of outcomes, views, and preferences that shape how individuals introduce themselves. On the other hand, Chaney stresses that the essential part of a lifestyle is its interconnectedness. It is sincerely entrenched in everyday colonial life, serving as a position record and a method of differentiating one person from another.

At the same time, lifestyle helps us understand what people do and whether it holds meaning for them. It can be deeply personal but also tied to cultural and historical identity. In the end, lifestyle is a symbol of class prestige. With mass communication, it spreads across social groups, blurring traditional boundaries.

Lifestyle can reflect a community’s unique character. People use it to signal their place within a social group, whether based on class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or age. Lifestyle is also tied to urban subcultures, music fans, sports enthusiasts, and hobby communities.

Social identity is deeply tied to the concept of lifestyle. It defines a group of people who incorporate lifestyle into their daily lives, shaping and explaining a larger sense of identity. More than just a personal choice, lifestyle is a way for people to interpret their experiences. Advertising, in turn, has become a significant force in shaping lifestyle, fine-tuning it through industrial image engineering.

This process has led to the rise of public relations practitioners in business and entertainment. In today’s media-driven world, you do not have to be as influential as Gandhi or Churchill to be seen as a hero. You do not even need to create a persona. Like in fashion, stardom follows a cycle—becoming a celebrity is easier than ever. Celebrity journalism only adds to this, exaggerating trivial details of celebrity life.

As a result, celebrity culture has become a spectacle—made by celebrities, for celebrities, and centered around their self-celebration.

If lifestyle is seen as a personal and existential project rather than just a marketing product, it carries political, aesthetic, and ethical weight. David Chaney differentiates between different political traditions in defining lifestyle. Some activists aim to restructure society to enhance individual autonomy, while others focus on newer forms of political expression tied to personal identity.

In this sense, lifestyle establishes principles that influence every person’s daily choices. How people define and adopt their lifestyle will remain one of the most significant psychological concerns of the future. It functions as an unspoken set of expectations, subtly managing dissatisfaction in mass society.

At the same time, people are beginning to see lifestyle as both a pattern of behavior and a form of social belonging woven into the fabric of modern life. In short, lifestyle is both a deliberate creation and an adopted identity. People can embrace, discard, or play with it in an ironic or self-aware way.

Rethinking modernity involves moving beyond the old idea that modern progress replaced the worldview of early modern and medieval Europe—a world shaped by divine destiny—with one based on science and logical inquiry. Consumerism has evolved into contemporary social growth.

Consumer civilization, nevertheless, is an additional current invention. Its hit depends on trade and promotion, which have reshaped colonial designs. One of modernity’s fundamental artistic hooks is changing the birth ranking. In the 20th century, peace and recreation initiatives developed rapidly, substantially changing how individuals shared and supported complimentary tours.

People often point to mass publishing, the rise of radio and television, and other entertainment industries like video games, popular photography, video recording, and pop music. Electronics development is another example of significant capital investment in leisure, whether in stores or at home. David Chaney argues that we cannot fully understand traditional ideas about leisure without looking at the broader social and cultural history of lifestyles and the modern world.

On the surface, lifestyle can seem as tangible as the chairs people use to decorate their living rooms. However, it is also about the origins of those materials, how they are arranged, and where and how they were produced. There are three key layers to this: how much an individual knows about these elements, what kind of message they associate with them, and where they hear about shifting lifestyle trends.

A commodity is not just a practical object—it carries an idealized meaning and a lived experience, transforming into a material and symbolic part of daily life. The way people use material culture is always shaped by existing traditions, whether inherited or newly created. As Chaney emphasizes, lifestyle is a way of experimenting with new forms of identity.

The creative energy behind shaping and maintaining new patterns of social interaction is, at its core, a form of design. It involves working with mass society’s overwhelming amount of symbolic cultural material to create new cultural expressions.

Modern society is shaped by dominant secular ideologies that express social conflicts through different levels of class awareness. The search for a social explanation fits into what Lyotard calls the “grand narratives” of modernity. While traditional social thought is centered on the nation-state, today’s discourse focuses on spaces shaped by democratic and feminist theories.

Because of this, Chaney argues that lifestyle resists being reduced to a single grand narrative that rigidly explains social structures. Instead, organizations that produce and distribute cultural commodities address lifestyle in ways that cross national boundaries. They challenge the idea of a unified national culture, even as local experiences remain intact.

At this point, lifestyle reflects a growing uncertainty in the core ideas of modern social thought. In a way, society is beginning to acknowledge—if only indirectly—the shift toward the postmodern distinction between public and private spaces.

References

• Chaney, D. (1996). Lifestyles. Routledge.
• Chaney, D. (2002). Cultural Change and Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Fiske, J. (1989). Understanding Popular Culture. Routledge.
• Schapiro, M. (1953). Style. Columbia University Press.
• Toffler, A. (1970). Future Shock. Bantam Books.