the.com/lifestyle
The word you add to anything to sell it as a personality instead of a product.
means The way a person lives day to day — their habits, tastes, and choices — now stretched to cover whatever a brand wants you to buy as proof of who you are.
from Coined in early 20th-century psychology (the term is tied to Alfred Adler's writing on the 'style of life' an individual adopts to cope with the world) and originally meant something fairly clinical — a person's characteristic way of living. It drifted into sociology and journalism by mid-century as a neutral descriptor for how groups of people lived, then got scooped up by advertising and magazines, which discovered that selling a 'lifestyle' was more profitable than selling a mere object.
- origin
- Coined by Alfred Adler in 1929, meant basic life pattern
- marketing shift
- Became a sales category once brands sold identity, not goods
- red flag
- Any job titled lifestyle brand usually means unpaid influencer work
- irony
- The more curated the lifestyle, the less actual living happens