Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Broadly speaking, lifestyle is a pattern of daily living that is a combination of val-
ues, attitudes, interpretations, preferences, actions, and interactions in a particular
time and space. Lifestyle choices are configured by multiple forces: technical, eco-
nomic, political, institutional, and cultural. More succinctly, one could say that life-
style is the way a person lives.
It is easy to describe rather than define lifestyle. Often lifestyle is described by
diet type, individual wants and needs, world view, expenditure pattern, religion,
geographic location, consumption level and pattern, leisure and work, and so on.
Consumption patterns and
lifestyle
are often assumed to be synonymous. The
term lifestyle, as used by social scientists, refers to values, that is, social prefer-
ences, and there is a difference in degree between them: a great many behavioral
changes (changes in consumption patterns) add up to value changes over time. A
comparison can be made here between the evolution of lifestyles to the evolution
of life itself: species evolve by adapting to a changing environment up to the point
of becoming, in some cases, very different from the one from which they origin-
ated. In this sense, the introduction of the automobile could be compared with the
great explosions in the evolution of life, such as that which took place in the Cam-
brian period, some 530 million years ago.
In the short run, incremental changes can be driven by consumers in a market-
place. And what people buy can be altered through information and education, to
achieve a desired outcome. In the medium term, an approach that relies on human
well-being in terms of sustainable development, on Millennium Development Goal
(MDG) indicators, can have a moderate dampening effect on energy consumption.
The driving force of changing lifestyle could very well be technological devel-
opment. The speed at which electricity, air transportation, and radio and television
became basic and global ingredients of today's lifestyles points in that direction,
despite cultural and social differences between and within countries.
