For the defunct british television channel please see Lifestyle (TV channel).
In sociology, a lifestyle is the way a person lives. This includes patterns of social relations, consumption, entertainment, and dress. A lifestyle typically also reflects an individual's attitudes, values or worldview.
Having a specific "lifestyle" means engaging in a characteristic bundle of behaviors that makes sense to both others and the self in different times and places. Therefore, a lifestyle can be used to forge a sense of self and to create cultural symbols for the way a person is. The behaviors and practices within lifestyles are a mixture of habits, conventional ways of doing things, and reasoned actions.
In business, "lifestyles" provide a means of targeting consumers as advertisers and marketers endeavor to match consumer aspirations with products. Lifestyles refer to patterns in which people live, spend time and money. These patterns reflect the demographic factors (the habits, attitudes, tastes, moral standards, economic level and so on) that together constitute the mode of living of an individual or group); they include things such as the individual's activities, in addition to their interests. As a construct that helps consumers interact with their worlds, lifestyles are subject to change at any time. Consumer behaviour research uses lifestyle data to determine which consumers buy products.
In environment, "lifestyles" are often associated with particular footprint. Green lifestyles are those lifestyles that consume less of the planets resources then other types of lifestyles.
The term "lifestyle" first appeared in 1939. Alvin Toffler predicted an explosion of lifestyles ("subcults") as diversity increases in post-industrial societies. Pre-modern societies did not require a term approaching sub-culture or "lifestyle", as different ways of living were expressed as entirely different cultures, religions, ethnicities or by an oppressed minority racial group. As such the minority culture was always seen as alien or other. "Lifestyles", by comparison, are accepted or partially accepted differences within the majority culture or group. This tolerance of differentiation within a majority culture seems to be associated with modernity and capitalism.
Within anarchism, lifestylism is a belief that by changing one's own personal lifestyle, and by retreating from class struggle, an anarchist society can be formed.

Specific interpretations of lifestyle
The term "the lifestyle" can also mean what is more commonly called swinging. This term was first used in the early 1970s by ClubWideWorld, a swing club in Anaheim, California, for advertisements in the Los Angeles Free Press. "The Lifestyle" was a more inclusive and acceptable term for swinging. People in "the lifestyle" most commonly are a couple, often a married couple. They meet other like-minded couples or occasionally singles through various websites, private/public clubs, and on tours to lifestyles-friendly resorts, to engage in sexual acts/activities. Not all lifestyle activities are sexual, as they may also meet to educate, support, or help others who are in "the lifestyle".