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For the defunct british television channel please see Lifestyle (TV channel).

In sociology, a lifestyle is the way a person lives. A lifestyle is a characteristic bundle of behaviors that makes sense to both others and oneself in a given time and place, including social relations, consumption, entertainment, and dress. The behaviors and practices within lifestyles are a mixture of habits, conventional ways of doing things, and reasoned actions. A lifestyle typically also reflects an individual's attitudes, values or worldview. Therefore, a lifestyle is a means of forging a sense of self and to create cultural symbols that resonate with personal identity. For example, "green lifestyle" means holding beliefs and engaging in activities that consume fewer resources and produce less harmful waste (i.e. a smaller carbon footprint), and deriving a sense of self from holding these beliefs and engaging in these activities.

The term lifestyle first appeared in 1939. Alvin Toffler predicted an explosion of lifestyles ("subcults") as diversity increases in post-industrial societies.^{[citation needed]} Pre-modern societies, he said, 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.

The term lifestyle in politics can often be used in conveying the idea that society be accepting of a variety of different ways of life---from the perspective that differences among ways of living are superficial, rather than existential. Lifestyle is also sometimes used pejoratively, to mark out some ways of living as elective or voluntary (e.g., "the homosexual lifestyle") as opposed to others that are considered mainstream, unremarkable, or normative.

Within anarchism, lifestylism is the view that an anarchist society can be formed by changing one's own personal activities rather than by engaging in class struggle.

In business, "lifestyles" provide a means by which advertisers and marketers endeavor to target and match consumer aspirations with products, or to create aspirations relevant to new products. Therefore marketers take the patterns of belief and action characteristic of lifestyles and direct them toward expenditure and consumption. These patterns reflect the demographic factors (the habits, attitudes, tastes, moral standards, economic levels and so on) that define a group. As a construct that directs people to interact with their worlds as consumers, lifestyles are subject to change by the demands of marketing and technological innovation.

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.