Giovanni Gaggia, CEO of Real Estate Services, said that lifestyle estates offer a unique blend of luxury living and community engagement.But the shanty-town lifestyle estates of informal settlements not only don't offer such "typical" features as golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, they also do not typically have indoor plumbing, sewerage, proper roads or electricity.
The estates typically offer several amenities, including golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, which cater to various interests and promote an active lifestyle.
They also offer a secure environment and well-maintained infrastructure to add to their appeal.
The advertising hype suggests that only an affluent lifestyle of conspicuous consumption qualifies as a lifestyle at all.
The earliest reference to "lifestyle" in the Oxford English Dictionary was 1915, and it is defined as
A style or way of living (associated with an individual person, a society, etc.); esp. the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life.
It only became popular in the late 1960s, however, when it was used mainly to contrast the lifestyles of the "hip" and the "straight". The hippie counterculture espoused different values from those of "straight" society, and expressed these values through different lifestyles.
One of the values that hippies eschewed was the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that was practised or aspired to by straight society.
The advertising industry, which was dedicated to promoting conspicuous consumption, fought back, and one of the ways it did so was by adopting hip jargon to promote products and services and sell them to the changing youth culture. "Lifestyle banking" was one of the earlier ones, illustrated with yachts and luxury cars.
Part of the countercultural lifestyle is, however, still reflected by my Collins Millennium Dictionary (does that make it a dictionary for "Millennials"?) which gives
lifestyle business a small business in which the owners are more anxious to pursue interests that reflect their lifestyle than to make more than a comfortable living.
When the term first became popular it was variously spelt as "life style", "life-style" or "lifestyle", depending on the house style (house-style, housestyle) of the publication concerned, but now the "lifestyle" spelling predominates.
The point to remember here is that a lifestyle of poverty is just as much a lifestyle as a lifestyle of affluence, no matter how much the advertising agencies would like us to believe otherwise.
Another point to remember is found in the OED definition: the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life
A lifestyle may be voluntary or involuntary.
The lifestyle of a prisoner is involuntary.
The lifestyle of a person living in an affluent "lifestyle estate" is voluntary. If you can afford to live in one, you can also afford not to live in one. And if you can afford not to live in one, you can also choose to avoid an affluent lifestyle, and choose rather to live an abstemious one.
For most people, lifestyle is a mixture of voluntary and involuntary. Inmates of institutions like boarding schools, hostels, communes, monasteries, old-age homes, etc may have varying degrees of choice whether to enter such institutions, but, once within them, they need to adopt features of the prescribed lifestyle or leave.
To some extent, this might be true of "lifestyle estates" as well. The lifestyle is prescribed and circumscribed, sometimes even more than the lifestyle of informal settlements. If you live in a "lifestyle estate" and start erecting shacks in your backyard to sub-let to others, you would soon discover the limits of freedom in a "lifestyle estate".
There are many ways in which lifestyle is determined by circumstances, such as wealth or poverty, ones upbringing, one's education or the lack of it. But some, like monks, choose voluntary poverty, and this was also the case with some in the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s.
Lifestyle is also linked to values. An authentic lifestyle reflects your values; an inauthentic lifestyle probably conflicts with your values, or perhaps reflects the values you actually hold rather than the values you profess.
Before the hippies came the beats, who didn't speak of lifestyle, though they knew what it was. Their term for what the hippies called "straight" society was "square", and as Lawrence Lipton put it in his book The Holy Barbarians (Lipton 1959:150):
The New Poverty is the disaffiliate’s answer to the New Prosperity. It is important to make a living. It is even more important to make a life. Poverty. The very word is taboo in a society where success is equated with virtue and poverty is a sin. Yet it has an honourable ancestry. St. Francis of Assisi revered poverty as his bride, with holy fervor and pious rapture. The poverty of the disaffiliate is not to be confused with the poverty of indigence, intemperance, improvidence or failure. It is simply that the goods and services he has to offer are not valued at a high price in our society. As one beat generation writer said to the square who offered him an advertising job: ‘I’ll scrub your floors and carry out your slops to make a living, but I will not lie for you, pimp for you, stool for you or rat for you.’ It is not the poverty of the ill-tempered and embittered, those who wooed the bitch goddess Success with panting breath and came away rebuffed. It is an independent, voluntary poverty.But for more on that see here: It's Cool to be Hip, but not Hip to be Cool.
Interestingly enough, though advertisers frequently misuse "lifestyle", the original meaning still lives and it has not been completely skunked. If you look here, you can see that when "lifestyle" is used as a modifier, the most common usage is "lifestyle changes", followed by "lifestyle choices" and "lifestyle factors".
