Achieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.

The body is thus not simply an 'entity', but is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events.

A lifestyle involves a cluster of habits and orientations, and hence has a certain unity - important to a continuing sense of ontological security - that connects options in a more or less ordered pattern. (...) [T]he selection or creation of lifestyles is influenced by group pressures and the visibility of role models, as well as by socioeconomic circumstances.

The sustaining of life, in a bodily sense as well as in the sense of psychological health, is inherently subject to risk.

Apocalypse has become banal, a set of statistical risk parameters to everyone's existence.

The body is an object in which we are all privileged, or doomed, to dwell, the source of feelings of well-being and pleasure, but also the site of illnesses and strains. (...) [I]t is an action-system, a mode of praxis, and its practical immersion in the interactions of day-to-day life is an essential part of the sustaining of a coherent sense of self-identity.

The difficulties of living in a secular risk culture are compounded by the importance of lifestyle choices.