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.
Anthony GiddensThe body is thus not simply an 'entity', but is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events.
Anthony GiddensAchieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.
Anthony GiddensThe 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.
Anthony GiddensThe body is in some sense perennially at risk. The possibility of bodily injury is ever-present, even in the most familiar of surroundings.
Anthony GiddensAbstract systems depend on trust, yet they provide none of the moral rewards which can be obtained from personalised trust, or were often available in traditional settings from the moral frameworks within which everyday life was undertaken. Moreover, the wholesale penetration of abstract systems into daily life creates risks which the individual is not well placed to confront; high-consequence risks fall into this category. Greater interdependence, up to and including globally independent systems, means greater vulnerability when untoward events occur that affect those systems as a whole.
Anthony Giddens