The Decline of "Lifestyle?"

About a decade ago I remarked the extreme stupidity of that word "lifestyle" on this blog--remarking in particular its use's tendency to reflect a combination of extreme privilege and extreme obtuseness, and in particular a notion that an upper-middle-class-to-rich existence with all its options is somehow the norm for how everyone lives that one can call the prevailing version of "Let them eat cake."

It seems that at the time the word "lifestyle" was still getting more popular, certainly to go by Google's handy Ngram function. The word's use was relatively uncommon for most of the period covered, but its popularity certainly seems to have grown since mid-century, and risen pretty steadily from the 1960s on. Still accounting for only 0.0000027% of the words in the Ngram function registered in 1961, it had exploded to 0.0013% of those words in 2011--usage rising 13 percent a year, year on year, for fifty years, to produce a mind-boggling five hundred-fold increase over half a century, people literally using the word five hundred times as much as they had a half century earlier. And by 2016 it was more popular still (with a 0.0014% score).

Since then there has been a decline in usage, to about 0.0011% in 2017-2019--falling almost as quickly as it surged during that period. Given how long that usage has been building up this does not change the picture much, but it can seem a reversal nonetheless.

Might this drop be meaningful? I can't help but notice that it came in the wake of the Great Recession--as the long-declining prospects of America's "middle class" seemed to collapse. It comes, too, in the wake of changes in political rhetoric that cannot but seem associated. Neoliberalism remains the touchstone for society's elite in economic and social matters--but even so 2016 saw a Republican running on a nationalist-producerist economic platform land his party's nomination and enter the White House and roil world trade with his subsequent moves, all as at the other end of the political spectrum the long-anathematized word "socialism" has become speakable in American life as something other than a hyperbolic epithet. To do so still scandalizes not only the right but the center, even when one is not entirely sure what the speaker actually meant by it, but all the same, things are different here from what they were a decade ago.

Amid all that it would be all too predictable for that unbelievably inane word to finally begin losing favor.