Lifestyle Gurus. Chris Rojek

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1 What is a Lifestyle Guru?

How to be among, and what to expect from, and rely upon, Others? These questions occur to every child, and are repeated, over and over again, in countless different settings, by every adult, for a lifetime. In part, the rise of today’s lifestyle gurus may be conceived as a response to these imperatives in the digital age. In this book, we use the term ‘lifestyle guru’ to refer to unlicensed native agents of awareness, positioned in conventional and social media, to offer emotional support, an identity matrix and pedagogy for self-discovery and well-being. By the term ‘unlicensed native’ we aim to highlight that lifestyle gurus are ordinary members of society, who possess limited, or no certified qualifications, and hence, no professional standing to claim expertise in emotional management, health, constitutional law and licensing matters. Lifestyle gurus employ a mixture of selective scientific knowledge, folk tradition and personal experience to offer alternative advice and guidance on medical, psychological and social problems afflicting others. The stance that they adopt is often dismissive of professional, elite knowledge and practice on the grounds that it under-values lay traditions and ordinary experience. While lifestyle gurus typically present themselves as anti-establishment, it would be an overstatement to propose that they are part of an anti-scientific movement. A sounder way of looking at things would be to describe them as generally adopting a selective, instrumental approach to science. Given that much scientific knowledge about lifestyle issues is conflicted, and often turns out on inspection to be tainted, lifestyle gurus cherry pick information to advance the profile and appeal of their own views. The media often collude in making these views newsworthy in an attempt to capture public attention. Lifestyle gurus embrace a broad range of editorial newsroom concerns from health to beauty, fitness, fashion, food, wealth, relationships and travel. They provide practical advice that people can apply in order to function more optimally and effectively under the guise of well-being. Against the implied remoteness of scientific and professional authority, with its lofty jargon that bespeaks insinuated superiority, and the uncomfortable rituals of privilege that distinguish it from habitual, mundane experience, lifestyle gurus propagate knowledge and applications that are a mixture of science, ordinary life experience, plain speaking and marginalised, discarded, or forgotten, ways and means of coping and wellness.

      Lifestyle gurus typically portray themselves as offering practical, no-nonsense advice on life issues. Using psychological concepts, they propagate a cult of perfectionism that mostly celebrates and affirms middle-class values. Although there are manifold inflections of this cult, at its core are four life goals:

The cult of perfection is part of the wider culture of achievement and high-status differentiation. It treats the goals of acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation as universally desirable. This is manifest in the exceptionally high number of lifestyle platforms dedicated to techniques of self-improvement and self-transformation, covering the topics of beauty, fitness, fashion, relationships, wellness, wealth and business success. It might be thought that questions of improving lifestyle immediately raise related social and economic questions of inclusion, equality, justice and social engineering. Be that as it may, the vast majority of lifestyle guru sites pass over these questions in seraphic silence. Instead, their typical approach is determinedly person-centred. They address an audience for whom the complexities of life have proved challenging with practical, plain speaking, oracular, non-hierarchical remedies. Gaining practical, positive self-knowledge is the bugle call rallying audiences to lifestyle communicators. Although most lifestyle gurus regularly participate in conferences, symposia and teach-ins, digital communication is the overwhelming and decisive point of exchange.

      Despite the strong ethos of non-hierarchy, and the deliberate emphasis upon empathy (co-partnership), accessibility (friendship) and complicity (against ‘the system’) between Communicators (gurus) and Communicants (audiences), the latent power dynamics typically privilege the former over the latter. The paradox of these lifestyle sites is that they generally claim to solve various challenges of complexity in life with simplicity. This is communicated to followers in three main ways: