Sociology of everyday life

Everyday life, daily life or routine life comprises the ways in which people typically act, think, and feel on a daily basis. Everyday life may be described as mundane, routine, natural, habitual, or normal.

Human diurnality means most people sleep at least part of the night and are active in daytime. Most eat two or three meals in a day. Working time (apart from shift work) mostly involves a daily schedule, beginning in the morning. This produces the daily rush hours experienced by many millions, and the drive time focused on by radio broadcasters. Evening is often leisure time. Bathing every day is a custom for many.

Beyond these broad similarities, lifestyles vary and different people spend their days differently. Nomadic life differs from sedentism, and among the sedentary, urban people live differently from rural folk. Differences in the lives of the rich and the poor, or between factory workers and intellectuals, may go beyond their working hours. Many women spend their day in activities greatly different from those of men, and everywhere children do different things than adults.

Everyday life is a key concept in cultural studies and is a specialized subject in the field of sociology. Some argue that, motivated by capitalism and industrialism's degrading effects on human existence and perception, writers and artists of the 19th century turned more towards personal reflection and the portrayal of everyday life represented in their writings and art to a noticeably greater degree than in past works, for example Renaissance literature's interest in hagiography and politics. Other theorists dispute this argument based on a long history of writings about daily life which can be seen in works from Ancient Greece, Medieval Christianity and the Catholic Enlightenment.

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