To build the economy we could have in Australia, we need to challenge outdated assumptions around the causes of our problems in society. Here Dr Katherine Trebeck explains the concept of lifestyle drift, and why it misses the real culprit: the economy.
The economy is a major upstream cause of many of the problems Australians face downstream. The economy creates the causes that compel certain behaviours, invoke certain reactions, and deliver harmful impacts.
Yet often the emphasis of policies and programs is choices and changes individuals needs to make. In the public health sphere, this shift in emphasis from the wider context to individual lifestyle choices has been referred to as ‘lifestyle drift’. Here are some of my thoughts on why there’s a need to move beyond it.
What lifestyle drift means
Firstly, let’s look at what lifestyle drift actually means. It’s a term used by public health scholars and as you may have suspected, it’s not as fun as it might sound. It’s what happens when those designing policies might understand the external conditions (upstream factors) that drive health inequalities, but when it comes to action, the focus drifts downstream to questions of lifestyle, where the individual is in the frame, rather than the economy.
Another way to think about the problem with such an approach is ‘wilting-plant-syndrome’, a concept described by poet and clinical psychologist Dr Sanah Ahsan. Ahsan wrote that ‘If a plant were wilting, we wouldn’t diagnose it with “wilting-plant-syndrome”; we would change its conditions’. ‘Wilting-plant-syndrome’ is seen all too often in policy and economic thinking today, where downstream individual action is seen as the problem, not the wider conditions causing the problem.
The consequence of thinking inherent in both lifestyle drift and wilting-plant-syndrome is that the onus of action is placed on individuals, as if they were separate and not touched by the wider dynamics wrought by policy and economic systems.
What lifestyle drift looks like
Health is an area where it is hard to avoid seeing the lifestyle drift phenomenon play out. As Kriznnik et al say ‘the main assumptions underpinning interventions to address health inequalities … remain focussed on individual responsibility’. For example, when people are struggling with their mental health, they are offered therapy or antidepressants. This might help someone manage, but it won’t address the challenges they face in their lives such as poverty, a hostile workplace, the stress of being unable to pay bills, or the anxiety of precarious housing. You can see a focus on individual action in a recent briefing on tackling obesity.
Lifestyle drift is also evident in a 2025 Australian Productivity Commission report calling for a National Prevention Investment Strategy. In all 95 pages of the report, the word “poverty” appeared only twice (once in a reference), and the word “inequality” only three times. To its credit, its list of primary prevention measures included economic support for families (while important, arguably transfers are also an after-the-fact response downstream). But in the same vein, it also described parenting education (where the onus is on the individual parents to change).
We Aussies aren’t the only ones at risk of wilting plant syndrome and lifestyle drift:
- A few years ago, the World Health Organisation published a list of ‘best buy’ interventions on non-communicable disease, which positioned the individual as the unit where change needs to happen (through education, taxes on unhealthy food etc). Poverty was mentioned only in passing and inequality ignored.
- In the UK ‘policies designed to reduce health inequalities’ largely assume that ‘human behaviour is a major determinant of health, and that behaviour is largely a matter of individual choice’. For example, a UK alcohol policy is described as largely directed to helping individuals make ‘healthy choices’.
These individualised framings cut through. For example, poor diets are often attributed to bad individual choices. Research in the UK found that Victorian-era notions of deserving and undeserving poor prevail, with the researcher observing that some providers of foodbanks depicted food charity as a ‘choice’, which ‘legitimat[ised] the classic deserving/undeserving divide while individualising food insecurity and obscuring the systemic issues’.
Shifting the blame for environmental harm
The shifting of responsibility to individuals, often by large corporations, is rife in environmental issues, from litter to the concept of a personal ‘carbon footprint’. For example:
- An ad launched in the US a few years ago showing an actor canoeing through polluted water, then walking toward a highway only to see someone throwing rubbish out their car window. The end of the ad states that ‘People start pollution. People can stop it’. This was part of the Keep America Beautiful campaign, an initiative designed and funded by packaging business, such as American Can Co, Owens-Illinois Glass Co, Coca-Cola and Dixie Cup.
- The term ‘litter bug’ was coined by the plastics industry, just as it was oil company BP that created the concept of an individual ‘carbon footprint’, with the carbon footprint calculator created in 2004 by a public relations firm working for BP.
How lifestyle drift dodges the real issue
The problem with all this focus on individuals is that overly emphasising individual action lets the real culprit off the hook: the economic system itself and the rules and players within it that create a misalignment with what people and planet need. It ignores the political decisions and deep-seated assumptions that have carved out the shape of the economy of today.
As scholars writing in the Lancet conclude, individualised framing absolves corporations and government of blame. It serves to ‘effectively [neutralize] the effects of social context and airbrushes out of the picture a number of important contextual agents and institutions—specifically the state, markets and industry’. Well-known epidemiologist Professor Michael Marmot and colleagues warn that: an ‘individualistic approach to health … is a convenient mechanism for those in and with power, and wider society, to abrogate responsibility for creating the conditions for a healthy society’.
Time to put the spotlight on the economy
The reality is that it is the economy that drives many of the challenges Australia confronts today. The economy is a major upstream cause of the many problems Australians face downstream. The economy creates the causes that compel certain behaviours, invoke certain reactions, and generate harmful impacts.
Take the unhealthy behaviours. Many are not so much a matter of free choice, but options taken when agency is bounded and curtailed. Sometimes people simply do not have the extent of autonomy and choice that the prevailing economic discourse, with its emphasis on individuals maximizing their own self-interest, might imply.
‘Causes of the causes’ is how Professor Michael Marmot describes the social pressures that drive harmful behaviours: such as reduced physical activity due to safety concerns, or stress leading to smoking or overeating. A leading authority on the social and economic determinants of health, Professor Sharon Friel, documents the various evidence of how and to what extent the economy matters to health. Socio-economic inequalities are critical factors: it was recently reported that one-fifth of ill-health in Australia could be avoided if everyone had the same socio-economic conditions as the top 20%.
So the story that needs to be told is how economic policies are deepening inequality, and how deliberate choices – like tax concessions for the wealthy, weakened unions, and the emergence of precarious work – have shifted wealth upward and eroded protection for workers, while increasing insecurity and instability for many. Discussion of outcomes needs to take account of how market logics and profit motives have reshaped access to basic needs in areas such as housing, education, and often health and care provision. This transfers risk from institutions to individuals and undermines collective support, and spurs an understandable response, people now look to personal insurance for support when sick and to their homes and share markets to provide a decent livelihood in their old age.
Conclusion: what would be better?
‘An indigenous analysis of the same thing would look more at the context to try and find out what actually happened.’ – Tyson Yunkaporta, Indigenous scholar and author
The alternative to lifestyle drift and wilting plant syndrome is looking upstream to how the economy operates: the terrain of jobs, what sort of work is paid for, ownership of firms, costs of goods and services, and provision of core services. Instead of just instructing and coaxing individuals to change, it means turning to the realm of the economy as a critical arena for prevention. It is the economy where risks such as poverty, precarious work, and homelessness, can be truly addressed, as opposed to simply patched up.
It means implementing policy instruments that ensure, for example:
- That people are paid enough, have job security and conditions that support a healthy life
- That profitability is a means, rather than a goal in its own right
- That economic activity is generated from the local up via community wealth building, rather than hoping in vain for it to trickle down
- That basic needs such as food, shelter, education, and health care are affordable
- That sources of unearned wealth such as inheritance and rent and land values are taxed more than income
- That economic activities which make money from people’s struggles or profit as a result of doing harm to the planet are, if not banned, at least marginalised
- Prices of goods and services reflect their true cost in terms of what it took to make them, both in environmental terms and via the people involved being compensated for their efforts
- That success is measured in ways that reflect what people and planet need
The economy we could have means grappling with the purpose, design, and delivery of the economy and resisting lifestyle drift. Fortunately, there is no shortage of ideas and practices that show what is possible.
Check out our series, ‘Building the economy we could have’ for more.