Living Alone, Consuming Alone?

Abstract

The previous chapter indicated variation in whether and how people living alone consciously express themselves through their home and showed that practices of ‘consuming’ the home often remember and display relationships to family and friends. This chapter extends the discussion through a focus on the consumption of food and holidays, topics that provide particularly interesting insight into the interdependence of the self and social relationships, as seen and managed in the subjectivity and social practices of people living alone. The environmental consequences of consumption were not explicitly raised in our study, but the interlinking of high carbon-emitting systems, food and holiday consumption were occasionally spontaneously acknowledged and this is also noted in the chapter.