Creativity Quote by Barbara Kruger

Kruger’s line lands like a tag slapped across a billboard: a refusal that’s also an accusation. “Living my life” is plain, bodily, unglamorous. “Buying a lifestyle” is slick, prepackaged, and—crucially—available for purchase. The sentence hinges on that pivot from being to consuming, turning identity into a receipt. It’s not a gentle self-help mantra; it’s a protest against the way late capitalism sells personality as an accessory.

The intent is classic Kruger: puncture the seductive grammar of advertising by borrowing its punchiness and flipping its message. Her work has long treated language as a battleground, where pronouns and imperatives (“you,” “we,” “buy,” “want”) discipline desire. Here, “lifestyle” is exposed as a corporate euphemism, a way to disguise class aspiration and social conformity as “choice.” The subtext: if you’re purchasing a lifestyle, someone else designed the template, set the price, and profits off your performance of it.

Context matters because Kruger’s practice emerged alongside the explosion of image culture—magazines, branding, TV—where consumption wasn’t just about objects but about the self you were supposed to become. Read now, it feels eerily contemporary: influencer aesthetics, wellness routines as status markers, “authenticity” packaged in affiliate links. The line works because it’s compact enough to sound like an ad, then detonates the premise of advertising: that you can purchase your way into a life that looks like living.