"Styles style" and autobiographical projection

While Miss Self-Important's definition of "styles style" covers much of the lifestyle-journalism genre, I'm going to offer up a second definition, to cover the rest. Mine is as follows: A writer has had a certain experience, or found something to be true. But because an essay just observing something isn't journalism, the author is compelled to pretend that whichever thing feels true to them actually is true for people generally.

On some level, though, the author gets that this isn't the case. So the author compromises and insists that whichever thing is true, but only of those of a certain class/in certain regions. This will seem less obviously false than claiming whichever thing is true of absolutely everybody in the country-or-world, but may amount to, the author found some friends who've had the same experience. As if, if you give a disclaimer about how you're only talking about the privileged, problem solved, and it somehow doesn't matter that what you're describing isn't necessarily representative of any caste. Or there may be - oh, there will definitely be - a survey cited that doesn't exactly prove the point, but that provides the heft of the quantitative. Autobiographical projection? What are we calling this, then?

Example: Frank Bruni on personal trainers. Everybody has one. Except not everybody. Except kinda-sorta everybody. There are - Science! - more personal trainers than there used to be, but still not enough for it to be plausible that a significant number of Americans are being personally trained.

But one most gets the sense that Bruni's talking about Bruni and not a broader cultural phenomenon from this sentence: "Many food lovers I know intersperse their trainer-monitored calisthenics with lavish meals at the latest restaurant: one lunge forward, one waddle back." Bruni has written extensively about the impact being the NYT restaurant critic - his former job - had on his weight. But getting fat from "lavish meals at the latest restaurant" is something beyond first-world problems. It's... major-publication-restaurant-reviewer problems. (Yes, there's probably some hyper-elite dining out at glam places nightly, but if they're not in the food industry, they're more likely to just be picking at their food.)

The problem, as I see it, isn't that Bruni has written about his experiences with personal training. It's that he's expected to pretend that these experiences are shared more widely than he could possibly demonstrate.