Leisure theory

• Welcome to my musings on the nature and purpose of leisure, and the various forms it takes. 

These days there is a lot of talk about work-life balance and the importance of allocating time to things that take us into spaces where all those responsible, functional, and instrumental things we need to do are temporally discarded, and imagination, play, and reflection take over. There are also claims that leisure is not a luxury, but rather a basic human right. This makes a lot of sense, but before we make a firm judgement on the matter, it would be prudent to dig a bit deeper into the leisure experience, and explain what leisure entails, and what makes it so highly valued by so many people.

For most people on this planet leisure is very often a relatively passive affair, where doing nothing in one’s spare time is just as legitimate as running a marathon, climbing Mt Everest, or making a chest of drawers. But doing nothing also has a catastrophic weakness built into it. There is no grand story to tell at the next social encounter. But a long walk up a challenging outdoors incline is something else. It has excitement, a heroic incident to re-tell, a traumatic accident to recite, and a glorious rush of adrenaline to recount. I then thought that mountaineering, skydiving and other similar adventure activities are really the ultimate leisure experiences. But I also understood that securing a smart TV at a bargain-basement price at a Myer department store Boxing Day sale can also deliver highly valued outcomes.

I was left wondering what leisure is about, and whether it is just a word that signals the time we spend unimpeded by the demands of work. Having realised I know less about the nuances of leisure than I had previously thought, I decided to secure the assistance of experts who have grappled with the idea of leisure over a long period of time. 

Just what is leisure?

Whatever way you look at it, leisure occupies a significant proportion of peoples’ lives and has for thousands of years. I decided to begin my exploration by seeing what James Suzman had to say in his 2020 book Work: A History of How We spend Our Time (Bloomsbury Circus).

According to James, a social anthropologist, primates, who, having foraged and eaten, would spend the rest of their time ‘sleeping and lazily grooming one another’. James found that hunter gatherers were similarly disposed to doing ‘nothing much’ a lot of the time. According to James they had a lot of free time because they were ‘not ridden with a whole host of nagging desires beyond meeting their immediate needs’. 

But a few thousand year later things have changed, and in twenty first century, the leisure options are massive, and were superbly documented by Robert Stebbins in his influential 2007 monograph, Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Time (Routledge)  In a single day it might include reading newspapers, sipping coffee, window-shopping, visiting art galleries, travelling to wine shows, doing aerobics classes, playing netball, and attending professional football games. These activities are as disparate as one could imagine, but they all share the common feature of being done in non-paid-work-time settings and spaces, and which, for the most part, have been done willingly, and without coercion.

They often provide memorable experiences by taking us out of our comfortable everyday routines and re-locating us in hyper-real spaces and ‘landscapes of pleasure’ where our senses are bombarded with colour, noise, and excitement. At other times they may be little more than interludes of mild excitement in an otherwise drab existence. And according to John Hannigan in his 1999 book Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profits in the Postmodern Metropolis (Routledge)they can be contrived, offensive and “inauthentic” to outsiders, but a source of pride to participants. John went on to say that in today’s hyper-modern world, where identity is shaped outside of work as much as it is at work, every leisure experience becomes a story to be rehashed, rehearsed, and retold.

In short, our spare time has become a repository for warehousing and re-imagining experiences, and - in more recent times with the advent of on-line social media networks – an instrument for gaining attention and having fleeting touches of fame. James Webster had a bit to say on this issue in his 2016 publication The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age (The MIT Press)

Leisure time

These days leisure is highly valued, and significant amounts of time, money, and energy are allocated to it. In western industrial nations adults spend on average, around 15%-20% of each day on social and leisure activities, with more women at the lower end, and more men at the top end. As a point of comparison, paid work occupies 18—25% of adult male time, but for women the average falls between 8% and 15%. When it comes to unpaid work, it is 5%-12% for men, but for women it oscillates between 15% and 20%. Interestingly, the most time-absorbing activity is personal care and body maintenance, which accounts for just over 45% of nearly everyone’s time. Most of it is taken up by sleeping. If you want to follow up on these figures, I suggest you begin with Jacques Charmes (2015). Time Use Across the World: Findings of a World Compilation of Time Use Surveys (United Nations Human Development Report Office, pp. 78-84).

This all interesting and OK, but it is just the beginning. There is a lot more to be said how we use leisure to make our lives more meaningful and manageable.

Bob Stewart

17 October 2025.

The notion of leisure is more complicated than I had initially thought and raises a whole lot of questions. For instance, what exactly do we mean by leisure; why do people spend so much of their spare time doing things that look, at first glance, ephemeral, trivial, and often decadent; and finally, where does sport – a high intensity leisure experience - rank within the hierarchy of leisure activities? And what makes leisure the antithesis of work? These questions do not have quick and ready answers, but a good way of finding out more about this surprisingly elusive concept is to examine its history, and in particular the role it has played in daily living for the past 150 years or so.

Aristotle 

In getting a grip on leisure, it makes good conceptual sense to think of it as things people do when they are not at work. The idea that ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ are distinct entities goes back to the ancient Greeks nearly 3,000 years ago, and was encapsulated by Sebastian De Grazia in 1962 in Of Time, Work, and Leisure (Twentieth Century Publishing). Aristotle noted that just like peace was the anthesis of war, leisure was an antidote to labour. He also declared that while leisure was recuperative and therapeutic, it could be wasteful and misused. When commenting on Sparta and the affluence that came with its military successes, Aristotle noted that the “growth of luxuriousness, avarice, mal distribution of property”, and a female population “abandoned to license and luxury” caused “more confusion than the enemy”. For the most part, though, Aristotle viewed leisure positively, since it represented not just time away from manual, sweaty toil, but also a means of “cultivating the mind”. He was ambivalent, though, about sport and games occupying leisure spaces, since he viewed them as preparation for war, rather than tools for reflection, contemplation, and re-energising the soul.

Trevalyan and Thompson

As it turned out, nearly every civilisation – be it hunter-gatherer, agricultural, or urban – provided space for leisure, although it varied between classes, and was not always distributed equally. The differences were especially evident in England in the lead-up to the industrial revolution in the early 18th century. In 1960, social historian, George Trevalyan, writing in An Illustrated English Social History: The Eighteenth Century (Longmans), painted a highly romanticised picture of leisure amongst the upper classes. Adventurous types explored the mountains while more sedentary types spent time at the seaside in search of relaxation, salty sea-air, and a ‘dip into the waves’. Fox hunting was particularly popular with the landed gentry, with shooting for ‘wild foul’ not far behind. In addition, the newly invented game of cricket enlarged its geographic and social boundaries. According to George, ‘nobleman gentlemen and clergy’ frequently played with and against ‘cobbler's, tinkers… and their companions’. George was quick to point out that many members of Britain’s upper classes also enjoyed drinking and gambling, often very heavily.

George’s take on aristocratic leisure was replicated by Stella Margetson, in her 1969 book Leisure and Pleasure in the 19th Century (Cassell & Company) when she said:

"Leisure among the upper classes was a rule of life; no gentleman ever boasted of doing anything, [and] no lady ever wanted to be caught doing what could be done for her."

Edward Thompson, on the other hand, examined the pastimes of the English working classes, which were there for all to read in his classic 1964 study, The Making of the English Working Class (Victor Gollancz). The first thing that caught Edward’s eye was their vigour, enthusiasm, and occasional playfulness. There was also a lot ‘cursing and swearing’, with violence to match.

According to Edward: 

"Dog fighting and cock fighting were common… it was also common at feast times to see several rings formed in which men striped to their bare skin, would fight sometimes by the hour together, till the combatants were not recognizable."

Other working-class pastimes were relatively benign. Fairs were especially popular, at which a ‘fraternity of pedlars, card-shapers, real or pretended gypsies, ballad-mongers and hawkers were in attendance. Quoits, wrestling, shooting with long-bows, and more sedentary activities like card playing, pigeon-racing, canary-breeding, and tulip growing were also popular pastimes.

Both George and Edward noted the stark difference between social classes. The upper class had the time and the money to engage in more sedate and esoteric activities, while the working class had to make do with the meagre resources they had at their disposal. The motives were also quite different. Whereas the upper classes were driven by the desire for easy pleasure, and the opportunity to re-affirm their superior social position, the working classes used their leisure time to escape the drudgery of work, and secure ready-made amusement by engaging in relatively uncomplicated, and sometimes blood-thirsty physical contests. And, unlike Aristotle's ancient Greece, leisure was used only occasionally to cultivate the mind. One of those occasions was evident in France during the middle the nineteenth century when older citizens ‘promenaded the galleries… showing off the pleasure of aimless strolling. This point was highlighted by Frank Trentmann in his 2016 tomb, Empire of Things: How we Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty First(Allen Lane). At one level, these ‘flaneurs’ were sharp observers of everyday urban life, but to others they were idle bystanders pretending to ‘men-about-town’.

Elias

During the final stages of the pre-industrial period, some of the more violent leisure behaviour diminished as evangelical Christianity re-shaped the character of ‘19th century artisans.it was all part of a civilizing process identified by German sociologist Norbert Elias in his 1939 book, The Civilising Process (Wiley-Blackwell). He found that as western society became more urbanised, modernised, and interdependent, social order and etiquette took on greater importance. As a result, people more assiduously self-regulated their conduct in both the private and public spheres. In addition, an ever-expanding merchant middle-class used their entrepreneurial ingenuity to build a pattern of self-consciously contrived leisure around the consumption of the goods they had helped to manufacture.

Veblen 

As the industrial revolution progressed, one of the most influential commentators on the relationship between work and production on one hand, and leisure and consumption on the other, was Thorstein Veblen, an American scholar and social critic who said it all in his famously provocative 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford University Press). Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, he focussed his attention on what he labelled the “leisure class”, and the spending, parading, and posturing that went with it. Thorstein began his analysis by defining leisure as the ‘non-productive consumption of time’. While he believed that leisure was the antithesis of work, he also argued that not everyone had the capacity to pursue it. Instead, leisure was the preserve of a business elite operating in an economic and social structure that allowed for the private ownership of property and capital. According to Thorstein, owners of property and capital had the capability to do two things. The first was to use their property to create a business, employ others to get work done, and invest surplus funds into growing the business. The second was to save part of the business’ annual surplus and spend it on things that were remote from the workplace. Under these conditions the owners of property and their beneficiaries could use their accumulated capital and wealth to buy commodities that not only delivered comfort and pleasure, but also signified honour and status, and conferred on them a “blameless social standing”. Thorstein noted that “in order to gain and hold the esteem of men it was not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power”. It was also crucial to provide evidence of this esteem, and for Thorstein the exemplar was the display of ostentatious leisure, since it signified a separation from every day “industrial processes”, and typified a concern with thoughtful, “beautiful and ennobling” activity. For Thorstein, then, the underlying function of leisure wasn’t about amusement, recuperating from work, reflecting on one’s toil, embracing beautiful things, or engaging in playful activity, it was, instead, a means of “gaining the respect of others”. According to Thorstein, leisure was wasted on idleness, and was far more potent when directed to the “conspicuous consumption of valuable goods which could be used to “enhance the reputability of gentlemen”.

Freud

Sigmund Freud found Thorstein’s analysis tantalising but preferred to highlight leisure’s capacity for pleasure and fun rather than confirming one’s social standing. In his 1930 book Civilisation and its Discontents (W. W. Norton), Sigmund argued, amongst other things, that our existence began as spontaneous play – ‘a programme of the pleasure principle’ - and while the ego attempted to ‘cage’ it at every turn, it could never be fully repressed. At the same time, Sigmund’s approach to leisure fitted neatly within Thorstein’s notion of conspicuous consumption, since it utilised ‘bourgeois’ ways of thinking to show how pleasure was associated with the possession of valued objects.” Thus, Sigmund understood that leisure, pleasure, and possessions were inexorably linked, with pleasure and play representing the unrepressed child, and the desire for possessions reflecting responsible adulthood with all its moral and physical constraints. But, unlike Thorstein, he argued that conspicuous consumption would not be confined to the affluent and educated class for long. His prediction proved true, and soon after the great war ended in 1918, hedonistic leisure began to dominate the behaviour of every social class, with the ‘roaring twenties’ being a benchmark period for organised entertainment and amusement amongst the middle and lower classes.

Durkheim 

Emile Durkheim, a French anthropologist, eschewed Thorstein’s view that conspicuous consumption was the key driver of social behaviour, while also taking a different slant on the role of leisure in newly emerging industrial societies. Adopting a view of society that merged the spiritualistic with the mechanistic, he argued that work and leisure were brought together by two factors, first, a functional interdependence that arose from the division of labour, and second, a fragile relationship between the need of individuals to satisfy their egoistic desires, and society’s need for social order and collective stability. Writing in 1933 in The Division of Labour in Society (Free Press), Emile noted that while social order, collective stability, and “a unitary coherent aggregate ...of the mass of individuals” were essential for the orderly functioning of working life, it was also essential for people to be liberated from the restrictive armour of everyday life. To this end, he observed that, traditionally, societies used religion as a way of escaping into a world where irrationality, fantasy, spontaneity and ritual were dominant. However, with the emergence of industrialisation and greater urbanisation, Emile contended that a variety of leisure activities that had no intimate link to religion were more generally used by “the masses’ to “excite a state of effervescence and sometimes even of delirium’.

Viereck

Durkheim’s views about the mass use of leisure were contested by the American historian, Peter Viereck. In 1956, in of his best-known books, The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Modern America (Capricorn), Peter argued that the people he observed had been turned into ‘massman’, having been pressured into conformity by the ‘fast tempo of American industrial life’ during the 1930s and 1940s. According to Peter, these ‘over-adjusted’ men had lost the capacity for simple enjoyment, having been swallowed up by a suffocating suburban conformity. 

Hannigan

American sociologist, John Hannigan, did not share Peter’s dismal caricature of working people’s relationship with leisure. As part of a 1998 study into the post-industrial city as an entertainment hub, which was published under title Fantasy City: Pleasure and profits in the Postmodern Metropolis (Routledge), he explored the place of leisure in urban centres in the early part of the twentieth century. Like Sigmund and Emile, he noted that the pursuit of organised leisure had spread to the lower classes, which was mainly due to the initiatives of entertainment entrepreneurs, who he described as ‘merchants of leisure’. Previously, few entertainment activities crossed class borders, and even when they did – with trotting races and boat regattas being universally popular - the ‘more affluent patrons were careful to maintain their social distance’. John found that in the 35 years between 1895 and 1930, city life was transformed by a massive infrastructure spend on ‘commercialised leisure’ that included ‘amusement parks, theatres, night clubs and cabaret, baseball stadiums, ballrooms, burlesque houses, storefront nickelodeons, and grand movie palaces’. The city was becoming ‘as much a place of play as a place of work’.

Huizinga

In the 1940s the Dutch philosopher and educator, Johan Huizinga, took a more idealistic and romantic approach to the role leisure plays in society, all of which is enthusiastically documented in his famous exploration of play in his 1947 classic, Homo Ludens, (Routledge and Kegan). As far as he was concerned, leisure was essentially about unstructured, creative activity that was, unlike Thorstein’s theory of leisure, unrelated to either production or consumption. Leisure was thus the antithesis of work-related-activity, and sharply divorced from any form of market transaction. Like Sigmund, he argued that the antecedent of leisure was play, which involved the voluntary and spontaneous use of free time, where its need was governed by the anticipated stimulation and the sensual pleasure it was expected to bring. According to Johan, play, unlike work, was a “voluntary activity”, was never imposed by “physical necessity or moral duty” and was “never a task’. He believed that play was “freedom” since it involved “stepping out of real-life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own”. Play was set apart from ordinary life in that it “stands outside the immediate satisfactions of wants and appetites”, and as such became an “interlude” and “intermezzo” that ‘adorns life” and amplifies our existence. Johan’s Huizinga’s views on play were shared by American anthropologist, John Pfeiffer. Writing in his 1969 book, The Emergence of Man (Harper and Row, John argued that its emphasis on exploration, creativity, imagination, pretending, and acting, made it the obvious precursor to games and contests.

So far so good. We have now broadened our discussion of leisure by including references to pleasure, fun, spontaneity, and play, with the emergence of commercialised urban-based leisure thrown into the mix. So, is that all there is? No, it isn’t. We are not even halfway there yet.

Bob Stewart

18 October 2025.

The evidence suggests that leisure has been part of the human experience for ever and a day, although some of us have had more opportunities to practice it than others. Hunter gathering and other self-sufficient societies had lot of it, but with the advance of civilisation and the formalisation of production in factory-style settings during the industrial revolution, working people’s free time was squeezed at every turn. But this was not a problem for everyone. By the 19th century the conspicuous use of large slabs of leisure time became the fashionable thing to do amongst the wealthy upper classes.

It was also clear that leisure served many purposes. It signified who you were, and what you stood for, it was an escape from the oppressive world or work, it provided fleeting but highly satisfying pleasure, and delivered the time and place to play or just ‘be’. It also enabled people to reflect on worldly matters and enact an assortment of myths, rituals, and related religious ceremonies. By the 1920s a huge entertainment industry had also emerged, which gave the leisure experience a new commercial edge.

Leisure was a bit of a side issue for most social critics during the nineteenth century, but this all changed after World War 2 had ended. Beginning in the late 1940s commentators legitimised leisure as a serious topic for analysis by not only acknowledging its therapeutic and free-play role (as Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, and Johan Huizinga had done), but by also linking it to work in the way that Thorstein Veblen had envisaged. Thus, as well as an antidote to the stresses of the workplace, leisure was viewed as an instrument for social advancement. In the USA industrialisation began to re-structure society, dominate the lives of white-collar workers, and increasingly shape their persona and behaviour. Leisure took on a whole new meaning from here on in.

As the 1950s unfolded, and the modern industrial world matured, people faced a vast array of choices about what education to get, where to work, where live, who to marry, what club to join, and what recreational activities to engage in. While in the early part of the twentieth century people’s ‘character’ were formed, and their choices constrained by tradition, strong parental discipline, and shaming, in the new, post-WW2 world of commerce, bureaucracy, and suburbanisation, traditional family life and the authority of parents had lost their cultural clout. Instead, people were given permission – as well as the space -to establish their own sense of who they, what they wanted to be, and ultimately, the shape of their ‘character’.

Riesman 

A particularly influential book around this time was David Riesman’s 1950 publication The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Doubleday Anchor Books). According to David, a lawyer, academic and political scientist, two new ‘types’ of individuals emerged; the inner-directed person (IDP) and the outer-directed person (ODP). While IDPs shaped their character by observation and introspection, ODPs got their signals from a ‘far wider circle’, often through frantic acts of social modelling. The key socialising constraints were also different, with shame no longer of any great consequence. For IDPs guilt was the corralling force, while for ODPs, it was anxiety. Moreover, the behaviour of ODPs was increasingly driven by the need to fit in, measure up, secure approval, and not offend. Their social position depended on the capacity to meet the “transitory expectations” of others. According to Riesman, outer-directed character types spent most of their spare time on socially approved away-from home activities like country club membership, scout leadership, and charity work. ODPs also gravitated to pursuits that reflected an ’escape upward’ where leisure practices like theatre going and holidaying in fashionable places mirrored their grand aspirations and readiness to conform. IDPs, on the other hand, were, because they were not as strongly bound by the need for acceptance and respectability, quite comfortable escaping downward as well as up. So, while they visited old cathedrals, ancient works of art, and other significant historical sites, they also immersed themselves in ‘dime novels, cockfighting, trotting races, and barbershop song’. 

While David acknowledged the social value of leisure, he believed that some forms of leisure were more valuable than others. He was critical of the ‘joyless’ and desperate things young people did in their spare-time and could not understand how so many adults could lead such aimless lives. He hinted that sport was often close to being aimless. He reckoned that, in these instances, a good dose of ‘self-improvement’ projects would not go astray.

 At the same time, he understood that there was ‘nothing wrong with lying on the beach and relaxing’. But, in a moment of guilt, he conceded that it was perfectly reasonable, and mostly preferable, for people ‘to be productive in their spare time’. This utilitarian view of leisure had gained a lot of traction during the 1940s, when it was seen as the perfect opportunity to become creative, immerse oneself in the arts, and ‘round out the personalities.' In short, leisure should be ‘used wisely’.

Interestingly, the growing prevalence of outer-directed - but frequently anxious -character types during the 1950s coincided with the introduction of the world’s first mass-consumption tranquiliser. The biggest selling brand during the 1950s was MIltown, which quickly became the most popular prescription drug in the USA. In her 2009 book, The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilisers (Basic Books), Andrea Tone referred to a promotional brochure at the time which noted that “when the virile drive for advancement...causes acute stress...the physician must attempt to change the patient’s outlook on life...through pharmacotherapy’. Andrea also cited a pamphlet that advocated “the tranquilisation of breadwinners who returned home too keyed up to enjoy the affections of a loving spouse or children”. It followed that aspiring to something more, seeking approval, and fitting in, came at a cost. 

Whyte

The need for acceptance and respectability, and the conformity it bred, was also examined by journalist and social commentator William Whyte, when writing about the emergence of bureaucracy in corporations and the civil service. In his popular 1956 book, The Organisation Man (Penguin Books), William explored the ways in which organisational change created a need for white-collar, university-trained technocrats with a standardised bundle of skills that combined technical virtuosity with social conformity. William explained this structural shift by noting how the underlying ideology of modern industrial society had changed from a belief in the Protestant Ethic into a belief in the Social Ethic.  Whereas the Protestant Ethic valued “hard work, thrift and competitive struggle”, the Social Ethic was dominated by a belief in “the group as the source of creativity”, and “belongingness as the ultimate need of the individual”. In expanding on what he saw as this new “utopian faith”, he reckoned that within this ideology the following view was common:

"Man (and woman) exists as a unit of society...he is isolated (and) meaningless...only as he collaborates with others does he become worthwhile, for by sublimating himself he helps produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts...there should be then, no conflict between man and society... and what we think of as conflicts are (just) misunderstandings ... (and) breakdowns in communication."

William saw the organisation as the driving force of this new dominant ideology and suggested that it had captured the commitment of professional white-collar workers because it meshed the individual need for achievement with the social need for harmony. While he did not specifically discuss the implications of the Social Ethic for leisure practice, but he did note that the centre of the organisation man’s life was now the suburbs, where household consumption would drive domestic activity, and where hi-fi sets and air conditioners would be “turned into necessities”.

William also noted that frugality had been devalued, and that daily experiences were now centred on the neighbourhood and the school, where “webs of friendship” weaved their way across communities. Like David, William found that a lot of free time was taken up with school committees, parent groups, and moving children around. Apart from walking the dog, and ‘playing baseball with his kids’, sports and hobbies did not rate highly in William's world of the organisation man and suburban conformity. Like Peter Viereck, William concluded that the executive class had been seduced by the American dream of buying a home, raising a family, building a career, and settling down.

Packard 

Vance Packard, like William Whyte, was fascinated by the dominance of the corporation in American life in the 1950s and 1960s, and wrote several books on the topic, including The Hidden Persuaders (Penguin Books) in 1961. But, unlike William, he saw something else going on that was equally significant: the frantic rush of consumers to buy things that confirmed - in their view at least -their sense of who they thought they were, what they wanted to be, and what other people were likely to think of them. This overwhelming desire to build a sense of self through the consumption of commodities was put into sharp relief when Packard revealed that advertisers understood that nothing appealed more to needy consumers than an image of themselves.

Consequently, anyone who wished for positive peer-reinforcement, was seen to be susceptible to messages that that reinforced their idealised identity and self-image. Even in the mundane case of petrol – or gasoline, as it was called in the USA - it was found that-the big tough, high octane gas was most attractive to ambitious professionals with masculinity issues to prove, while the value-for-money, no frills gas was preferred by “folksy”... “chatty types” of people from “small towns’ with a preference for “warm colours”... [who]..  needed to have their likeability confirmed and regularly engaged in outdoor recreation.

Vance found strong links between consumption and status, especially in the domestic domain, where the home became a ‘showcase’ for good taste and culture. Vance observed that a display of ‘antiques, old glassware, [and] leather-bound books… elicited envious glances, while a well-established library signified a family of ‘high intellectual attainment, and at least some affluence’. Vance also discovered that people’s consumption activities were driven deep-seated needs as well as the immediate desire to buy something that did the job, so to speak. They were seeking not just functional objects, but also emotional security and the need for reassurance, an opportunity to express their creativity, an outlet for confirming their sexual/gendered identity, a pathway for exploring their ancestral roots, and confirmation that their family would be financially secure after their ‘passing’. Leisure provided the ideal space for making these things happen.

Scitovsky 

Tibor Scitovsky, an American economist, was, like Packard, acutely aware of the growing materialism that became so visible in the 1950 and 1960s. But, unlike Vance, he was disenchanted with the products created from what was generally seen to be “technical and economic progress”. Writing in his 1976 book, The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction (Oxford University Press), Tibor argued that the increasing levels of shoddiness and harm that came with the delivery of many commodities led people to question their patterns of consumption and the choices they had made.

 Tibor argued that the increasing levels of shoddiness and harm that came with the delivery of many commodities led people to question their patterns of consumption and the choices they had made. For the defenders of the market system and free enterprise this was a confounding situation to be in, since it suggested it may take more than millions of autonomous choices – which is what the market can effortlessly do - to secure the best production and consumption outcomes for society as a whole. On this issue Tibor concluded that viewing the market as a “voting machine” where dollars spent was just like votes cast, hid a fundamental flaw. According to Scitovsky the consumer sovereignty that was supposed to characterise free-enterprise economies was really a “plutocracy’ – that is, the rule of the rich – where “each consumer’s influence on what gets produced” depended on how much they earned.

 Tibor conceded that economies of scale and mass production would lead to lower prices and mass consumption, but this, in his view, effectively led to “mob rule” where the lowest common denominator would decide what got produced. And even worse, according to Tibor, while a cheaper product would make it “accessible to all”, it would also ‘discriminate against more sophisticated taste”, and consequently “pull down the level of the public’s average taste”.

Having examined the patterns of consumption in industrial societies, Scitovsky identified two key reasons for its exponential growth. First, it provided stimulation and novelty, and was therefore the ideal antidote to boredom. Scitovsky also reckoned competitive sports and games were great antidotes to boredom. The second driver of consumption was the desire to seek pleasure and secure comfort. Scitovsky argued that pleasure and comfort were closely linked, since “if comfort is the avoidance of discomfort, and pleasure is the feeling associated with the relief of discomfort, then anything that ends a situation of discomfort will both give pleasure and leave comfort in its wake”. Fair enough.

At the same time, comfort and pleasure were both linked to arousal. Whereas comfort was all about an equilibrium or optimal level of arousal somewhere between discomfort and excitement, pleasure was mainly about a change in arousal that created tension and excitement that gravitated to the optimal. Tibor found that recreation, and especially sports and holidays, provided consistent stimulation and pleasure, and would therefore be high on the preference list of consumers. He also noted that in the USA at least, the residual impact of the Protestant and Puritan work ethic mitigated against the maximisation of pleasures from some commodities, food being one important item.

He also observed that while millions of dollars went into training for work and improving labour productivity, virtually none went into training for leisure and improving the pleasures to be secured from consumption. He concluded that societies that did not enable their members to maximise consumption – and thus enhance the leisure experience, were the worse off because of it. 

Marx

Tibor blamed Karl Marx for the modern-day tendency for citizens to value work over leisure. Tibor reckoned this was because Karl – writing 170 years ago – had implicitly adopted the Protestant, Puritan ethic by asserting that work was the “main source of worldly satisfaction”. Karl argued that “only in being productively active can man make sense of his life”. For Karl, work was an act of “self-creation” and the “most meaningful expression of human energy”. So, in an idealised world Karl saw little value in the consumption of leisure and referred to it as nothing more than ‘commodity fetishism'. 

But Karl was also pragmatic enough to understand that in a capitalist world, the “true realm of freedom “resided in what was effectively the leisure time of workers. And what is more, this condition could only be secured once the necessities of life had been secured through the alienating labour processes imposed by exploitative capitalist enterprises. In short, the alienation of labour was made slightly more tolerable by the opportunity to engage in leisure activities and pursuits, no matter how frivolous or ephemeral they might be. 

Wow! I never thought a discussion of leisure could be both so turgid and so dispiriting. I concluded that leisure was valuable only in so far as it provided time to manage the anxiety, boredom, and/or guilt bought on by having to conform to the stultifying social demands of the workplace, the household, and the neighbourhood. I was also shaken by Tibor’s claim that leisure was poorly managed because citizens had never been trained in how to use it properly.  I did, however, like the idea of people participating in leisure education programs in their spare time as a means of enhancing the quality of their non-work experiences. 

Bob Stewart

19 October 1925    

The 1970s were turbulent times, with a lot of economic and cultural change occurring. What’s more, lot of people who thought they knew something about leisure, work and play in modern industrial society got highly agitated about how people were using their spare time. Unlike Tibor Scitovsky, a hard-line pragmatist who saw the value in pleasurable leisure, others adopted a more critical view of where leisure-time practices were heading. There was a growing belief that not all leisure was good leisure. If the 1950s and the early 1960s were an age conformity, then the 1970s turned out to be an age of critical reassessment.

Kaplan 

The view that leisure was what one did when not at the workplace was re-enforced in the 1970s when, in 1975, American sociologist Max Kaplan, wrote Leisure Theory and Policy (John Wiley and Sons). Max contended that leisure – especially sport – was highly valued not because it allowed people to achieve things that work only partly did, but because it was “completely different from work”. In other words, sports rated highly as leisure experiences because they were clearly non-work experiences.

This was not a new idea, since as we have previously noted, Aristotle vigorously promoted it more than 2,500 years ago.

Max understood that work was an essential societal activity, but also a saw the value of making time for not working and thus engage in some type of leisure experience. According to Max, leisure was, fundamentally, about the use of free time, unburdened by the demands of the factory assembly line, shop floor, office or transportation schedule. For Max, leisure consisted of “relatively self-determined activities (and) experiences” ...that were carried out in “one’s economically free time” ...were “psychologically pleasant in anticipation and recollection” ...and provided ‘opportunities for recreation, personal growth, and service to others”.

While Max understood that leisure did not need to have utilitarian value, his messages about ‘ideal’ forms of leisure contained warnings that if leisure did not have a productive, socially responsible, or ethically-sound dimension to it, it was not real or authentic, and therefore likely to be problematic.

Weber 

This view of leisure fitted neatly into Max Weber’s analysis of work under capitalist economic structures in the early part of the 20th century. Max asserted that the engine for growth was not merely technology and the formation of bureaucracies, but a value-system and ideology that made profiteering and capital accumulation social virtues. The Protestant work-ethic, as it came to be known, was founded on the principle that the “avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life “was virtuous, and that industriousness and hard-work was morally superior to idleness. Max’s 1958 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism said it all. In this context leisure was doubly problematic if it was both frivolous and wasteful.

But this was not a problem during the 18th century and early 19th centuries, – especially amongst the aristocracy – where frivolity and buffoonery were rated highly. Amongst the lower classes, idleness was a totally acceptable pastime. As one commentator noted having observed a few manual workers at rest, “they will...for hours...sit on a bench or lie down on a bank or hillock...yielded up to utter vacancy and torpor”.

Lasch

Christopher Lasch, an American historian, and political commentator did not share Kaplan’s view that leisure was valuable only when it allowed people to creatively contribute to their communities outside of work time. In his 1975 publication, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, Christopher argued the opposite, having increasingly felt that leisure itself had - unfortunately - taken on work-like features. That is, leisure had become ‘instrumentalised’ and was consequently neither an escape from day-to-day realities nor a pathway into a separate world of autonomous play. It was, in short, a replication of work, where ‘the same forces that organised the factory and the office have organised leisure as well’.

In Christopher's mind, sport was a classic example of how the ‘organisation of leisure’ had become ‘an extension of commodity production’. As a result, the ancient connections between games, rituals, and public festivity, and the re-enactment of communal traditions, had been discarded, and were replaced by banal athletic contests embedded with ‘prudence, caution, and calculation’.

Christopher argued that the visual arts suffered the same fate when it ‘opened itself up to the ‘invasion of commercialised aesthetic fashion’. Christopher concluded that sport and the arts were just the tip of the iceberg, where the commercialisation of the whole leisure experience had, to paraphrase Johan Huizinga, been reduced to a ‘thing of no consequence’.

Christopher also took up Vance Packard’s point about using commodities to build an identity. He viewed this trend as pathological and warned against a narcissistic culture where the ‘self’ dominated one’s search for meaning. He also argued that a person’s identity and self-image would become nothing more than a grab-bag of commodities, household goods, and leisure experiences where “the differences between self and the other become dangerously blurred by the “forces of organised (corporate) domination”.

Rojek

By the 1980s the debate about the relationship between work and non-work, free time and leisure, and the boundary that separated the field of leisure from the theatre of work had peaked, and a sociology of leisure took over the intellectual space. An exemplar of the seriousness with which leisure studies was taken was the body of work produced British sociologist, Chris Rojek, with his 1985 publication Capitalism and Leisure Theory (Tavistock Publications) offering many tantalising propositions.

Chris strongly supported the move to theorise the leisure experience within a broad economic and political framework and examine the ways in which capitalism shaped the way we viewed and did free time. Chris hypothesised that the only way contemporary sports and leisure could be properly understood was by reference to their essential context, which was built on the foundation principles of individual competition, the ideology of “acquisition”, and an unequal distribution of power. 

Chris went on to make the challenging suggestion that while some leisure forms – equestrian, rowing, and rugby union for instance - would most probably reproduce the above principles, other more subversive leisure forms like street skateboarding and snowboarding could undermine the competitive assumptions underpinning contemporary leisure practice. Chris was critical of theorists whose formalist models of leisure usually included four key features, which were choice, flexibility, spontaneity, and self-determination.

In Chris’ mind these features were not realistic since first, some people had very little choice in how to spend their leisure, second, the idea that people could smoothly shift between leisure practices was fanciful and went against the evidence, third, spontaneity was heavily constrained in sport and related games where rules counted for everything, and finally, there was little evidence that leisure was used by individuals as a tool for self-improvement and social development. 

And, like Tibor Scitovsky and Sigmund Freud, Chris believed that pleasure and non-pleasure had significant roles to play in affecting the pattern of leisure practices. Chris, however, wanted to take these notions further than Tibor by including practices that might be seen as neurotic, or symptomatic of a chronic personality disorder. Chris intimated that there were significant differences between the leisure practices of people with narcissistic personalities on one hand, and avoidance problems on the other.

Chris did not however believe that neurotic pre-dispositions and disorders like narcissism, avoidance, autism, drug dependency, obsessions, compulsions, phobias, bulimia, anorexia, mania, and the like, would lessen the subjective quality of leisure experiences. On the contrary, they could well explain why many people immersed themselves in seemingly trivial, apparently irrational, and superficially harmful leisure experiences so passionately, so addictively, and so often.

Bob Stewart

20 October 2025 

As the 1980s came to an end, David Harvey and Frederick, Jameson, two prominent social theorists, who wrote The Condition of Postmodernity: An-Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change in 1990 and Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991 respectively, pronounced that western industrial society had reconfigured itself. On the economic front there had been a shift from welfare-statism, where regulation and income re-distribution from rich to poor were the driving ideologies, to neo-liberalism, which involved the dismantling of regulatory structures, the freeing up of markets, and the privatisation of programs and services that were previously seen to be the monopoly of government.

On the social and cultural front, modernism, with its concern for structure, discipline, and social control, had given way to a post-modern ideology, which precipitated a whole array of diverse lifestyles, practices, and behaviours, with no benchmarks by which to judge their relative social worth, or value. In this economic and social free-for-all, agency and autonomy were privileged over structure and social control. Mechanistic compliance was long gone. 

While these developments brought greater choice, and freed people from the tyranny of conformity and custom, they also created further anxiety about individual identity. Instead of being handed a self-identity - which effectively meant they had some immediate notion of who they were - through family background, religious tradition, occupational training and job-initiation, people were forced to create their own identity. Even the most traditional of way of confirming oneself to oneself and others – work and the workplace – had lost its identity building capacity. 

According to Richard Sennett in his 1999 piece, ‘Street and Office: Two Sources of Identity’, W. Hutton and A. Giddens (eds.) On the Edge: Living With Global Capitalism, (Jonathon Cape) the re-structuring of corporate life from pyramidal bureaucracies to flexible, casual networks, and long-term employment to short term contracts, meant that “people can’t ...any more...identify themselves with a particular labour or single employer”. For Sennett, all the identity-talk that had flooded modern culture since the 1970s, whatever its theme or focus – “marginal, subaltern, transgressive, or...even ...oppressed” - was often about nothing more than image and personae, where social masks were used to merely reveal the “edge of an identity” Even gender had become a contestable and problematic identity issue at this time, since male and female binaries failed to take into account gay and lesbian factors, and the additionally fuzzy areas of bisexual, cross sexual, transexual, and even asexual identities, preferences, positions, and practices.

Slater and Giddens

  Richard’s concerns were not always taken seriously, though. In Donald Slater’s mind there was nothing to worry about since consumerism and leisure activities had taken up the identity-formation slack. In his illuminating 1997 book Consumer Culture and Modernity (Polity Press), Donald reckoned that in a postmodern – or as it was sometimes called, a late, or even hyper- modern – world, we “not only had to choose a self” – that is, an identity – but we also had to “do something” to make it happen. Consequently, the onus was put on the individual to take the initiative on a whole array of issues including, manners, health, and appearance.

 According to Anthony Giddens in his 1991 book, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Polity Press) this obsessive search for identity demanded constant self-assessment, which he labelled a “reflexive project of the self”.As a result, individuals were ”forced to negotiate lifestyle choices amongst a diversity of options” with a view to sustaining a “coherent, yet continuously revised biographical narrative...in the context of multiple choices filtered through abstract systems”. 

For Donald, identity formation was best understood through the act of consumption itself, where – he reckons - we could effectively choose our identity “from the shop window of the pluralised social world”. In this scenario, all “actions, experiences and objects [were] reflexively encountered” and the ‘self’ became “not an inner sense of authenticity, but rather a calculable condition of social survival and success. Consumer Culture and Modernity (Polity Press).

 Donald reckoned that in a postmodern – or as it was sometimes called, a late, or even hyper- modern – world, we “not only had to choose a self” – that is, an identity – but we also had to “do something” to make it happen. Consequently, the onus was put on the individual to take the initiative on a whole array of issues including, manners, health, and appearance.

 And, in these situations, consumption initially – and paradoxically - created additional anxiety since every choice and every action “implicates the self”. The anxiety that accompanied consumption was magnified by the understanding that commodities do not only have ‘use-value’, but they also have symbolic value, and this symbolic value was realised through the ability of commodities to “act as markers of social status”. And, like Vance Packard, Donald argued that some commodities were better markers of social status than others, and as a result a demarcation emerged between mundane consumption and prestige consumption, both of which had to be weighed up by social agents, and then a decision made as to which consumption – and by implication, identity – pathway to take.

And, according to Donald, the mundane-prestige divide has not only embedded itself in the fashion industry, where the cult of the designer-label ruled, but had also seeped into sport, tourism, and recreation, where every activity and experience now had its designated place in the hierarchy of taste and status. While drag and speedway competitions, greyhound racing, and pigeon fancying were popular pastimes in Britain especially, they had none of the prestige that was associated with having courtside tickets to a grand-slam tennis tournament, attending a major sport event like the world soccer cup, or just cheering on the participants at a local gymkhana, regional rowing competition, or national sailing regatta.

Clarke and Critcher

John Clarke and Chas Critcher, like David Slater and Anthony Gibbens, found that leisure had been not only captured by consumer capitalism – and turned into a commodity, but also used to construct images and claim an identity. However, their focus was not so much on the utilisation of leisure, and the different forms it could take, but rather its distribution. They argued the case for the inequality of leisure opportunity, which was underpinned by two drivers. 

The first was ‘material’, which involved ‘access to key resources’. According to John and Chas time and money were the two core constraints, which meant that low-income households with dependent children were immediately disadvantaged.

The second driver was ‘culture’. While its influence was more subtle and mysterious, its impact was, as far as John and Chas could estimate, just as significant as time and money. Culture caused inequality because it shaped people’s perceptions about what was, or was not, ‘appropriate leisure behaviour’. According to John and Chas these perceptions were usually constructed from negative stereotypes around gender, age and race that linked participation to a narrow band of pursuits, especially when it came to sport.

Moreover, these stereotypes not only reflected the inequalities present in broader society but also validated and perpetuated them. Clarke and Critcher’s views on leisure, identity, class, and inequality were comprehensively revealed in their 1985 work, The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain (Macmillan, and their 1995 article ‘Leisure and Inequality’, in Chas Critcher et.al., Sociology of Leisure: A Reader (E and F Spon).

Lipovetsky

One of the most enthusiastic proponents of the hyper-modern thesis, and the way it shaped leisure practices was Gilles Lipovetsky, a French philosopher and social critic, who wrote Hypermodern Times (Polity Press, 2005).

Gilles argued that in the 1970s western society had entered an age of excess where ‘rampant individualism’ and the ‘commercialisation of lifestyle’ followed the breakdown of traditional hierarchies and authority relations. Beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours were no longer constrained by the social and moral demands of the family, the Church, and the state, which gave way to a smorgasbord of lifestyle and leisure options. One of these options was about how to best define one’s sense of self, and how to construct an identity that was no longer ascribed by virtue of the family, religious affiliations, cultural traditions, or occupations. According to Gilles, this cultural vacuum was filled by lifestyles constructed through the act of consumption and marketized leisure. A ‘whole hedonistic and psychologistic culture’ had come into being which incited ‘everyone to satisfy their needs immediately…stimulate their clamour for pleasure, idolise self-fulfilment, and set the earthly paradise of well-being, comfort’, and quality leisure-time, on a pedestal.

But, as Gilles also noted, not everybody benefited from these newly won freedoms. While some people prudently assessed their lifestyle choices, attended seriously to their leisure time priorities, and enhanced their quality of life, others were engulfed by a ‘destructive irresponsibility’. In a world stripped of its traditions, responsibility for social and moral action now resided in the individual, and the pronouncements of authority figures who hitherto had moral clout were dismissed as puritanical and prejudiced.

Many individuals were overwhelmed by the vacant cultural and moral space they now occupied, and, threading its way through this moral malaise, disconnected from the past, and uncertain about the future, was an insidious uneasiness manifest as chronic, and sometime disabling, anxiety. It appeared to be a case of the 1950s revisited. Thus, it was not surprising to Gilles that while many individuals were taking care of their bodies like never before, and increasingly ‘obsessed by health and hygiene’, this mania for consumption had led to a litany of harmful excesses, including drug-taking in athletics… the vogue for extreme sports… bulimia and anorexia, obesity, compulsions, and addictions’. According to Gilles, pleasure and fun – vital ingredients of the leisure experience had been sucked dry and replaced by a ‘cult of health’ the ‘ideology of prevention’ and a ‘vigilance toward disease’, culminating in an all-encompassing ‘medicalisation of existence’.

Gilles also found a feverish desire for self-transcendent, and ‘high voltage’ experiences where lazy relaxation and contemplation had been replaced by a relentless search for intensity, ‘hyperactive performance’, and ‘the latest thing’. 

But Gilles also discovered something else, which was an accelerating interest in the past. Far from being locked up in a self-enclosed present, Gilles found that people had - in part because of their fear of the future - become entangled in a ‘frenzy of commemorative activities’ based around heritage and ethnic identities. Gilles concluded that instead of dismantling the past and throwing away tradition, people had, paradoxically, exhumed it, rehabilitated it, celebrated it, and commercialised it. 

Stebbings

Robert Stebbings took a more structured view of leisure, and how it was actioned in contemporary, hyper -modern societies. Instead of focussing on the anxiety associated with citizens having to navigate their way through a world bereft of external moral benchmarks, and using their leisure time to fill the void, Stebbins thus adopted a more instrumental approach by building an ontology of how leisure could be experienced. He wrote it all down in 2006 in Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Time (Routledge) 

He began by defining leisure as ‘uncoerced activity engaged in during free time, which people want to do and, in either a satisfying or a fulfilling way (or both), use their abilities and resources to succeed at this’.  This definition set the scene for a new taxonomy of leisure practices. In Stebbing’s mind, leisure could be initially differentiated by how much effort and organisation underpinned the experience.

It could, first, be casual. Although casual leisure could be intrinsically rewarding, it was a relatively short-lived pleasurable activity, requiring little or no training to enjoy it. A day at the beach or walk in a park would fit neatly into this category.

Second, it could be serious. To be categorised as serious leisure, the activity had to be sufficiently substantial, interesting, and fulfilling for the participant to find a ‘career’ by acquiring and expressing a combination of ‘special skills, knowledge, and experience. According to Robert, serious leisure involved the systematic pursuit of free-time activities as an amateur, a hobbyist, or volunteer. Any club-based sporting activity would slot comfortably within this category, as would acting as a museum or art gallery guide.

Robert labelled his third and final leisure category as project-based, which involved engagement in a short-term, reasonably complicated, and occasional creative undertaking. This form of leisure included things like running a self-improvement workshop or organising a special family event. 

Robert put meat on the conceptual bone of serious leisure by giving it several distinguishing qualities. First it required perseverance, which meant ‘sticking with it through thick and thin’. Second, it was a career that involved a specific role, and had clearly defined stages of achievement. Third, it required a significant personal effort based on ‘specially acquired knowledge, training, experience, or skill. Fourth, durable benefits flowed from the experience, which could range from development, self‐enrichment, self‐expression, regeneration, feelings of accomplishment, and enhancement of self‐image, to social engagement and a sense of belonging. The benefit could also be material, and include a painting, piece of furniture, or a fit and healthy body.

Robert’s forensic analysis of leisure experiences delivered an impressively detailed taxonomy. It also hinted that serious leisure was more desirable than casual forms of leisure. Robert did not go so far as saying casual leisure was meaningless, but he noted that while a frivolous filling-in-of-time with no aim in mind, or guiding purpose, might secure some fleeting pleasure, it had no enduring social value. Window shopping would not secure a top spot on Robert’s hierarchy of leisure practices but officiating at a children’s sporting event would. Similarly, playing competitive community sport would rate well above watching ageing professional wrestlers engaging in a bit of rough theatre on television.

Fratila and Berdychevsky

Robert Stebbings had a lot of interesting things to say about leisure and how it adds to the quality of life and well-being of citizens. But Robert forgot to mention how leisure can be used in slightly riskier ways, where the pleasures come from not only the experience itself, but also its transgressive qualities. These themes were taken up by Iulia Fratila and Liza Berdychevsky in their 2020 Leisure Studies paper titled ‘Understanding drugs as leisure through the (de)differentiation lens and the dialectic of Logos and Eros.

Having spent several months interrogating the drug use ‘habits’ of American college students Iulia and Liza concluded that it had become a ‘normal’ way to spend their leisure time. And even more interestingly, they found that drug use served two distinctive wants. First, it provided significant amounts of pleasure, while also enabling participants to explore their newly found independence.   This was the Eros part of their college experience. The second need it satisfied was the capacity to both pacify and stimulate their capabilities. In short, drugs were seen as a valuable tool to enhance their academic performance when long sessions of low stress thinking and writing were required. This was the Logos part of their college experience.

Iulia and Liza concluded that drug use was an important multi-functional leisure active that was both ‘deviant’ and normal, and intrinsically pleasurable and instrumental. And as such, it often leaked into the work-related world with mostly positive outcomes.  They additionally noted that given the generally positive beliefs participants held about drug use, the idea that harsh penalties would eliminate the ‘problem’, was fanciful in the extreme. 

Bob Stewart

20 October 2025.   

In this journey through the high-ways and by-ways of leisure, with an occasional deviation into the meaning it has for its participants, we have encountered a broad array of theories, arguments, and opinions. At the same time, important themes emerged as we moved through the twentieth century, and into the twenty first.

The first point to note is that people have, no matter what their position in the social hierarchy happened to be, always found time to engage in leisurely activities. Homo sapiens were quick to understand that there was more to life than work.

At the same time, not everyone had the same leisure opportunities. In pre-industrial societies particularly, the working class – mainly agricultural labourers and servants - made the most of their frugal lifestyles by engaging in low cost and sometimes brutal games and contests. It offered not only occasional bouts of fleeting pleasure, but also respite from the demands of crafting out a living by providing space for relaxation and recuperation. For the aristocracy, landowners, and clergy, leisure was not only taken for granted, but also put on public display, and done in ostentatious ways to confirm one’s superior social position. The one thing the different classes had in common was a love of alcohol, and a penchant for watching others engage in risky contests, with boxing and other combat-style games right at the top.

But things began to change. As the industrial revolution progressed and working people slowly improved their living standards, leisure time was increasingly used to be entertained by others as music halls made their mark. By the 1920s the invention of the motor car had opened the world and traveling for pleasure became a major pastime. But, with the introduction of radio, people were lured back into the home and found enjoyment in the simple art of listening.

Things became complicated after WWII. By the end of the 1940s with the spread of capitalism, a population drift to the cities, further industrialisation, and highly supervised workplaces, leisure had like the workplace, become more structured and instrumental. Leisure was no longer seen as time for switching off, so to speak, letting the mind wander, and giving the body a rest.

By the 1950s it was clear that leisure had to count for something. It had to be meaningful and useful, and ideally have some social pay -off. Life was too short to waste it on frivolous activity that went nowhere. Play was for children, and easy pleasures were for hedonists. Mature adults were expected to make their leisure time count for something.

And, what’s more, work was becoming a source of meaning, a measure of one’s character, and an indicator of one’s social position. Life, itself was a serious endeavour, be it in a department store workplace attending to customers, at home preparing a meal for the family, or at the school meeting sitting on a committee and drawing up a plan to enhance its scholastic standards. Life was busy for nearly everyone, but also vacuous for many.

By the 1960s and into the 1970s, capitalism had gone into overdrive. The age of consumerism had arrived, and while work, as it had been forever, continued to be a means of earning a living and incidentally creating an identity of sorts, leisure became something else altogether. Western nations were living through a period of enormous wealth creation. Not only had the spending capacity of people reached record levels, but the range products on the shelves, and in the stores, had become formidably broad. In addition, television had widened the advertising opportunities for business by assembling mass audiences, with professional sport coverage (especially the football codes, and boxing) first on the list.

Every leisure activity now had a price, and frugality was dispatched to the dustbin of history, and the space was filled by a massive wave of consumption, which was increasingly used to signal one’s achievements and success, while also using it to hide one’s anxieties.

By the 1990s consumption had gone well beyond being an instrument for securing the basics of life, creating home that projected domestic bliss, and gaining the attention of significant others. Leisure had now become a site for accumulating experiences from which narratives could be constructed and moulded into a gaze-diverting identity.

This theme threaded its way through Joseph Pine and James Gilmour’s 1999 book The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business is a Stage (Harvard Business School Press), Leisure was both relentless and competitive, where images were built around gender, class, ethnicity, race, disposition, religion, values, and lifestyles. There was no end to the race to re-affirm one’s economic, social, and, increasingly, political credentials. On the left side of politics it was also used to highlight one's victimhood. 

Thus, more than ever, leisure had gone beyond being a time for rest, relaxation, and the occasional rough-and-tumble game. It had become a form of entertainment, pleasure came in every conceivable form, every incident or experience was a story to be told, bodies were worked on, the mind was reimagined, relationships were both nurtured and discarded, news, scandal, and gossip was swallowed whole, and the electronic media became a staple of stay-at-home amusement while masquerading as news, drama, comedy, and reality TV. 

And, most seriously of all, identities – which centred on who I am, what I want to be, and how I can signal it to the world - were displayed at every turn when social media dominated smart phone usages in the 2000s.

Leisure rivalled work as the pathway to self-esteem and admiration from others. As we moved through the first two decades of the 21st century, leisure had become not only a commodity - a serious enterprise if you like - but also a performative space with everyone clamouring for their 15 minutes - and more - of fame.

 And, in many aspirational scenarios fame became a stepping stone to the role of an influencer, the ultimate experience for anyone under 30 years of age.  At this point we might be excused for thinking leisure had lost its meaning altogether and consigned to the dustbin of history.   

Bob Stewart

21 October 2025