Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Serious Leisure
I started today looking about for things to take seriously. Just as I was about to give in to it all, I found this article about Serious leisure. I know. I know. It doesn't sound serious enough. Nothing can, really. But wait. Let me quote:
Serious Leisure "...is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where, in the typical case, participants find a career in acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience (Stebbins, 1992, p.3). The adjective 'serious' (a word Stebbins's research respondents often used) embodies such qualities as earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness. This adjective, basically a folk term, signals the importance of these three types of activity (serious, casual and project-based) serious leisure in the everyday lives of participants, in that pursuing the three eventually engenders deep self-fulfillment."
It's hard to think of all those people who have dedicated so much of themselves to the memory of 9/11 as engaging in anything as trivial as leisure. But it's serious leisure. It's something they choose, out of their own free will and time, not for money or glory, but because they find it rewarding. Rewarding as in the kind of rewards you get from doing things you believe in, from doing things you think are "right."
Casual leisure?
"Casual leisure is immediately intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-lived pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it. It is fundamentally hedonic, engaged in for the significant level of pure enjoyment, or pleasure, found there...Serious leisure is further distinguished from casual leisure by six characteristics found exclusively or in highly elaborated form only in the first. These characteristics are 1) need to persevere at the activity, 2) availability of a leisure career, 3) need to put in effort to gain skill and knowledge, 4) realization of various special benefits, 5) unique ethos and social world, and 6) an attractive personal and social identity."
It seems to me that in a slightly better and more uniformly affluent world, these distinctions would not be that easy to draw. The Casual Leisure of the immediately rewarding would be just about the same as "playing." "Project-based leisure," the "short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time," would be known as "learning." And the serious leisure of doing what you want most to do - "living."
Thanks for this leisurely find go to Funscout Joey Grey
Serious Leisure "...is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where, in the typical case, participants find a career in acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge, and experience (Stebbins, 1992, p.3). The adjective 'serious' (a word Stebbins's research respondents often used) embodies such qualities as earnestness, sincerity, importance, and carefulness. This adjective, basically a folk term, signals the importance of these three types of activity (serious, casual and project-based) serious leisure in the everyday lives of participants, in that pursuing the three eventually engenders deep self-fulfillment."
It's hard to think of all those people who have dedicated so much of themselves to the memory of 9/11 as engaging in anything as trivial as leisure. But it's serious leisure. It's something they choose, out of their own free will and time, not for money or glory, but because they find it rewarding. Rewarding as in the kind of rewards you get from doing things you believe in, from doing things you think are "right."
Casual leisure?
"Casual leisure is immediately intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-lived pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it. It is fundamentally hedonic, engaged in for the significant level of pure enjoyment, or pleasure, found there...Serious leisure is further distinguished from casual leisure by six characteristics found exclusively or in highly elaborated form only in the first. These characteristics are 1) need to persevere at the activity, 2) availability of a leisure career, 3) need to put in effort to gain skill and knowledge, 4) realization of various special benefits, 5) unique ethos and social world, and 6) an attractive personal and social identity."
It seems to me that in a slightly better and more uniformly affluent world, these distinctions would not be that easy to draw. The Casual Leisure of the immediately rewarding would be just about the same as "playing." "Project-based leisure," the "short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time," would be known as "learning." And the serious leisure of doing what you want most to do - "living."
Thanks for this leisurely find go to Funscout Joey Grey
Labels: work
Links to this post:
