Leisure, or free time, is time spent away from business, work, and domestic chores. It also excludes time spent on necessary activities such as eating, sleeping and, where it is compulsory, education.
The distinction between leisure and unavoidable activities is not a rigidly defined one, e.g. people sometimes do work-oriented tasks for pleasure as well as for long-term utility. A distinction may also be drawn between free time and leisure. For example, Situationist International maintains that free time is illusory and rarely free; economic and social forces appropriate free time from the individual and sell it back to them as the commodity known as "leisure". Certainly most people's leisure activities are not a completely free choice, and may be constrained by social pressures, e.g. people may be coerced into spending time gardening by the need to keep up with the standard of neighbouring gardens.
Leisure studies is the academic discipline concerned with the study and analysis of leisure.
Read more about Leisure: Cultural Differences, Gender Gap, Adolescents
Famous quotes containing the word leisure:
“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption ... is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.
He has no time to be anything but a machine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When at leisure make preparations for a time of need.”
—Chinese proverb.