Much has been said about the so-called Great Resignation or “quiet quitting” from jobs. Furthermore, the examination is important now in the aftermath of the wide-spread effects of the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., remote work). 513) have acknowledged psychological aspects and centrality of leisure choices and their “situated meaning.”Įxamination of the relationship between leisure and meaning in life is important not only for its own sake but also, for better understanding the complexity and breadth of meaning in life in general. In contrast, some sociologists (e.g., Coalter, 1999, p. This is important because scholars, especially psychologists, have paid very little attention to the relationship between leisure and meaning in life. They certainly are important contributors, but we wish to highlight how and why leisure can make its own contribution. Although we focus on leisure’s potential contribution to meaning in life, we do not want to imply that work and interpersonal relationships, on their own without leisure, would not play an important role in people’s search for meaning in life. When work is unsatisfying, leisure can potentially help fill the gap in meaningfulness, but it can also be meaningful in its own right. However, it is important to add that leisure activities are also done alone or in formal social contexts with weak interpersonal relationships, such as acquintances in structured programs. For example, meaningfulness often emerges from close relationship bonds, and leisure is an avenue for doing activities with friends and family (e.g., Crandall, 1979 Iso-Ahola, 1980, 1999). We seek to explain just how leisure contributes to satisfying people’s needs for meaningfulness.
While for most people, leisure remains secondary to work in terms of priority, it can nevertheless infuse substantial amounts of meaning into life, along with boosting happiness and satisfaction. In this article, we seek to examine another possible source of meaning in life: leisure. For such individuals, family, romance, and other forms of social contact loom as the primary source of meaning. Indeed, a surprisingly large category of people describes their work as “bullshit jobs” and think society would be perfectly well off if their job did not even exist ( Graeber, 2013, 2018). Some people find it highly engrossing, fascinating, and rewarding, while others see it as little more than a tedious activity necessary to provide money to support life. However, the contribution of work to life’s meaningfulness is highly variable. More precisely, meaning is often found in interpersonal relationships, especially strong and close ones, as well as in meaningful work. Research has abundantly confirmed the importance of both interpersonal relationships and work to the meaning of many lives ( Bellah et al., 1985 Stillman et al., 2009 Lambert et al., 2010). The study of how leisure enhances meaning in life is rich and ripe for future research. The most common leisure activity in modern society, watching television, encapsulates some of the paradoxes of leisure and meaningfulness. interpersonal, and we consider the implications of these for meaningfulness. Leisure activities vary along multiple conceptual dimensions, such as active vs. People desire their lives to be meaningful, and leisure activities offer varying degrees of satisfying the basic needs for meaning (here covered as purpose, value, efficacy, and self-worth). Leisure itself is largely defined by meaning: The essence of leisure lies less in the specific activity than in the subjective perception of freedom, choice, and intrinsic motivation.
Leisure activities range from highly engaging and meaningful to subjectively trivial. How people engage in leisure is an important but frequently underappreciated aspect of meaning in life. 2School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.1Department of Kinesiology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States.
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