Question

What is serious leisure? Do any of your own pastimes contain the characteristics of serious leisure? Why or why not? Use your own words. at a minimum should write at least 150 words. Please be sure to use real life examples, quotes from the book and/or other kinds of evidence to support your answer.

Answer 1

Serious leisure is a systematic pursuit of amateur, interesting activities or ‘hobby’ and voluntary activities which the participant find highly interesting, and internally fulfilling to the extent that the individual begin such to pursue it as a career choice (‘leisure career’) and acquire the necessary training and skill knowledge for the activity. The term became popular after Robert Stebbins’s book” Serious Leisure: a Perspective for our Time” (2007) in which he delineated an array of activities of amateur athletes, musicians, artists, voluntary social servic professionals, animal welfare activists and or crafts-makers.

Keeping in line with the serious leisure perspective, I can its implications for my own activities in the everyday. For instance, I have a deep interest in baking and I follow traditional recipes as well as the new trendy desserts in the culinary world. While baking cakes started as a summer project for me, I soon became very interested in it and I began to collect recipes. Other than the actual work involved in the kitchen, I also read literature around the history of baking and its status in the current. Using my own experience as a baker, I can see how Stebbins would have come to theorise about the commonplace everyday leisure activities taking an intense proportion of time and energy in the life of the actors. I value my time spent in baking and I see it as a productive activity which has also helped me earn a supplementary source of income in the form of weekend bake sales in the neighbourhood. Moreover, since I live in a society and a culture which encourages young individuals to take charge and partake in domestic responsibilities just as Stebbins suggests in the book, I have found that my skills as a baker have allowed me to gain a status in the family as an independent, creative and active individual.