Finally, what emerges most forcefully from the discussion is the sheer paradox of leisure. Leisure is a luminous goal in culture. It is associated with freedom, choice, escape and life-satisfaction. Yet it is prosaically constructed through social means and its meaning varies historically so that commonsense, essentialist definitions and treatments... See more

It is the fate of modernism to regard these responses as subjects to be remedied; and it is the condition of postmodernism to perceive the remedy as the problem. By committing ourselves to decentring leisure we emancipate leisure from the modernist burden of necessarily connoting freedom, choice, lifesatisfaction and escape with leisure. We recover... See more

Western culture presents leisure as a realizable utopia. Perhaps this is why we often feel that our leisure does not belong to us and that it eludes our grasp. For it is in the nature of utopia to be perpetually out of reach and on the edge of our existence (Bauman 1976). In struggling to achieve that longed-for state of freedom, choice and... See more