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Leisure in the 1990s
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17466 |
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SPECIAL SECTION
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1 / 1990 |
5,280 Words |
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Geoffrey Godbey
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If history teaches us anything--and it must--it teaches that one era is connected to another, that the unfolding of the future is not random; it is a reaction to the past, but a reaction that often surpasses our imagination to predict. Predicting anything about leisure is, perhaps, among the more complex exercises in speculation, since none must divine what freedom will mean to people, what they will voluntarily and pleasurably do given a minimum of constraints, the nature and extent of obligation in a society, and other imponderable questions.
Nevertheless, if the future is a reaction to the past, the last decade provides some extremes to which a reaction in the 1990s must surely come. If the 1980s were about self, the 1990s will be more about community. If the 1980s were about short-term pleasure, the 1990s must be more about long-term happiness. If in the 1980s we spent our options, in the 1990s we will try to keep them open or redevelop them. If in the 1980s we tried to have it all, the 1990s will begin the process of choice and consequence. If leisure in the 1980s meant consuming endless things and experiences, in the 1990s it will have a bit more to do with the spirit. If the 1980s were a decade in which successful people got the good jobs and used leisure for conspicuous display of success, the 1990s will be one in which the concept of career will begin to apply to one's leisure as well as one's work.
While the U.S. government is likely to continue its policy of work creation rather than work reduction, the potential for lives to be built around leisure will increase and be recognized. Although individual freedom in the 1980s was characterized by the desire for ease and abundance, the 1990s may bring the understanding that a life of freedom is a difficult one that requires tremendous preparation to be successfully lived.
This, of course, was the original notion of leisure, of which Aristotle wrote. Leisure, the absence of the necessity of being occupied, was a difficult life that was lived in opposition to materialism and that required great preparation to be successfully undertaken. If one were not sufficiently and properly educated, if on could no envision an ideal and provide a worthwhile answer to the question "Given a minimum of constraints, what is worth doing?" one would be incapable of leisure and should not have it. Leisure was the only suitable center for one's life, and work was excusable only as a means of obtaining it. While this ancient idea will not magically penetrate our whole society, it will, at least, begin to be rediscovered.
The 1980s were a decade that seemed to confirm the ideas of one Mr. Thorstein Veblen, who, at the turn of the century, castigated an emerging leisure class which, having huge economic resources, used leisure merely to become conspicuous consumers. For Veblen, an economic determinism caused those who obtained wealth to change their way of life and use leisure to differentiate themselves from other people. Leisure became the arena to show off, to do and buy things that other people could not.
The leisure class, which confirmed that leisure was simply unproductive and a waste, was not only evident during the 1980s, but the number in the population who aspired to this class grew prodigiously. The beer ads promised "You can have it all." The nineties will bring about the recognition that you cannot. Further, it will be more and more understood that having it all cannot
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