Leisure time Leisure has often been defined as a quality of experience or as free time

Project-based leisure[edit]

"Project-based leisure is a short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time."^[31] For example, working on a single Wikipedia article or building a garden feature.

Cultural differences[edit]

GI Card Game, Watercolor by James Pollock, U. S. Army Vietnam Combat Artists Team IV (CAT IV 1967). During the Vietnam War soldiers waiting to go on patrol would sometimes spend their leisure time playing cards. Courtesy National Museum of the United States Army.

Time available for leisure varies from one society to the next, although anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherers tend to have significantly more leisure time than people in more complex societies.^[39] As a result, band societies such as the Shoshone of the Great Basin came across as extraordinarily lazy to European colonialists.^[40]

Workaholics, less common than the social myths, are those who work compulsively at the expense of other activities. They prefer to work rather than spend time socializing and engaging in other leisure activities.

European and American men statistically have more leisure time than women, due to both household and parenting responsibilities and increasing participation in the paid employment. In Europe and the United States, adult men usually have between one and nine hours more leisure time than women do each week.^[41]

Family leisure[edit]

Family leisure is defined as time that parents and children spend together in free time or recreational activities,^[42] and it can be expanded to address intergenerational family leisure as time that grandparents, parents, and grandchildren spend together in free time or recreational activities.^[43] Leisure can become a central place for the development of emotional closeness and strong family bonds. Contexts such as urban/rural shape the perspectives, meanings, and experiences of family leisure. For example, leisure moments are part of work in rural areas, and the rural idyll is enacted by urban families on weekends, but both urban and rural families somehow romanticize rural contexts as ideal spaces for family making (connection to nature, slower and more intimate space, notion of a caring social fabric, tranquillity, etc.).^[43][44] Also, much "family leisure" requires tasks that are most often assigned to women.family leisure also includes playing together with family members on the weekend day.

Aging[edit]

Leisure is important across the lifespan and can facilitate a sense of control and self-worth.^[45] Children's leisure time is an important part of their daily lives and it constitutes an important factor in socializing, developing skills and shaping personal identities.^[46] Older adults, specifically, can benefit from physical, social, emotional, cultural, and spiritual aspects of leisure. Leisure engagement and relationships are commonly central to "successful" and satisfying aging.^[47] For example, engaging in leisure with grandchildren can enhance feelings of generativity, whereby older adults can achieve well-being by leaving a legacy beyond themselves for future generations.^[48]