Serious leisure and well-being

Following on the intellectual foundation laid by Josef Pieper, Sabastian de Grazia and Max Kaplan, among others, the term ‘serious leisure’ made its debut in leisure studies circles in 1982. The initial statement (Stebbins, 1982) and several more recent ones have centred on the nature of serious leisure, a concept now reasonably well elucidated in what seems to have become its standard short definition: serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that participants find so substantial and interesting that, in the typical case, they launch themselves on a career centred on acquiring and expressing its special skills, knowledge and experience (Stebbins, 1992a: 3). 1 This is probably as good a depiction of this form of leisure as any single-sentence definition can provide. Serious leisure is commonly contrasted with ‘casual’ or ‘unserious’ leisure, which is considerably less substantial and offers no career of the sort just described. Casual leisure can also be defined residually as all leisure falling outside the three basic types of serious leisure.