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Freedom and Belonging in Everyday Leisure Lives

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Leisure in Later Life

Part of the book series: Leisure Studies in a Global Era ((LSGE))

Abstract

The great crisis facing our age is not a tsunami of resource hungry centenarians. It is the struggle to balance freedom and belonging, winning and love, doing and being, performing and relaxing, producing and consuming. For leisure to enable the construction of agentic stories, an element of subjective freedom is essential. Instrumental leisure saps the fun and freedom, makes it consequential. The labour of being an active ager makes paid work look more appealing by comparison and can cause conflict in families. Resisting or subverting active ageing messages provides a little fun for those who prefer to be naughty, and that is good to know. Passive leisure in later life offers direct fun, sociability and connection. People that have grown up and grown old in a culture of active ageing have more freedom when they choose home-based leisure, and socialise with people of their own age

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Wiseman, T. (2021). Freedom and Belonging in Everyday Leisure Lives. In: Leisure in Later Life . Leisure Studies in a Global Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71672-1_6

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