[This is week 3 and we would look at the issue of Entertainment. Entertainment is part of our lives and we need to engage with it even as much we need to help young people engage with it. Welcome to the fascinating (un) learning about Rest, Re-creation and Entertainment]
The fascination for leisure culture
Today, there is a fascination for leisure activities. The higher levels of stress at workplace make leisure activities a necessary evil. People are just looking for get-away solutions. With increasing automation at the workplace, monotony of the task and the pressure to perform, we all go through a cultural crisis of purpose. And yet, despite being tired – tensed and torn we continue work in order to live and live in order to work, which only accentuates the crisis of purpose. It is against this background that we need to understand the dawn and the rise of today’s leisure culture. The mushrooming of multiplexes, shopping malls, Family Entertainment Zones (FEZ), and fast food eat-outs and the patronage they seem to enjoy point to the fact that we are terribly in need of ‘an escape’ from the boredom of work, if not the drudgery of life itself.
In a world of dis (stress) leisure seems to be a real blessing. But unfortunately, the very blessing has become a ‘challenge’ or may be if William Bogan is right, it may prove to be a curse. William Bogan contends,
“Leisure may prove to be a curse rather than a blessing, unless education teaches a flippant world that leisure is not synonymous for entertainment”. Has Leisure has become synonymous with entertainment?
Listen to the words of Alan Bloom, the author of the book The Closing of the American Mind (1987):
“Any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men’s taste and capacity to live it has disappeared. Leisure has become entertainment”. While there is nothing wrong with leisure itself, unfortunately leisure has been taken to be synonymous with entertainment, and that to me presents the biggest challenge to our generation.
