When leisure activities become work

Is bringing up children a leisure activity? What does visiting the sick have to do with leisure time? And is being involved in a club a fulfilling leisure hobby or a strenuous job? For the first time, the Hamburg-based BAT Leisure Research Institute surveyed 2,000 people aged 14 and over in the old and new federal states on a representative basis about the very personal significance of such leisure activities, which are wholly or partly of a compulsory nature.

East and West Germans are largely in agreement: being together with the family and playing with children is fun and is „definitely perceived as leisure time“. For the population in the new federal states, spending time with the family (East: 80 % - West: 73%) and playing with children (East: 69 % - West: 66 %) are even more important in terms of leisure time. However, the more an activity takes on the character of an obligation during free time, the less it is considered leisure time. Accordingly, only 22 per cent of West Germans and 30 per cent of East Germans consider raising children to be real leisure time.

Social obligations quickly put an end to the leisure fun

What sometimes begins as a voluntary activity can quickly become a chore. Only a third of Germans (East: 30 % - West: 36 %) consider volunteering in a club to be a leisure activity and only 15 per cent of East Germans and 23 per cent of West Germans can imagine volunteering in a social organisation (e.g. the Red Cross) as a leisure activity. Active involvement in political parties and trade unions is considered to be the least important leisure activity (East: 12 % - West: 18 %).

Prof. Opaschowski, Director of the BAT Institute, comments: „The experiential character of personal involvement in social and political organisations is increasingly being lost. People are finding that an interest in politics does not lead to an experience of politics. More leisure time does not automatically mean more time for political engagement, but can rather promote tendencies towards the de-politicisation of leisure behaviour.“

People increasingly have the feeling that the catalogue of social obligations is also growing in their leisure time and prevents them from doing what they actually enjoy more. For one in four Germans, helping neighbours (East: 18 % - West: 23 %) and visiting the sick (East: 26 % - West: 23 %) have „nothing whatsoever“ to do with leisure time. Social services for others can quickly become a chore. Necessary work at home also threatens to fall victim to the growing selfishness of leisure time. While just under half of the East German population (44 %) regard household chores at the end of the working day and at weekends as a necessary evil, almost two thirds of West Germans (63 %) consider household chores in the family to be an activity that gets in the way of their own leisure interests.