Casual observation suggests that most people spend a considerable amount of time thinking and talking about a variety of personal interests and concerns while engaged in work, leisure, or non-work obligatory activities. The English language has no word for this process, even while it is a common practice, oftentimes enjoyable (e.g., daydreaming, planning a party, reminiscing), sometimes unpleasant (e.g., anticipating a major operation, coping with difficult financial circumstances, pondering the imminent death of a loved one). However positive or negative this everyday process at any given moment, it tends to become active whenever the main activity at the time requires less than full concentration.
Here we shall refer to this process, for want of a better term, as pondering everyday activities, or PEA. It is at once a process of thought and talk as well as an activity. More precisely, it appears to be an activity within an activity being undertaken during work, leisure, or non-work obligation. That is, when thought and talk constitute the only activity a person is engaged in, it is just another activity in the domain of work, leisure, or non-work obligation.
In one sense work, leisure, and non-work obligation—the latter known in popular terms as chores—occupy separate domains in the modern mind of much of the world’s population (Stebbins, 2017a). In other words, most everywhere people understand these three concepts and know when they are functioning in one domain or another. And this, even though in many languages there are different words for the three, and even though they are probably not apparent in primitive and peasant societies where the borders of the three may be substantially blurred.1 This we may call the institutional or macro-level conception of work and leisure.
In a second sense, however, we interrelate these three in myriad ways; they are discernible, even though we occasionally think about one or two of them while pursuing an activity in one of the others. I will show throughout this book how such interrelating brings continuity to everyday life. This micro- and meso-level conception squares, in part, with Beatty and Torbert’s (2013) position that work and leisure are not as separate, not as compartmentalized, as some thinkers have claimed.
The present book explores this seldom-examined process/activity and in so doing helps validate the Beatty-Torbert conception and ipso facto its macro-level cousin. In this book I will also discuss how people think and talk about activities pursued inside and outside the domain they are in at the moment. For example, some people on a leisurely holiday are said to be unable or unwilling to leave work behind, keeping up with it by using cell phones and laptop computers (Paris, Berger, Rubin, & Casson, 2015). And free-time interests may be pursued at work (e.g., while at the office ordering catered hors d’oeuvres for a weekend party or memorizing lines for one’s part in a play—for evidence of the latter, see Stebbins, 1979, p. 86). Furthermore, we make comparisons across the three domains, as in noting how boring work is vis-à-vis certain leisure activities or how well the output from a hobby of baking cookies is received by co-workers. Third, we sometimes borrow time from one domain to facilitate an activity in another. For instance, by leaving work early, I can do some necessary yard work before the forecasted rain storm arrives. By cutting back on the time spent this weekend watching television, I can write the report due early next week at the company where I am employed.
All this suggests the existence of PEA, a thinking process/activity in which we routinely understand, coordinate, organize, remember, and compare our involvements in the three domains. It is framed in a person’s relevant ideas and beliefs about everyday life as well as in their sense of that life as experienced in the past, present, and future in these domains. That is, one’s PEA also bears in particular ways on one’s life course (see Chap. 4). Sometimes seemingly external interests or circumstances enter the PEA, such as a new government policy affecting work, extreme weather conditions, and dramatic changes in health of oneself or a person in one’s care (as a non-work obligation). In fact, there are times for most everybody when external interests or circumstances dominate one’s PEA, seen in major storms, fires, health problems, financial crises, among others.
An important feature of this mentality is its origin in life’s routines and how they interface, for it is this thinking process/activity that gives significant direction to our pursuit of the activities comprising the three domains. The wider meso- and macro-level contexts in which this operates, however, should not be ignored. Those contexts—culture, broad social trends, social structure, history—help explain the PEA that emerges in the mind of each participant. This book will not systematically consider this more remote though vital explanatory level, however, only because setting out effectively the nature and consequences of such everyday thinking is all that a conceptual monograph should attempt. In other words, this is the first step from which others must follow. The next steps should consist of exploratory studies of the PEAs typically found in certain leisure and work activities examined at their micro-, meso-, and macro-levels (these levels as exemplified in leisure are examined in Stebbins, 2017a).
Why is PEA important? Separate sessions of PEA together constitute an individual’s overview of everyday life—their big picture of that life. This picture is not in the typical case scientifically or analytically sophisticated, as it would be when mainly anchored in such abstractions as social class, gender, ethnicity, and historical background. Nevertheless, our PEA does give a sense of life’s personal organization and sometimes of its personal disorganization and contradictions (e.g ., Joudrey & Wallace, 2009). It also gives a sense—a social organizational sense—of how one fits in the local community and for some people fits beyond it.
Moreover, the PEA is motivating and, as such, is a source of personal agency. It is thus a vital force in shaping one’s general lifestyle. What is more, it is not always pleasant; rather it is sometimes attractive (part of well-being), sometimes partially attractive, and in some respects downright unattractive. Put otherwise each session of PEA is itself a leisure activity when agreeable and a work or non-work obligatory activity when disagreeable. It is also a home-grown justification for doing either what one must do or wants to do. Even when the PEA is chiefly about boredom, it is motivating, if for no other reason than it pushes the bored individual to find an interesting activity (Brissett & Snow, 1993), possibly one fostering creativity (Harris, 2000).
Who in modern society is inclined to PEA? In general, those members of it whose daily lives are complex enough—have enough work, leisure, and non-obligatory activities—to either encourage them or force them to interrelate those activities. Thus people with monotonous leisure and work lifestyles (e.g., watch entertainment TV often, work at unskilled jobs) might be shown by way of research to live a life so simple that they are uninclined to PEA or engage in it less frequently than people faced with routine complexity (e.g., the “rat race”). Additionally, conditions like unemployment, disability, and retirement could constrain participation in activities, leading thereby to a significant reduction in the complexity of everyday life.
Three Domains
A domain is composed of a distinct set of activities. An activity is a type of pursuit. In it participants think or act (or do both), hoping to achieve a desired end. For a more detailed discussion of activity, see Stebbins (2012, Chap. 1), where it is stated that life consists of many activities, both pleasant and unpleasant: napping, weeding the garden, taking the bus to work, having physiotherapy for a sprained ankle, eating breakfast, playing handball matches, directing a meeting, and so on. Activities, this list suggests, can be classified as work, leisure, or non-work obligation.
On the activity level, much of everyday life can be understood as experienced in one of these domains. At first blush it might seem that all of life can be conceptualized thus. Still, experiences we must undergo entirely against our will fail to fit the definition of activity just presented (e.g., being tortured, interrogated by the police, being kidnapped). As pointed out the ends sought in these unwanted experiences are pursued by other people. The “victims” of such activities have no agency, unless they can somehow rebel with an activity designed as resistance (Stebbins, 2017b). One might ask at this point if our existence is not more complicated than this. In fact it is, since each of the domains is extraordinarily complex, while there is also some important overlap across the three.
The domain approach is a prism through which to view the institutional space of leisure. In its own special way it elaborates the institutional side of leisure (Stebbins, 2017a). This said, the idea of domain is distinctive enough to be treated of separately, since it is rare in the social sciences to view everyday life as unfolding in these three different but interrelated spheres. The following examples show how domainal boundaries become blurred. If the government mandates that a family may have no more than one child (until recently a policy in China), this will allow more time for activities in the work domain as well as in those of leisure and non-work obligation. Or consider the condition of poverty. For the extremely poor, their conditions of hunger, disease, malnutrition, and unemployment largely obliterate their non-work and leisure domains, forcing these people into a full-time search for survival (subsistence-level work). Third, on the cultural level, some groups (e.g., religious, community) the significance of altruism is manifested as volunteering. Volunteering is a leisure activity, which, however, loses this quality when ...