Jeff Pieper Work And Leisure Analysis

By reading Josef Pieper’s “Work, Spare Time, and Leisure” I learned that those terms are three possible ways to describe and divide up one’s time. Work is when you go to your job or whatever means you have to make money. Spare time can be defined in two ways, negatively and positively. To define something negatively, you say what it is not and spare time is the time that you are not working, this is the time most often spent resting to get back to work. But defining spare time positively means you must say what it is, and that is what leisure is. Leisure time is spent doing activities that you do just for the sake of the activity. Leisure activities are able to provide a sense of purpose and a level of fulfillment that are lacing in work and …show more content…
Many times when we see someone succeeding in their leisure activity we say that they have a gift or talent for it. That is where this is coming from. Dancing wasn’t something I was taught to love or forced to become great at, it was something that in doing it, I naturally fell in love with and just felt internally right. While I am dancing, there is nothing else in my mind besides the dancing, not the time, not my homework, nothing else and I can just enjoy and focus on the activity on its own. Consequentially, I spent a lot of time doing it and became quite good at dancing, and there were many people out there who would criticize and be very jealous of me. By accepting my dance as a free gift and not worry about living up to the expectations of all these people, I can more freely participate it by not have their judgments cloud my mind and focus solely on my dancing. Trying to explain it as something other than a free gift and treating it otherwise would put dancing at risk to becoming a means and not just an end. For example, as I went through life enjoying dancing, I met a lot of people who also enjoyed it and this inspired me to create a club where we meet up and dance and perform for other people. This was a bad move on my part because this club ended up turning my leisure activity into more work; my passion into something that I felt forced to do. There were deadlines to learn dances, criticisms from other members, having to sync up with other dancers, focusing all of our work to our showcase where we wanted everyone in the school to see. Dancing was becoming dangerously close to being a means and I stepped back and realized it, so I quit the club and went back to having dance as a mere side hobby and as an