What Did You Do On Your Vacation?

I visited with family, read, fished, learned a little more about my family ancestry, and relaxed. Did I use my time well? Maybe, according to Geoff Godbey, a professor of leisure studies at Pennsylvania State University, who says there is a hierarchy of leisure activities:

To be most satisfying, Prof. Godbey explains, leisure should resemble the best aspects of work: challenges, skills and important relationships. Leisure has its hierarchy. At the lowest level, it's a search for diversion, higher up it's a search for pleasure and, at the top, it's a search for meaning. "It's not that diversion is bad," says the professor, "but in terms of human growth, it's inferior to activities that are more pleasurable -- and they're inferior to activities that are more meaningful."

Scientific evidence, he notes, shows that people who engage in skill-oriented leisure -- crossword puzzles, bridge, chess, woodworking -- score higher on practical intelligence tests. "Leisure is a very important medium for making us stupider or more intelligent," he says. "At the end of your life what you've done with your leisure may be more important than what you've done at work."

I don't have a doctorate in leisure studies, and don't remember seeing those classes on the curriculum when I attended PSU some 25 years ago either, but I suspect that truly meaningful leisure is strongly correlated with what a person does when they are not at leisure. For some who work in very high-stress jobs, for instance, I can imagine that sitting on a beach frying ones body and brain is quite meaningful.