Working for leisure

Today's workplace is creating ever increasing demands upon us. To fulfil our own personal idealised image of happiness - a well-furnished house in a nice part of town, an impressive car, and exotic holidays a plenty, for instance, we realise that we need to earn more money. So we put in more hours and hope that one day we will get that promotion. And when we eventually do, we realise that the job carries more responsibility and that means working more and more hours... and then we wonder where our leisure time has gone.

As we become at the mercy of the mobile phone, the cut-off point between work and leisure gets more and more blurred. A survey carried out by a office equipment supplier found that British bosses work an average of 60 hours a week. In Germany this increases to 70.

We place the same structuring on our home life as our work life to make full use of the seven or eight hours left, when sleep is accounted for. Every hour is calculated to take account of our social life, sports or fitness activity, with television swallowing up an average of four hours for most of us. This economic use of time will take a more important role in the future, if leisure time continues to diminish.

We will see centres emerge where our leisure time activities converge. A public place for meeting business or social contacts, with a restaurant or cafe, gym, library, Internet access and cinema all under one roof. It makes sense, commercially, to group everything together like this, to provide a hook that keeps people there as long as possible. With everything there that customers need, they won't want to leave.

Almost every part of the globe has been ventured by holiday makers, with the exception the Arctic Circle. Expect to see more faraway places added to the departures board, in the not too distant future, as interest and demand arises from TV natural history programmes, documentaries and the mass media. Cruises are the biggest area of tourism at the moment, as package tour operators drive the cost down, proving that travelling in itself has its attractions. Trips into space will inevitably be the next hottest destination, predicted by some to occur in just three years time. Like cruise ships of today, space travel could take a luxurious form to account for its predicted prohibitive cost.

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