Reflections on the different sides of idleness in contemporary times

Abstract

Over the last century, idleness experienced a modernization and democratization process especially with the crisis of a society focused on work – the post-Industrial Revolution - and the emergence of new ideas that put the free time, the leisure and recreation in the role of structural elements of the new social context and like tools for the new ways of life. In this work, we we seek to focus on the significant aspects of reality and function of leisure in our time, clarifying their relationship with the processes of personal, social and economic innovation by establishing a balance of our acts in thinking the leisure and work and leisure and life from different angles of approach. In order to analyze this phenomenon, we were based on scientific sources which are representative in the context, and then we elaborated a general overview of the subject from the contributions of the bakhtinian perspectives. We observed that the increase in leisure options in the last decades of the twentieth century, along with the growth of the studies of the idleness phenomenon and its possibilities, allowed an evolution of its concepts, from activities or practices associated to the consumption and to digital entertainment, to its understanding as an experience whose key of the discussion is the subject living these experiences. We believe that this reflection about idleness may open possibilities of a better comprehension of its insertion in the social and human sciences field and, especially, in its contribution to a new attitude of the relational production, centered on the subject, which stimulates a society that creates and innovates goods and services and who deepens the studies of leisure from the dynamic experiential horizon to the right to the otherness and to its time – the own one and the others’ – such as "the right to unfunctionality", from listening to the other word.