🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and you're listening to the Weekend Book Review — where your weekend reading list meets your inner researcher. Today, we're unpacking a little book with big ideas, and I promise you, it’s going to shift how you think about what you do in your free time. 🧠📖✨
The book is titled Project-Based Leisure: Toward Personal Well-Being and Community Involvement, written by none other than Robert A. Stebbins — a name that rings loud and clear in the world of leisure studies. If you’ve heard of the serious leisure perspective, you’ve already stepped into Stebbins' world. He’s a professor emeritus at the University of Calgary, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and the kind of sociologist who has spent over five decades mapping how humans find meaning, creativity, and connection in their free time. 🧩🎨🌍
In this compact but thought-provoking book, Stebbins introduces us to something he calls Project-Based Leisure, or PBL for short. It’s not the mindless scrolling kind of leisure. It’s also not your long-haul, life-consuming passion project. PBL is the stuff that falls just in between. It’s that short-term, creative, one-off adventure—like joining a mural-painting weekend, organizing a neighborhood cleanup, or building a backyard greenhouse from scratch. Things you do for joy, for growth, and sometimes, for the community. 🌿🛠️💡
He argues that while PBL may not be as intense as serious leisure or as fleeting as casual fun, it plays a vital role in boosting our well-being and deepening our community ties. And honestly? I’ve started seeing my own weekends in a different light. That one-off documentary project. That pop-up poetry event. That time I helped set up a local food drive. Were those chores? No. They were mini-missions. 📝💪🎭
So here’s the question I’m still turning over in my mind after finishing this book:
🤔 What if the secret to a more fulfilling life isn’t in chasing constant passion or endless productivity, but in embracing the occasional project that lights a small but meaningful spark?
A huge thank you to Robert A. Stebbins and Springer Nature for bringing us this beautiful blend of theory and practice, grounded in years of real research and real life.
✨ Make sure you subscribe to our podcast Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, Amazon Prime Music, and Apple Podcasts — and head over to our YouTube channel Weekend Researcher for more deep dives, weekend reads, and unexpected ideas. 🎧📺💬
Go build something this weekend. Not for money. Not for status. Just because it matters to you. 💙🛠️🌱
Reference
Stebbins, R. A. (2023). Project-Based Leisure. In SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality of Life Research. Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47052-3
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