The Weisure Lifestyle

Today, I learned a new word called “weisure”. According to Word Spy (the word lover’s guide to new words), weisure is “free time spent doing work or work-related tasks. [Blend of work and leisure]”.

I also read this arresting article by Thom Patterson, “Welcome to the ‘weisure’ lifestyle,” that appeared in CNN.com on May 11, 2009, where the line dividing work and leisure time is blurring right before our eyes, and it's creating a phenomenon called "weisure time".

Many who haven't already abandoned the 9-to-5 workday for the 24-7 life of weisure probably will do so soon, according to New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, who coined the word. It's the next step in the evolving work-life culture.

"Increasingly, it's not clear what constitutes work and what constitutes fun," be it "in an office or at home or out in the street," Conley said. Activities and social spaces are becoming work-play ambiguous, he says, as "all of these worlds that were once very distinct are now blurring together."
…more and more Americans are using smartphones and other technology to collaborate with business colleagues while hanging out with their families.

Why do Americans want to mix work and play? Well, first, there's more work and less play, according to Conley's book "Elsewhere, U.S.A."

"For the first time in history now, the higher up the economic ladder you go, the more likely you're going to have an extremely long workweek," he says. These busier Americans often want to save time by taking care of business and pleasure simultaneously.

Obviously, the Internet offers nothing but opportunity for that.

People are more willing to let work invade their leisure time because, for a lot of Americans, working has become more fun, Conley says. He refers to this group of professionals who tend to get more enjoyment out of work as "the creative class," borrowing a term coined by author Richard Florida.

Their work involves ideas – perhaps helping create a new software product, ad campaign or creative financial derivative.

"This makes their work a source of meaning and fun to them, and thus the work-all-the-time mentality is partly driven by choice and desire," Conley said.

It's no coincidence, Conley says, that weisure has been growing simultaneously with the popularity of the personal computer, which has helped professionals with more tedious parts of their jobs – and has made many jobs somewhat more interesting.

Weisure has been fueled by social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, where "friends" may actually be business partners or work colleagues.

"Social networking as an activity is one of those ambiguous activities," Conley said. "It's part fun and part instrumental in our knowledge economy."
These networking sites offer participants in the weisure life lots of ways to do business – and to have fun.

Social technology "triggers a pleasure response in our brain that we want, even if it's quasi-junk mail, because someone's reaching out to us for a social connection. So we're addicted, some of us, me included."

Perhaps more disturbing is the idea that weisure is changing us. "We lose our so-called private sphere," Conley said. "There's less relaxing time to be our so-called backstage selves when we're always mingling work and leisure."

But, short of a nuclear winter or some cataclysm sending us back to the stone age, there's no turning back the clock on the spread of weisure, he says. The weisure lifestyle will engrain itself permanently in the American culture.

Jacqueline Pereira in her “Culture Cul De Sac” column in StarMag, Sunday Star today offers reasons for this weisure yearning, among them are gadget addiction, fear of losing a job and being ostensibly so inundated with work that we are unable to complete it in the given time (p SM2). She understands that Malaysians are similarly caught up with weisure too. It's a fast-paced world, after all.