Leisure is the time one is free from his or her daily routine. It is the time one has at his or her disposal to use as he or she chooses without being bound by any necessity. It is regarded as the time free from work where an individual is set to use it with freedom. In a normal situation, leisure follows a given work.

However because different individuals have different occupations, leisure might vary from one person to another. This means that what may be one’s leisure may be regarded by another as a piece of work.

Types of Leisure

Leisure activities are sub-divided into two types including.

      i)    Active leisure

      ii)   Passive leisure

Active Leisure

This kind of leisure involves a situation where someone is doing something. It involves a direct and physical participation of the individual enjoying the leisure activity.

In this type of leisure, a lot of energy is used. This is because the individual is actively involved using either the physical or mental energy to fulfill the activity.

Examples of active leisure include dancing, acting drama and playing games like football.

Passive Leisure

This is a kind of leisure where an individual is simply entertained. The person enjoys some activities without direct participation.

This means that an individual uses only the mental energy. The examples of passive leisure include sleeping, watching films and listening to music among others.

However, passive leisure may have some problems since the individual simply absorbs whatever is being presented without thinking much about it. This leisure may.

•     Encourages idleness         

•     Makes one unfit

•     Talents are undiscovered   

•     Promotes individualism

•     Encourages laziness          

•     Kill one's creativity

•     Promotes poverty        

•     Limits socialization

•     Promotes theft            

•     Promotes   boredom

The Importance of Leisure

The various leisure activities carried out offers different benefits. This may be economical, social and spiritual in nature including the following.

1.   Leisure helps in refreshing the mind of workers. This makes it possible for an individual to recover from the fatigue of work and regain the energy lost.

2.   Leisure provides an opportunity to discover and develop One's talents. This is especially true with active leisure where the individual directly participates in such activities like playing football, netball and swimming.

3.   Leisure promotes co-operation and socialization among people. As people come together to enjoy such activities including games, conversation and praying, peace and harmony may be promoted.

4.   Leisure provides income to different people at different levels. This is true with entertainers including actors and play writers among others.

5.   Leisure helps to strengthen an individual's faith. This can be through activities such as watching religious films, bible studies and prayers among others.

6.   Leisure promotes self-discoveries by the individual worker. It gives an opportunity to evaluate the work already done. This may assist in finding loopholes and better solutions in one's work.

7.   Leisure provides employment opportunities, for example radio and television presenters.

8.   Leisure helps in strengthening one's cultures through participating in activities like traditional dances. This gives, the people their true identities and creates the sense of belonging.

9.   Leisure promotes education among people. This can be through activities such as reading magazines and novels among others. These activities may facilitate learning.  

10. Leisure activities help to relieve the burden of being idle or redundant. In such a case, the worker is at least occupied with something.   

11. Leisure activities can improve-on the health status of an individual. Activities such as dancing and jogging among others muscles flexible. It also reduces the level of fat in the body because of the sweating. This limits the chances of contracting diseases such as high blood pressure and heart attack.

12. Leisure gives the chance for the workers to attend to their families. This is true considering that most workers spend much of their time away from homes.

13. Leisure helps to diversify the economic standard of the individual and the country. For instance, the government may increase on its earning through taxing the people engaging in the leisure activities and even the equipment being exported or imported.

14. Leisure gives workers adequate time to prepare for the next stage of work. In such free time, an individual is given the opportunity to lay strategies and plan for the work properly.

Problems associated with leisure today

1.   Most leisure activities today are commercialized. A person is required to pay some money before having access to leisure activities like watching football and film shows among others. This means that it is only those with money who can enjoy them thereby isolating the poor. This promotes social class differences, which threatens unity.

2.   Some leisure activities promote boredom especially when a person spends it passively. It may also be caused by the activities being unnecessarily long and continuous. This makes such activities to become monotonous hence denying people total enjoyment.

3.   Leisure is responsible for family neglect. In such cases, the leisure makers prefer engaging in leisure activities to attending family issues.

4.   It can lead to neglect of faith. Such people prefer the pleasurable activities to religious activities like bible studies.       

5.   Leisure can bring about school dropouts. This is because of the growing tendency of some students to go for different leisure activities like films, disco and watching football at the expense of reading books.

6.   The plenty of free time may give way for an individual to plan for evil. This can explain the emergency of gang stars and evil doers in urban areas.

7.   Some leisure activities are destructive to human life. Among others, motor rallies, drinking and wrestling have ended up causing serious injuries leading to death.

8.   Some leisure activities consume and waste a lot of energy. This is true with active leisure where an individual is made more tired than before. Therefore, an individual may not be refreshed and energized as it is always thought.

9.   Leisure may promote wrong education in the community. For example, exposure to pornographic materials may lead sexual immorality like fornication.

10. Leisure cat lead to and cause poverty, some people tend spend money extravagantly on leisure activities such as drinking and going for trips among others. This discourages saving which affects investment negatively.

11. Some leisure activities degrade and undermine the indigenous African cultures. This is because of the ever-increasing love for the Western leisure activities including films and nightclubs among others. This leaves the traditional way of life undeveloped.

12. Some leisure activities limit socialization. People are divided up because of some activities like sleeping and site viewing which can only be enjoyed by a person at go.

13. Most of the, good leisure activities are concentrated in urban areas. Activities such as film shows, theatres and discotheques are urban based. This may be one of the reasons why some youth are forced to migrate to town.

14. Some leisure activities kill a person's creativity. Talents may not also be developed. This is especially true if the leisure is spent passively.

15. Leisure also wastes a lot of valuable time that could be used in more productive activities. This may leave the community underdeveloped.