Put your toys away
We're prioritised leisure for a long time. But Covid and the Cost-of-Living Crisis are threatening that.
It’s the summer holidays, so let’s talk about leisure.
For as long as I’ve worked in trends analysis, one of the trends we’ve talked about is the Play Society. The Play Society describes the importance of leisure and the way it has become central to our lives and our identities. The way in which we talk about our interests and hobbies rather than our work and careers (some of us). The way we carve out opportunities for fun, or entertainment, throughout the day. The way foreign holidays have become more accessible and untethered from a few weeks in August and the way that rising longevity – especially more time in good health – means an extended lifetime of play, on golf courses and tennis courts, in microbreweries and cafes, in parks with grandchildren, on holiday without them.
One of the things that made this trend so compelling was the fact that our obsession with leisure appeared to be coming at the expense of work. In 1990, according to data collected by the World Values Survey, only family was more important to people in the UK than work. But work has plummeted as a consideration – these days it barely makes our top five priorities. What used to be the key consideration is now an also-ran – we’re less likely to define ourselves by what we do, less likely to see our jobs as fundamental to who we are, less likely to bore people to tears by droning on about our careers.
One of the other fascinating things about this data was that leisure didn’t really increase in importance. In 2018, 48% of people in the UK told us that leisure was very important to them. That’s only 4% higher than when World Values Survey first asked the question in 1990. The way we viewed leisure didn’t dramatically change – indeed, the leisure line would have been an excellent boring chart – it just rose in relative importance because of the collapse of work.
This should very much not be taken to mean that people in the UK are work-shy. Employment is currently very high. The idea that ‘people just don’t want to work anymore’ is a common sentiment, but also nonsense, as we explored last year, here and even more recently, here.
Playtime is Over
But all that is changing. Below is the chart combining Trajectory data (2011 onwards) with the World Values Survey data (1990-2006). Since the start of the pandemic, the weight we place on leisure has collapsed. Has the Play Society ended?
It’s dipped before. In 2013 – not a banner year for the economy, and the point at which the impact of the Coalition government’s public spending measures really started to hit – it dipped below 40% for the first time. That time, it quickly recovered. This time, the dip has been longer, and keeps getting lower. A weakening in the importance of leisure during the very serious times of the pandemic is understandable. That it would remain weak during a bleak cost-of-living crisis makes sense too. But the continued decline this year suggests a more fundamental shift. At what point does a dip become the new normal?
Leisure also stands alone in seeing such a dramatic change since the start of the pandemic. Work has recovered slightly, but completely in line with previous trends. The importance of family is in long term gradual decline (a topic for another edition) but hasn’t seen much change in the last few years. Income has increased gradually over the past decade, art and culture hasn’t increased at all. National culture/identity spiked in 2018, in the torturous aftermath of the EU Referendum, but has since settled. Politics also jumped then, and has maintained its level. Combined, these variables create one of our trademark boring charts. The big story is leisure.
What does this mean?
Is it all over for the Play Society? There’s compelling evidence to suggest that our appetites for leisure aren’t going to recover anytime soon. In June, we asked UK consumers what Covid adaptions they’d kept. A quarter (25%) told us they were having fewer social engagements, 28% said they were having more nights in. Perhaps most notably, 22% said they’d ‘adopted a slower pace of life’. More than three years on from that first lockdown, they are big shifts to have kept. The rising cost of everything isn’t going to help either.
There’s scope to be cautiously optimistic about the Play Society. During the last big financial crisis, discretionary spending and time spent on leisure dropped, but recovered quickly. Post-pandemic, if finances are the big suppressor of leisure then as soon as people feel they have some headroom they will prioritise it again. But that may not be anytime soon.
Finances might explain why spending on leisure has dropped, but not why its importance to us has dropped. That’s a values shift – perhaps the big manifestation of the New Seriousness we identified as an emerging trend during the pandemic. Then, our examples were declining smoking rates and plummeting self-employment.
In the long term, perhaps its biggest impact is on the perception of the more trivial aspects of our lives, weakening the importance of the things that aren’t meant to be that important.
I see this a lot in our team, the 20-somethings now definitely seem to have a different approach to leisure than the older group. Would be interesting to see the split across ages.