Time Is of the Essence: An Analytic Autoethnography of Family, Work, and Serious Leisure

Abstract

While leisure is often represented in public discourse as a realm of freedom and self‐actualization, for most adults the pursuit of serious leisure activities involves negotiating familial and professional constraints. Based on the author's autoethnographic experiences with sport skydiving, this article examines the familial and professional constraints that he has experienced, as well as the challenges to recreational skydivers posed by current trends in the sport. The author describes various only partly successful strategies he has used to manage the tensions between his skydiving pursuits, work, and family. Proposing his analysis as an example of “analytic autoethnography” the author concludes by considering the implications of his research for better understanding serious leisure pursuits more generally, as well as for answering the personal question, should I continue to jump out of planes?