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From Mundane to Everyday Leisure: Rethinking Happiness, Meanings, and Life State Through Multispecies' Narrative
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

From Mundane to Everyday Leisure: Rethinking Happiness, Meanings, and Life State Through Multispecies' Narrative

Haiting Zhu, Ebony Carr and Neil Carr
Leisure sciences
14/03/2026
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/10523/50261

Abstract

being constructivism leisure mundane
This paper begins not with festivals or faraway journeys, but with the quiet rhythm of living alongside Ebony, a female, black dog whose days are woven from simple repetitions. Each morning, the first author rose to Ebony's yawns and steady gaze. Each walk traced familiar paths that, through her nose and eyes, became endlessly new. Afternoon sun, a beanbag shared, the twitch of her ears in half-sleep. These small details revealed leisure not as escape but as dwelling in the ordinary. Through three months of shared life, and through the lens of multispecies ethnography, this paper sees leisure as a philosophy of being: sufficiency, gratitude, and joy inscribed in the mundane. Life around Ebony showed that freedom and agency are not found only in spectacle but in everyday life. The routines, the mundane, far from trivial, are the ground where leisure takes root and meaning unfolds.
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From Mundane to Everyday Leisure Rethinking Happiness Meanings and Life State Through Multispecies Narrative1.50 MBDownloadView
Published (Version of record)CC BY V4.0 Open Access
url
https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2026.2643249View
Published (Version of record)CC BY V4.0 Open

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