International Journal of Ageing and Later Life· 2026Q1
“That always surprises me, the dark in the light”: meaningful pleasure in creative leisure of midlife women
- 0citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Creative leisure activities provide midlife women with meaningful pleasures, including embodied delights, immersive sensations, and identity exploration, countering societal narratives of decline and depression for this life stage.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Creative leisure activities provide midlife women with meaningful pleasures, countering negative societal narratives.
- Pleasures identified include embodied delights, immersive sensations, transformative play, risk-taking, friendships, learning, and identity exploration.
- These positive experiences are understood in the context of fears of aging, mortality, and self-criticism.
- The findings suggest a counternarrative to the portrayal of midlife as a time of decline and depression.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Hegemonic narratives of midlife portray this understudied life-stage as a time of decline, depression, and joyless juggling of career and caregiving. Women in midlife face the “double standard” of aging at the intersection of ageism and sexism (Sontag 1972), pressured to “age successfully” (Lamb et al. 2017). An interpretive phenomenological analysis (Smith et al. 2009) comprising interviews, observations, and photo-elicitation of five women in the Netherlands suggests a counternarrative, by which engagement in creative leisure provides opportunities for pleasure, delight, sensual joy, and flourishing through midlife transitions. The findings reveal a wide array of meaningful pleasures in creative leisure: embodied delights, immersive sensations, transformative play, adventurous risk taking, friendships, new learning, and identity exploration. These pleasures gain nuanced understanding when considered in context of fears of aging and mortality, embodied inhibitions, and self-criticism. The sombre themes enhance the joyful ones, highlighting dark and light as a delicate interplay underpinning women’s creative leisure in midlife.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 2026 · DOI ↗
Continue with a free account
Ask the paper: 3 free questions a day about this paper; save it, get its citation, new summaries every day for your field. Takeaways are Premium.
Continue free on the webSign in with Google or Apple; no card needed. You come back to this paper.
On your phone:
Field: Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Neuropsychology and Physiological PsychologyPsychology