From Alienation to Resonance: Rethinking Modern Leisure Through Hartmut Rosa’s Critical Theory

Drawing on Hartmut Rosa’s “acceleration-alienation-resonance” theoretical framework, this paper systematically diagnoses the pathological alienation of modern leisure across five dimensions—time, experience, materiality, meaning, and the self—revealing its root cause as the rupture of “responsive relations” under the time-dominated logic of social acceleration. The study further proposes “resonant leisure” as an emancipatory practice, actively cultivating meaningful connections between the subject and the world along three axes of resonance: horizontal (social), diagonal (material/practical), and vertical (existential). The theoretical contribution of this work lies in providing a unified, time-centered generative explanatory mechanism for critical leisure studies, translating the normative ideal of “emancipation” into an actionable practical framework, and advancing the field from a diagnostic critique toward a dual-track “diagnosis-reconstruction” paradigm. Consequently, leisure is repositioned as a profound practice through which we learn to resonate with the world and pursue a good life.