Leisure. The Ultimate Act of Resistance.

Insatiable is a new project and we are often thinking about the line "all work and no play".

In a world increasingly defined by acceleration, productivity, consumption, and burnout, leisure has become something of a radical act. Not the commodified leisure sold back to us in curated experiences and digital escapism, but true leisure: unstructured, unproductive, and self-directed time.

The dominant narrative insists that value lies in output. Even rest is now marketed as a means to optimise performance with recovery as a productivity hack. In this climate, choosing to be still, to be present, to engage in leisure without economic purpose, is framed as laziness at best, deviance at worst. But what if it’s resistance?

Across communities fractured by inequality, violence, and structural harm, leisure takes on an even deeper significance. It becomes a space for autonomy, to feel pleasure, to reconnect to others, to place. It offers a kind of harm reduction not as a policy intervention, but as a human right. The freedom to waste time, to take up space, to be idle, is distributed unequally. And yet it remains essential.

Criminologists talk a lot about control and leisure interrupts this. It reclaims time from systems that see people as problems to be managed or data to be mined. It offers a glimpse of life beyond survival, a landscape of joy, creativity, and restoration. It is not a withdrawal from politics, but a rewriting of what it means to live well.

Leisure, in this sense, is not frivolous. It is sacred. And maybe it’s where the real work begins.

Having one of the foremost Criminologists on Leisure in our midst has led to interesting conversations where leisure is not the absence of productivity but the presence of possibility and we're asking what this means for society in the 21st century. With this in mind, can we crack open a line of inquiry that exposes structural harm by looking more deeply into what Leisure is today.