Your Thursday Letter 16th July 2026
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Image Credits: Augustus Leopold Egg, The Travelling Companions (1862). Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
On Research as Leisure
— Written by San Choudhury
While the summer sun only keeps getting brighter, and we march towards the longest day of the year, I seem to repeatedly encounter the darker idea of hell. R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis has been on my currently-reading shelf for almost two months, during which I’ve been journeying through the eight courts of hell alongside Kuang’s protagonist, Alice Law. More recently, I read a post describing overconsumption as a spiralling hell from which escape is nearly impossible. Then came the quote from Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery: “There is my last-chance ticket out of Substack hell.” I encountered it during one of my late-night trawls through my Substack feed, as someone celebrated getting a book deal with a publisher. Three instances are all I’ll recount for now, n = 3 being good science and all that. As the glorious sun streamed through my window, three mentions of hell, I felt, were all I could handle.
So instead, I decided to turn my attention towards paradise and entertained what is perhaps the most common dinner-conversation question: what would life in paradise look like for you? And so the idea of ‘research as leisure’ entered my mind. If I were stuck on a desert island, with only one activity to occupy me for the rest of my life, and guaranteed peace of mind and safety, I’d choose, without a doubt, to pursue a life of research. I would do research, take my time with it, and go down as many rabbit holes as I wished. I would enjoy it, and there would be no stress around it.
My own version of paradise would be ‘research as leisure’.
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In Celine Nguyen’s Substack post of the same name, “Research as a Leisure Activity”, she writes:
The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas.
Oh, how dearly I would like to embody a practice of research like that. Far removed from any end goal, taking up ideas purely because I was curious about them, getting a feel for them, and seeing what I could do with them. The idea almost harks back to my childhood, when I would spend endless hours following links on Wikipedia. I would start on the Wikipedia page for anime, and hours later, when my mum came into my room to turn on the lights because dusk had fallen, I would be on the page about the militarisation of outer space. You keep reading and learning just because… There is no answer to the question of why I did that beyond sheer interest.
In recent years, I’ve noticed the idea of research as a leisure activity finding some takers online. As people increasingly turn inwards, there appears to be growing interest in developing oneself through intellectual activities. Research has become a hobby that people are actively pursuing. Or, at the very least, there are now people encouraging their followers to pursue research in their free time. If people once did yoga or baked cookies on a Sunday afternoon, they are now following their intellectual curiosities, deep-diving into niche topics, learning about them, taking notes on them, and even writing essays and creating videos about them. The world of ideas, explored through the practice of research, is becoming a playground for adults. For these hobbyists, research isn’t something they must do as a means to an end, but something they choose to do as a way of resting, replenishing, and relaxing.
By contrast, there’s little semblance of leisure in actual academic research. From the day I started my PhD, any notion of research being leisurely existed primarily in the realm of the imagination. From thinking about which conferences to submit to, to passing my annual reviews and scoping out journals for publication, there was nothing about research that felt remotely akin to sitting on a beach beneath the shade of palm trees, sipping piña coladas straight from coconut shells. Every paper I read, every paragraph I wrote, and every concept I explored was in service of an end goal. Even now, as I trapeze between academic research projects as an independent researcher, I wouldn’t say that doing research is all fun and games.
But then again, is there much surprise there? Research with a capital ‘R’ is a profession. As much as some of us puritans would like to believe, and even advocate, that academic research is a calling or vocation, in our world, that simply isn’t the case. Academic researchers get paid to conduct research, and being a researcher is a profession. By virtue of being a profession, research is labour and therefore not, by any straightforward definition, a leisurely activity.
Yet denying leisure a place within ‘Research’ seems problematic.
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