Collective term for fun, relaxation and escapism I'm pondering the nature and relationship of several things that I think are at least loosely related: fun, rest/relaxation and escapism.

They are all things that might be loosely described as "humanistic;" things that you associate with happiness. They might also be described as "fringe needs;" we have to take care of more important things before we go into leisure mode. (However, rest is an exception, as we can hardly stay sane without sleep.)

So is there a collective term for these things? Or can they be placed in some kind of category that separates them from more familiar needs, such as security, social connections and esteem?
I do not believe that there is an actual term that encompasses the three, but if you look at the functions they fulfil, you will find that they tend to give you a "break" from the stimuli that memory is repeatedly exposed to and allow the brain to process those stimuli from memory. 

My thoughts on it are: re-processing information that was processed before, trying again to find the patterns and bring the information you are exposed to onto consciousness is hard work that the brain shouldn't have to do. Instead, the same stimuli can be brought from memory and processed as such during lack of exposure.  

The only scientific thing that comes to my mind is a thing that comes from imagery of the visual cortex during significant activities (memorising a picture) versus non-significant activities (like being exposed to a blank picture instead of repeating the significant picture). It is called refreshing. More about it, for the scientifically-minded, here

In laymen terms, at times of non-exposure to the real stimuli your brain will automatically expose you to self-made renditions of those stimuli. This particularity of the brain involves complex cognitive functions, of which visual imagery is just an example. 

This might be an assumption and an over-generalising of the findings in the paper quoted here, but it might also be true that all the terms you mentioned in your question (fun, relaxation and escapism),can be linked to periods of time of non-exposure to the stimuli that need refreshed, aka. brought to memory by a cognitive representation rather than by repeated exposure. 

Now, the big difference between my proposed term and the terms you used is the fact that, scientifically, attentional refreshing has only been  proven for stimuli that the brain was exposed to moments ago. For complex pieces of information and longer periods of time, it would be hard to measure the effect that non--exposure has, because of the nature of the experiments we are now conducting in cognitive and neuro psychology.