Editorial: Too driven to doodle

When was the last time you did something just because you wanted to — not because you had to?

It’s a simple question, but on Lehigh’s campus, the answer often feels complicated. 

Our community encourages intellectual curiosity, with professors pushing us to ask questions, classes allowing us to explore new areas and clubs for nearly every imaginable interest. 

Lehigh culture, at its best, makes it easy to “nerd out” about little things. Yet despite these opportunities, too many of us choose not to engage with them. 

Somewhere along the way, we stopped having hobbies, with many of us not making time for passions outside of coursework, academic goals or social commitments. 

“What do you like to do for fun?” becomes a difficult question to answer when our schedules are always full with exams, labs, practice, club meetings or catching up on sleep. 

Studies show hobbies and meaningful free-time activities are important for college students’ well-being, helping them feel more satisfied, capable and connected. 

But many students today have less time for hobbies because of academic stress and instead fill their free time with passive activities, like scrolling or just hanging out with friends. By choosing not to have hobbies, students are losing out on the benefits these activities have for their mental health and personal growth.

It isn’t just our free time disappearing, but the spirit of curiosity that hobbies inherently encourage; they’ve always been spaces where students could explore interests without deadlines or rubrics. 

Now, those pursuits feel indulgent, almost irresponsible, when compared with all the “more important” things we could be doing at college. 

Instead, hobbies have shifted toward activities that still feel productive. For some, working out has become a dominant pastime, framed less as recreation and more as self-optimization. And while pastimes like this are valuable, they’re not the same as curiosity-driven hobbies. 

Pew Research Center studies show the difference in teenagers’ hobbies from the periods of 2003-06 and 2014-17. The study showed teens reported spending more time sleeping and doing homework than socializing or working in recent years. The majority of teens’ leisure time is spent on screens, at an average of three hours and four minutes a day, while time spent on other forms of leisure decreasing. 

The rise of social media has also made it easier for people to grow self-conscious about the hobbies they once loved. With some hobbies considered “millennial” or “cringey,” and the idea that taking one on is in tune with a mid-life “millennial crisis,” it can make some hesitate to start collecting, crafting, scrapbooking or building model kits.

Interests like this that require vulnerability and enthusiasm are often dismissed in a campus culture that prizes efficiency and being “cool,” where genuine excitement can feel risky.

Yet, on this campus, we know students are capable of embracing those little things. We see glimpses of it every day in activities around campus. Organizations like Arts and Crafts Club, Fiber Arts Club, Letters and Literature and many more spaces foster creativity and curiosity. 

When we make space for these creative moments, Lehigh feels more alive, reminding us how to fail without consequence and reconnect with curiosity — the same curiosity that drew us here in the first place.

While Lehigh holds space for hobbies, it’s no longer normalized to have them. 

Niche hobbies like knitting and crafting are on the rise, but the competitive environment of Lehigh and constant need to be working make us push leisure and creativity to the backburner.   

As students we can challenge ourselves to reclaim time for things that matter to us, not because it looks good on a resume, but because it sparks joy. 

Even a single hour spent sketching each week, playing chess or learning guitar is a step toward balance. Small activities like these have the power to shape our lives in meaningful, lasting ways, allowing us to be people who knit, garden, or play piano, possibly poorly, but enthusiastically. 

We shouldn’t graduate with nothing but a list of accomplishments, but rather, we should leave Lehigh with passions that we carefully nurtured, interests we explored and even hobbies we failed at but enjoyed anyway. That’s what will sustain us long after our classes end and our careers start. 

Instead of asking “Who has time for hobbies?” we should start wondering, “How can we make time for them?” encouraging one another to try new pursuits without the fear of laziness and reclaiming curiosity as central to the college experience.

If Lehigh is a place where we can truly be passionate about anything, then it should also be a place where hobbies can thrive, away from our screens and activities that fill our resumes.