A student sat down in my office for what I thought was going to be a quick check-in on a paper idea, but her face darkened as her eyes passed over my monitor. “What?” she exclaimed, “Who are those other 42%? Who? I don’t know them!” I’d been skimming a news article reporting that 58% of Americans reported not getting enough sleep. She could not believe that the number was so low, for she and her classmates were so squeezed by school, employment, and, in many cases, athletics that she could scarcely imagine a world where anyone had enough time to get it all done, never mind sleeping enough. I couldn’t blame her. I’d had the same basic reaction to that headline.
In both casual conversations and formal interviews with students, I’ve noticed that they don’t simply complain about their fatigue and time poverty. They share that time poverty curtails their ability to flourish, limiting their exploration of the full range of their vocations. What we might call “productive leisure”—the use of time and effort not simply to restore oneself to return to work but to engage actively with hobbies, with play, and with unpaid interests—is often crowded out of their lives. This loss is not superfluous nor is it merely the price of adulting in a culture of busyness. If vocation is truly an invitation to live holistically, then we are called in our work, family, community, and leisure.
While Aristotle saw the purpose of leisure to restore us to return to work, a more thoroughgoing understanding of the human person sees our relation to leisure as much more complex. We are made for work, of course, but also for relationships, for play, and for exploration. As the great 20th-century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us, Sabbath is not a means to being restored for the rest of the week; Sabbath has a value all its own. Relationships, play, and exploration are an essential part of who we are, and so our schedules should reflect the depth of these facets of our humanity.
Baptist theologian Elizabeth Newman equates “leisure” not with “sloth” but with contemplation in the world, with our deepest selves engaging most fully in it. Drawing on the philosopher Josef Pieper, she considers leisure to be “the basis of academic culture.” Similarly, my students find it useful to make a distinction between “lower” forms of leisure (by which they mostly mean mindless scrolling) and “higher” forms of leisure (when they are engaged in hobbies and in relationships). I like to call those “higher” forms of leisure “productive leisure.” They are ways in which we engage our interests in the world, fashioning both the world and our very selves, but in ways that are not required of us in the same way that our employment, school assignments, and family duties are. Almost to a person, my students lament that they lack the time, energy, and habit of engaging in any kind of “productive leisure.” As the student in my office said, “I would love to find a hobby … I just feel like I don’t even have time to think about what a hobby would be because there’s no time for it anyway.”
In my own field of religious education, theologians like Courtney Goto and Lakisha Lockhart-Rusch have especially emphasized the need for pedagogies of play—and playful pedagogies—that encourage students to wonder, to explore, and to embrace both self and world. Similarly, the philosopher Matthew Crawford, drawing on his own experience as a scholar and motorcycle mechanic, notes that it is often in our free time that our actions are most wholehearted and that we find a community of engagement. Play and productive leisure allow us to attend to the self and the world in ways that ground vocational discernment and create contexts in which our vocations can be lived out. I think, for instance, of one student whose boyfriend helped her do a brake job on her car, all while helping her practice doing it by herself for the future. She came to class the next day talking about she discovered a love of fixing and building things—a love she could not have discovered without the time to try it out and the guidance to be tutored into it. And our undergraduate students, like the rest of our society, seem not to have enough of that kind of leisure.
The point here is decidedly NOT that students should not work for money, that we should ignore the reality that higher education is expensive, or that higher education should only be the province of the financial elite. The point is that if we as educators are to take seriously—and to ask our students to do so, too—the notion that vocations are themselves invitations to which we can respond in the fullness of our humanity, and not extraneous, nice-to-have-but-really-for-the-elite; then we must look for ways to help our students to explore vocational commitments in their leisure during their undergraduate careers. We owe it to them to help them develop the habits of taking seriously their whole selves as people of leisure and to consider that living vocationally unfolds over the course of a lifetime as they discern their callings along multiple paths.
What might taking productive leisure seriously mean for us and our undergraduate students? I suggest three possible implications. One is that we must continue to provide spaces for the exploration of interests not only within, but also beyond, the curriculum. While this suggestion may seem so obvious as to not even to merit a mention, in a society that views higher education only as professional preparation, the co-curricular is again being viewed by the public as extracurricular. If clubs and activities are seen by students (or their parents) as frivolous extras with no return on investment, then we will be hard-pressed to persuade them to engage such activities meaningfully, but we must continue to try.
Second, we must encourage students to critique the cultural narrative that overemphasizes the “grind,” valorizes busyness, and leaves us all making money for short-term consumer goals. Emerging adulthood is a time when we can take ownership of our culture and separate ourselves from it. What can we do to coach students to think critically about this narrative so that they can choose more consciously and intentionally how they will spend their time?
Finally, if students lack leisure because they lack time, we must not ignore time management. Certainly, many first-year student success seminars and academic support programs teach the skills of time management, and we must continue to do so. However, part of time scarcity is also about procrastination, and procrastination is less often about sloth than it is about anxiety: we put off (while continuing to fret about) the unpleasant or challenging task because we are anxious about how even to begin. Indeed, when my students use generative AI, they often defend their action by saying, “I didn’t know where to start, so I was just trying to get ideas.”
In response to this challenge, I suggest that we continue to teach students to manage their academic anxiety so that they not only stop wasting time procrastinating but also carve out more free time to take on their academic tasks in a spirit of joyful exploration. Perhaps even more importantly, doing so might also help them discover their capacities to explore productive leisure outside of these tasks in ways that could powerfully shape their vocational journeys.
Christopher Welch is associate professor of religious studies at Rivier University in Nashua, NH, and a NetVUE Faculty Fellow. He is co-author, with Cynthia L. Cameron, of Life Abundant: God and the Created Order in Catholic Social Perspective (Kendall Hunt 2022). None of these endeavors has adequately prepared him to match wits or wills with his toddler.