‘Loremaxxing’: An ode to doing literally anything but your law school assignments.

*Disclaimer - Chelsea does actually do her law assignments. If you are one of her professors or her parents, please disregard the article below.

I love theatre. Ever since being shoved up onto a stage to go and dance at three, I have trodden the boards more than I care to admit. After having a firm ‘I am going to be a professional dancer and music theatre performer’ era, I subsequently decided to stick to University Theatre during my gap year.

Before recommencing my studies in 2026, my parents asked me, ‘You're not going to keep going with that theatre thing, are you? You will be far too busy with work, law school, living on your own and paying taxes’. While I have not yet told my parents that I did indeed keep doing University Theatre and will be doing a show this semester. I am hoping this article might soften the blow should they inadvertently find out that I am playing a seductive, 1930s German spy instead of studying on a random Tuesday. Hopefully, it can also encourage you to do something random or pick up something that you love again.

What is Loremaxxing?

Loremaxxing is defined in the ‘Urban Dictionary’ as ‘a philosophy and a way of life based on the commitment to embrace bizarre experiences constantly.’[1] As far as I interpret it, you can obtain lore intentionally or unintentionally, and lore does not necessarily have to have positive connotations. Generally, I like to consider lore as experiences that have shaped who you are or have taught you a lesson.

Why should you loremaxx more often?

Meeting people more genuinely

Some of the best relationships I have made both personally and professionally have been made by doing random sidequests in the pursuit of loremaxxing. Most of my personal friends prior to and since starting university in Canberra have been involved in theatre, youth advocacy or writing rather than strictly in my law classes.

Professionally, in the week prior to writing this, I was marching in my first-ever Sydney Mardi Gras when the person dancing next to me happened to work as senior legal counsel at a large firm. From being friendly and getting to know each other throughout the night, I’ve ended up connecting with the firm in Canberra, who are now helping me with my professional development. Whilst this is admittedly a wild example and farming connections should not be the sole reason why you loremaxx, it can sometimes be a hidden benefit.

Teaching yourself to be a time wizard.

People ask me after hearing about all the weird and wonderful things that I do, ‘how on earth can you be so busy all the time?’ The answer to that is years of understanding my routines and optimising the boring bits of my life so that I can get on with the fun. This understanding was gleaned through loremaxxing in my youth - As a young athlete, I managed 35 contact hours of training a week on top of school. While I'm pretty unfit now, the long hours taught me a lot about using my commutes productively, prioritising active rest through either hobbies or sleep and understanding how best to schedule my days and my months to prevent burnout.

Trial and error regarding time management is much more forgiving when you are young and have the flexibility, support or energy to make up for misjudgements. Learning this skill by managing multiple sidequests will benefit you later when the responsibilities you are juggling become more high-stakes.

Learning how to do (and cope with) hard things

Starting something you know you are not very good at is hard. Managing many things when they all get busy is hard. Not achieving something on the first try is hard. Experiencing these in the context of your sidequests makes difficulties on your main quest more bearable, as you know how to cope with stressors.

Having a sense of self beyond what you do for work or for study is important; one of my pet peeves in life is people introducing themselves solely with their occupation when it is clearly not their vocation or something they are kind of passionate about. ‘Hello, I’m Chelsea, I’m a Law Student, former Government Regulator and current Programs and Events Officer’ sounds way less interesting than ' Hi, I’m Chelsea, I like learning about tech governance, dancing, writing, playing Catan and crocheting tiny dinosaurs. One of these is certainly more interesting to me, and it isn’t the one you would find on my LinkedIn page.

When your work or your studies become difficult ( you are having an argument with your colleagues, you fail a uni assignment, you get laid off), you also have another aspect of your identity to help ground yourself. Having something constant when everything else is changing or falling apart around you is important for you to realise that things can and will get better. If that means your sidequest becomes a main quest for a time, then so be it.

A more fun way to procrastinate:

Let's be realistic. We all procrastinate sometimes. I personally have an average cumulative procrastination time of 3 weeks to 1 month between starting and finishing a major assignment or exam revision crash course. However, if you could decide between procrastinating while scrolling reels in bed or saying yes to pursuing a long-lost hobby, starting a project that you have never done before or seizing a random opportunity, which would you choose?

The latter options are all forms of ‘productive procrastination’ where you procrastinate a task by doing a completely different thing entirely. I am a big fan of productive procrastination for a few reasons:

• It allows you to put the task you are working on into perspective and realise that it isn’t that serious or time-consuming;

• It engages your brain while resting it, allowing you to feel both refreshed while expanding your understanding of the world around you;

• Feeling accomplished when you finish the ‘silly’ thing makes you more motivated to start the serious thing and;

• Because sometimes you can use the skills learned while doing your sidequests in your main study or career quests.

I ironically get more assignments done, holed up backstage in Kambri Theatre, where I have to keep my brain engaged enough to be a funny actor, than I do at my own desk. I have more epiphanies about how my law assignments are wrong upside down in a headstand at callisthenics training than I do in my tutorials. And I get more career clarity watching Air Mata di Ujung Sajadah (Tears at the edge of a prayer mat, my favourite Indonesian soap opera) for the 8th time than I do at most seminars or networking events.

While, in the technical sense, these hobbies are a form of procrastinating finishing my studies or starting my career, they make up for that lost time in self-understanding, burnout prevention, and just having some fun.

So please, if you have the capacity to go do a random thing for fun, say yes, build your lore. And if that is through university theatre, then maybe I’ll see you in the audition room next semester.

Footnotes:

[1] Loremaxxing (2024) Urban Dictionary. Available at: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Loremaxxing (Accessed: 15 March 2026).