Even purely from a practical perspective of "I have to get into college", if you are not very active in extracurricular activities you are screwed on your appli

Even purely from a practical perspective of "I have to get into college", if you are not very active in extracurricular activities you are screwed on your applications. If you're doing athletics, you're spending five days a week for three hours after school every day during the sports season. Even not during the sports season I was spending a minimum of two hours every day on extracurriculars including Boy Scouts, Academic Superbowl, Chess Club, and Science Olympiad. Those I all did because I had honest enthusiasm and got a lot out of all of those things (contributed more to my engineering and general life education than many classes for sure). But this kind of load is not and should not be unusual in children trying to find out what they enjoy in life. Perhaps the problem is that there has been a shift from unstructured extracurricular activities to structured ones. I've seen this both in high schools and in universities. Writing poetry used to be something you did in an unstructured fun way, now it's a poetry club at school. So perhaps the difference is that what you define as "fun and trouble" is now a formal extracurricular activity.