There was a time when hobbies were simply for your enjoyment. You had one or two, at the least, that perhaps you were good at. If you weren’t, you kept trying until you were. You could even suck at it and no one would care. Regardless, you put effort into them, felt the satisfaction from it and went about your day. Hobbies have taken a turn.
Coloring
It used to be as simple as a pack of crayons and a coloring book. Back when Dandelion Yellow wasn’t discontinued and coloring books were $1 each, if that. Now there are coloring books priced at $30. In the early 2000s I would’ve gotten three of them with twice the number of pages for a fraction of the price.
Coloring is now labeled as a “cozy hobby” (basically any hobby you can do in your home is labeled “cozy”). These books often depict cute animals in cafes, comfortable interior designs and so on. They are cute, but the issue doesn’t reside with the images. The dilemma is the people making these forms of entertainment exhausting by treating it as a competition of who can color the same page better. Some are actively selling their pre-colored pages online.
When did we stop coloring outside the lines? When did we start coloring over the lines with $150 pens to make it more aesthetically pleasing? When did coloring become difficult?
Reading
Let’s talk about reading. What I really mean to say is, let’s talk about BookTok.
Tiktok is a video sharing social media platform that launched in 2016. It took off after the rise of COVID-19 and the shutdown in 2020. In recent years, book recommendations, mostly of the romance genre, have become increasingly popular on this app. Many titles gained relevance there, creating a chain reaction of crediting the app, thus birthing BookTok.
Influencers whose content focuses on recommending books have fused with those who generate views with shopping hauls. A shopping haul is when someone records what they’ve bought, after buying it. Now there is an entire wave of “creators” who post content buying books, not reading them. And like many other consumerism-driven trends, this one has caught fire. To the point where buying books has become the hobby. Reading them? Forget it. Getting the books second-hand? Then they can’t brag on camera about the smell of the new pages. Sound familiar?
We are in a literary crisis and there are people making money off of it. Even worse, the books are changing in response to book hauls. Have you walked down the book aisle in Walmart lately? They all look the same! Sprayed edges, pops of color, an enchanted object with some sort of greenery wrapped around it or a person with swirly tattoos. A gut-wrenching horror novel has the same cover design as a book about fairy romance. Don’t get me started on the multitude of books that have been published centering around comfy, magical shops or cafes. What is with the fixation around glamorizing buildings recently?
The point is they want you to buy dozens of pretty books without reading them. They want you to buy the book and place it on a shelf to never be touched because you think it’s too pretty to open. What happened to the beauty of writing your name in a book? I can’t be the only one who loves seeing the wear I put on a book. Remembering the history behind each coffee stain, each accidental tear. Then after its journey, annotating it, lending it to a friend so they can experience and see just how much you loved it.
They need you to convince yourself that spending $30 to $200 on coloring is therapeutic. As long as there are people profiting off of it the cycle will continue. Then they will have whatever is trending next at your fingertips. Available with same-day shipping, I’m sure, but at what cost?
Not to beat the bush here, but a lot of this points to the rise of social media platforms and influencers. Everyone has this unwavering desire to be the next big thing. In order to make it in on social media you need an audience and a niche. What better niche is there than nostalgic hobbies? Things your grandmother did without posting a time lapse of.
I would like to say that it is OK to want that. We all want things we don’t need. Though it’s OK to not be the next overnight sensation. It’s OK to just enjoy things. To be underwhelming with the things that make you calm. There is someone out there who will think you are anything but underwhelming. So color outside of the lines and read that dusty book with the creased spine! Do things for the sake of doing them without having to advertise it.
