More and more Gen Zers are spending their weekends not in clubs or bars, but at home. They knit, drink tea, and go to bed early. What appears to be a conscious choice for a slower, more laid-back lifestyle is often seen as a counter-movement to the constant sensory overload on social media – a retreat from a world that constantly demands attention.
Back to the roots – a return to our grandparents’ leisure activities? Is the knitting movement an expression of a growing desire to spend more time at home, to engage in simple, analog activities, to indulge in manageable routines?
The turn toward the analog could be an act of liberation. A letting go of the constant sense of urgency that social media creates: being visible, reacting, keeping up. Turning away from it seems like an exit from this system – like reclaiming time and attention. Knitting, baking, and crafting appear in this context as spaces where nothing needs to be evaluated or optimized.
But perhaps this movement is less an expression of freedom than a symptom of exhaustion.
Perhaps we don’t reach for wool and needles because we’re consciously choosing against something, but simply because we lack the energy to keep participating in everything. Withdrawal then becomes not an active choice, but the only remaining way to cope with being overwhelmed. In this sense, knitting would not be an alternative to the system, but a reaction to being overwhelmed by it.
And this is precisely where the ambivalence begins: for the more these analog practices are staged as a solution, the more they lose their original character. As soon as withdrawal becomes a trend, and the activity an aesthetic, their function also changes. What was once private, purposeless, and casual then becomes visible on social media, shareable, and – once again – subject to evaluation. Slowness becomes an attitude that can only be maintained through its own staging.
Knitting is then no longer simply an activity, but part of a narrative about oneself – one that shows that one is withdrawing while simultaneously remaining visible. The moment this form of deceleration becomes part of a cultural code, it is no longer outside the system, but already integrated into it.
Even for our grandparents, DIY was less a matter of contemplation than of necessity. And the younger generation seems to live out this necessity in an intensified form of compulsion, driven by the need to showcase their aesthetic and seemingly self-determined lifestyle.
This is exemplified by the story of the “Sophie Scarf,” invented by Danish designer Mette Wendelboe Okkels. Thanks to social media and numerous trendy influencers, a small triangular wool scarf quickly became the most copied knitting pattern in Northern Europe. Simple and short enough to let the yarn quickly pass through all sorts of impatient Gen Z hands, without compromising the need to convey a “made by you” feeling to the outside world within the Danish hygge context – a context that is only seemingly a retreat into the cozy world of home.
In the end, the turn toward the analog reveals itself to be just another step in the desperate pioneering work of the eternal search for new ways to stage content for the ever-hungry, never-sated maw of social media.