If you're of my generation — millennials — or you have relatives in our age range, you might have noticed something over the last few years: Your friends (or children and grandchildren) may have picked up on what social media has deemed "grandma hobbies."
Rooted in a need for nostalgia and tradition, grandma hobbies are essentially activities that force you to slow your life down and do something with your mind and body. They're things women did years ago without apology, before everyone told us to stop. They force you to put down your smartphone, step away from social media scrolling, stop worrying about the future, and just be present in the moment. They can be born out of necessity or something you do for pure entertainment purposes. They're quiet and cozy.
Grandma hobbies might include gardening, cooking and baking from scratch, reading, putting jigsaw puzzles together, bird-watching, quilting, crocheting, and other crafts. Some people even turn it into a whole lifestyle. The idea behind it has also inspired the "grandmacore" aesthetic, which means many younger women are foregoing fast fashion for modest floral feminine dresses (my favorite!) and decorating their homes with handmade, vintage, and antique items instead of whatever poorly made furniture was just shipped over from China.
I'll admit that I love it. I think I was probably doing it before it was trendy, but I embrace it more and more as time passes. I grow my own flowers and vegetables. I'm learning to bake and cook from scratch. I even raise chickens and ducks. I find all of this 1,000 times more satisfying than turning on my TV or computer most days. My cousin next door has embraced it too, which makes it kind of fun. Just this weekend, I gave him a dozen duck eggs and some flower starts I'd grown from seed in exchange for some extra flower bulbs he bought.
Parents magazine wrote about how even teenagers are embracing this way of life, though it points out that it's not sure if it's a passing trend — potentially spawned by the pandemic — or a true shift toward embracing "authentic offline activities." I certainly hope it's the latter because, as it turns out, it's pretty good for our mental health (not that I needed anyone to point that out. I'm walking proof. Give me a quiet day alone in my garden, and all my stress and anxiety melt away).
According to Tiffany C. Ho, assistant professor of psychology at the Brain Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, picking up these types of hobbies helps us destress, relax, and simply find pleasure and joy in life.
"Working and creating with their hands brings a sense of calm. It helps divert ruminative and internally focused energy that we often see in anxiety, depression, or burnout," Ho told Real Simple, adding, "The repetitive movements and present moment awareness mimic mindfulness meditation in a lot of ways, which may explain why they could help improve mood and mental health."
They can also boost your confidence and make you feel good about yourself. "Setting personal goals to work towards in any area of life, including cozy hobbies, provides purpose to our pleasures. Whether you're learning a new craft or challenging yourself with a new pattern, working towards goals and feeling accomplished boosts self-esteem, positive emotions, and overall wellbeing," Emma Palmer-Cooper, a research psychologist in the United Kingdom, told Good Housekeeping.
I'm sure older generations will laugh at all of this, thinking these are just normal activities you grew up doing. But you have to keep in mind that my generation grew up with rapidly changing technology thrown in our faces from an early age. We — women in particular — were told that it was wrong to enjoy cooking for your husband or sitting down to read a book or knit a sweater when you could be doing something more productive. We were told that it was best to become an engineer or get a STEM job if you wanted a fulfilling life and that domestic activities were something forced upon us by the patriarchy.
You might even argue that a departure from these types of activities has contributed to the mental health crisis in our country. If some of these members of our younger generations were growing tomatoes and crocheting their own clothing, they might be a little less worried about their pronouns or whose Tesla they're going to torch today.
