The Internet Is Teaching Us to Leave the Internet

There is a pleasing contradiction hiding inside one of the newest internet trend reports: people are increasingly going online to learn how to spend less of their lives online.

Pinterest’s 2026 Hobbies Trend Report, released Aug. 25, opens with an unusually direct diagnosis of the moment. After years of “always-on feeds,” the company says users are looking for hands-on pastimes that command attention and produce something tangible. Its phrase for the pattern is almost comically literal: hobbies with “real life results.” The report says 51% of Gen Z respondents say having a hobby contributes to their joy, while eight in 10 monthly Pinterest users say the platform motivates them to try new things.1

The searches underneath that claim are more interesting than the corporate framing. Interest in dried and pressed flowers rose 457%. “Field notebook” rose 70%. “Scrapbooking journaling” climbed 240%, “book log journal” 482%, and “tracking journal” 1,264%. Searches for hand embroidery art rose 1,351%. Sashiko ideas, an old Japanese mending technique built around visible stitching, rose 1,509%. Fermenting recipes were up 106%. Even whittling projects for beginners rose 118%.1

None of these activities requires a declaration of war on technology. That is precisely what makes the pattern culturally useful. The emerging analog hobbyist is not necessarily deleting every app, buying a cabin and becoming unreachable. More often, the phone remains involved. It supplies the tutorial, the pattern, the inspiration, the recipe, the plant identification guide, the niche community and the recommendation for which notebook to buy. Then, at some point, the screen has to be put down because the thing cannot be completed inside it.

That may be the real shift. The internet is not only becoming a destination. It is becoming a launch ramp back into physical life.

THE SATURATION POINT

A return to tactile hobbies makes more sense when placed beside the amount of digital exposure now treated as ordinary. Pew Research Center reported in January that 90% of U.S. adults use the internet daily, including 41% who say they are online “almost constantly.” Among adults ages 18 to 29, that share rises to 63%.2 For younger people, the saturation is even more pronounced: Pew’s 2025 research found 45% of U.S. teens said they spent too much time on social media, up from 36% in 2022, and 44% said they had already cut back on both social media use and smartphone use.3

That does not mean the internet has suddenly become culturally unwanted. The same Pew study found teens continue to credit social platforms with connection and creative expression. Seventy-four percent said social media makes them feel more connected to friends, and 63% said it gives them a place to show their creative side.3 The tension is not between “internet good” and “internet bad.” It is between usefulness and saturation.

We have become very good at turning leisure into another form of intake. Watch a show while checking messages. Scroll while listening to a podcast. Browse while a game plays in the background. Read about a restaurant while standing in the restaurant. The defining feature is not simply screen time; it is that attention remains open for business.

Analog hobbies create a small, stubborn problem for that arrangement. Clay gets on your hands. A needle has to pass through a specific hole. Bread dough changes while you are touching it. A pressed flower can tear. A watercolor wash dries whether or not you are ready. A record ends. A plant can die. The physical world keeps imposing sequence, resistance and consequence.

The screen is frictionless by design. Many of the hobbies now rising are compelling because they are not.

THE RETURN OF THE OBJECT

There is another signal arriving from a completely different industry. On Sept. 1, the Recording Industry Association of America reported that U.S. physical music revenue jumped 25.9% in the first half of 2026. CD revenue rose 58.6% and vinyl revenue 17.7%, according to figures reported by Reuters. Streaming still dominates the business by an enormous margin, but the direction of the physical formats is notable precisely because streaming already solved the problem of access.4

If every song is available instantly, buying a disc is no longer primarily about obtaining the song. It is about obtaining the object.

That is the same emotional logic visible in scrapbooks, field notebooks, collections and DIY projects. Digital abundance made access cheap; it did not make possession meaningless. A playlist can contain 5,000 songs and leave no physical trace in a room. A shelf of records announces that choices were made. A notebook accumulates crossed-out lines, weather damage, ticket stubs and bad handwriting. A jar of something fermenting on a counter is evidence that time is passing in a place you actually occupy.

Pinterest calls one of its hobby clusters “Curated Clutter,” a phrase that captures the reversal neatly. For years, digital culture promised liberation from stuff: put the photos in the cloud, the music in the cloud, the books on an e-reader, the notes in an app, the calendar in a phone. The current analog turn does not reject convenience so much as rediscover the emotional information carried by objects. Physical things age. They take up room. They remind you that you were there.

A hobby with a physical residue has one advantage an infinite feed cannot easily reproduce: when you stop, something is different.

A COMPLETION ENGINE

The modern feed has no natural ending. It can be refreshed faster than a person can decide they are finished. Many analog hobbies, by contrast, are built around visible completion. The scarf has another row. The page has an edge. The roll of film has 36 exposures. The loaf either rises or does not. The flower is pressed. The tiny model is assembled. The shelf is painted. Even a badly executed object has the dignity of being done.

That difference matters because leisure increasingly competes with systems engineered to eliminate stopping cues. Deloitte’s 2025 Digital Media Trends report described social video as an “endless” supply of personalized content optimized for engagement and found Gen Z respondents spent about 50 minutes more per day than the average consumer on social platforms and user-generated content.5 The business logic of the feed is continuation. The psychological appeal of many hobbies is completion.

This does not require romanticizing handcraft as medicine. The evidence is more modest and more useful than that. A 2024 study in Frontiers in Public Health analyzed 7,182 adults in England and found that participation in creating arts and crafts was associated with higher reported life satisfaction, happiness and a stronger sense that life was worthwhile even after researchers controlled for factors including age, health, employment and deprivation. The study did not find a significant additional effect on anxiety or loneliness, and because the data were observational, it cannot prove crafting caused the wellbeing differences.6

That caveat is important. Cultural trends become silly when every pleasant behavior is promoted as a cure. The point is not that embroidery fixes modern life. The point is that activities involving agency, skill, attention and visible progress are showing up in both behavioral data and wellbeing research at the exact moment many people are describing digital life as excessive.

The hobby offers something smaller than salvation and perhaps more believable: a bounded task.

THE INTERNET AS INSTRUCTOR, NOT HABITAT

The funniest part of this analog revival is that the internet is doing an enormous amount of the recruiting.

Pinterest itself says the quiet part out loud: “Sometimes the best thing you can find online is a reason to get offline.”1 TikTok can teach crochet. YouTube can explain sourdough starter. Reddit can identify the fountain pen that leaks least. Instagram can introduce someone to bookbinding. A phone camera can send a person outside looking for a bird they only learned existed 30 seconds earlier.

This is not a retreat to a pre-digital world. That world is unavailable, and nostalgia tends to edit out its inconveniences. What appears to be emerging instead is a more selective relationship with the network: use digital systems for discovery, instruction and coordination, then cross a threshold into an activity the platform cannot finish for you.

That threshold matters. Watching 200 pottery videos is still consumption. Making one ugly bowl is participation.

The distinction may help explain why Pinterest is such a revealing source for this particular signal. Unlike platforms built primarily around public performance or continuous commentary, Pinterest has long operated as a planning machine: save the kitchen, the garden, the haircut, the recipe, the wedding table, the bookshelf, the thing you might eventually do. Its 2026 report is therefore less interesting as proof that the entire population has adopted analog hobbies than as evidence that millions of people are increasingly using a major digital planning platform to imagine lives with more tactile output.1

That qualification matters too. Pinterest’s trends reflect Pinterest users and Pinterest search behavior, not a representative census of human desire. Trend reports are marketing products as well as data products. But good cultural reporting does not require pretending a single dataset is the whole culture. It asks whether independent signals point in the same direction. Here, they do: younger users reporting efforts to cut back; persistent near-constant internet use; growing searches for tactile hobbies; measurable growth in physical music formats; and research associating creative making with several dimensions of subjective wellbeing.

THE NEW LUXURY IS ABSORPTION

For much of the internet era, convenience was treated as the highest form of progress. Faster, lighter, instant, synced, searchable, frictionless. Those gains are real. But once convenience becomes the baseline, inconvenience can acquire a different meaning.

Grinding coffee by hand is inefficient. So is developing film, growing herbs, repairing a shirt with visible stitching, pressing flowers inside a book, making a zine, keeping a handwritten field log or listening to an album that requires getting up and flipping it over. Their appeal is not that they outperform the digital alternative. Their appeal is that they ask something of the person doing them.

The scarce resource is no longer information. It is unfragmented attention.

That makes absorption feel almost luxurious. An hour in which the hands are occupied and the brain is not awaiting a notification can feel less like quaint nostalgia than control. The product at the end—a scarf, a loaf, a page, a jar, a record shelf—is partly beside the point. The object is evidence that attention stayed somewhere long enough to leave a mark.

And that may be why the phrase “real life results” lands harder than a piece of trend-report language probably should. It names a frustration without making a speech about it. Much of online life produces evidence of activity: views, saves, likes, watch time, tabs, messages, streaks, recommendations. Analog hobbies produce evidence of action.

You can eat the bread. You can hold the photograph. You can give someone the scarf. You can point to the crooked shelf and say, with varying degrees of pride, I made that.

The internet is not disappearing from this story, it is standing at the beginning of it, holding the instructions. Then, increasingly, people seem to be putting the phone down.

REPORTING NOTE

Pinterest trend percentages cited here are platform search-growth figures and should be read as directional signals within Pinterest’s user base, not population-wide prevalence estimates. The Frontiers study cited below is observational and reports associations, not proof of causation. The article uses multiple independent sources to test the broader cultural pattern rather than treating any single trend report as dispositive.

SOURCES & REFERENCES

Pinterest Newsroom, “Pinterest Hobbies Trend Report 2026: Find your joy,” Aug. 25, 2026. Includes the 51% Gen Z hobby/joy figure, the “real life results” framing, and platform search-trend data. SourcePew Research Center, Colleen McClain and William Bishop, “What we know about internet use, smartphone ownership and digital divides in the U.S.,” Jan. 8, 2026. Survey of U.S. adults conducted Feb. 5–June 18, 2025. SourcePew Research Center, Michelle Faverio, Monica Anderson and Eugenie Park, “Teens, Social Media and Mental Health,” Apr. 22, 2025. Survey of 1,391 U.S. teens and parents conducted Sept. 18–Oct. 10, 2024. SourceReuters, “CDs make a comeback, boosting US recorded music revenue,” Sept. 1, 2026, reporting Recording Industry Association of America first-half 2026 data. SourceDeloitte Insights, “2025 Digital Media Trends: Social platforms are becoming a dominant force in media and entertainment,” Mar. 25, 2025. Based on an online survey of 3,595 U.S. consumers conducted in Oct. 2024. SourceKeyes, H. et al., “Creating arts and crafting positively predicts subjective wellbeing,” Frontiers in Public Health 12 (2024): 1417997. Analysis of 7,182 adults in England from the 2019–2020 Taking Part Survey. Source