2026 is set to be the year of cosy hobbies. At least if we are to believe the Swedish Youth’s 2026 Trend Report, which has surveyed how young people in Sweden would answer the question “What will be the big trend among young people in 2026, and why?” According to the report, Gen Z are set to ditch digital devices and reject grind culture in favour of a lifestyle prioritising comfort and cosiness, preferably while engaging in some kind of analogue hobby. Following the pandemic, when we suddenly found ourselves stuck indoors for long periods of time, social media saw an increase in “cosy hobby creators” who curated portfolios of activities as solutions to the atomised individual. As the idea of finding a fulfilling career seems increasingly out of reach, hobbies provide an alternative avenue to explore our personal interests. The report should not be taken at face value, as most predictions are incompatible with young people’s material conditions, but the emphasis on cultivating cosiness represents a collective desire to desert the manic speed of competitive society.
Framing the prediction that more people will engage in cosy hobbies as a ‘rebellion’, the report argues that Gen Z are “actively opting out of a performance-driven, digitally overstimulating everyday life”. Looking for a possible escape from a seemingly inevitable future of working while wages are being devalued, young people are forced to find other means to console themselves. Learning new hobbies is now the natural substitute to climbing the corporate ladder, providing a way to progress your skills, sometimes producing a tangible object that shows the work that has been put into making it (the report notes that one in four girls identify as a “crafter”). Even for those who see grinding it out as a necessary step to increase their quality of life, few are hopeful that they will gain happiness from work. For that, they have to look elsewhere. Framing the rise of cosy hobbies and aesthetics as a calculated strategy affected by worsening economic conditions gives agency to young people who are too often deemed lazy. What may be true on a personal level does not immediately translate to the kind of generation-wide movement the report proposes, however. Rather than a collective rebellion, the turn to cosy hobbies becomes a personal coping mechanism to ward off anxiety for the future. An individual “rebellion”, reinforced by a new tendency for what the report calls “curated solitude”, where young people focus on spending time alone, is unlikely to dismantle preexisting systems and norms. The idea of curating our time spent alone rather reiterates our individual exceptionality.
Hobbies are increasingly marked by their commodification, which limits the effectiveness of pursuing them as an alternative to productivity culture. Cultivating the appearance of a cosy lifestyle filled with hobbies has become more important than actually leading it, which is largely impossible for young people today. Rather than reflect a new reality, the growing popularity of the “cosy aesthetic” suggests that romanticising reality has the potential to make it more manageable. Young people may have given up on the prospect of making the big purchases later in life, traditionally associated with becoming an adult, but they earn just enough to be able to buy both the necessary and excessive tools to engage in hobbies, whether that’s special edition physical books, elaborate LEGO sets, or new gaming consoles. Social media also exemplifies how hobbies are increasingly regarded as potential side hustles to generate new streams of income. Cosy hobby influencers don’t do their hobbies for work but aestheticise and thus subject their private space to showcase themselves doing their hobbies, turning personal recreation into public spectacle, arguably becoming more alienated from themselves than in a traditional nine-to-five.
In “Do We Need Hobbies?” (The New Yorker, November 4th, 2025) Joshua Rothman questions the performative nature of hobbies, arguing that the purpose of hobbies is to pursue them for self-fulfilment. Modern day living crises and their resultant grind cultures make it difficult to be an amateur – once you get good enough at a certain hobby, society almost expects you to use your skills to your advantage. As Rothman points out, “a hobby involves some aversion to professionalisation”, which is at odds with the prevailing norm that time spent must be justified in terms of investment/gain. Conversely, the trend report highlights how young people turn hobbies into side hustles as proof of their ingenuity. Knitted sweaters can be sold on Etsy, gaming can be streamed on Twitch, and reading can be complemented by posting about it on BookTok. Every hobby must now be an entrepreneurial activity, whether for direct economic benefits or as part of self-improvement. Instead of remaining an individual pursuit, hobbies are another thing we simply have to do.
The problem is less about hobbies themselves than the reasons they’re trending. Pursuing your own interests is sometimes best done outside of work, but feeling the need to perform mindless activities just to de-stress does not achieve balance but rather swings between two extremes. Curating a cosy aesthetic and learning “granny hobbies” feels less like an active strategy that will have long-term benefits than a temporary measure to cope with the anxiety caused by worsening future prospects. The long-term effects are more likely to be a more general pacification of a population who see no escape from competitive society. That engaging in cosy hobbies is seen as anything more than a consolation of an exhausted society shows just how impossible it has become to imagine an alternative and the necessity of struggle in shaping it.
