by The knitting needles come out at parties now. Not as a performance — someone just sits on the couch, hands moving, following a conversation without needing a screen in their palm. A few years ago this read as eccentric. Now it barely registers as unusual.
It’s not just knitting. Film camera sales keep climbing. Vinyl records outsold CDs for the first time in decades. Fountain pens, once the province of people who use words like “fountain pen,” are having a genuine renaissance. People are baking bread from scratch in numbers that would have seemed absurd fifteen years ago. Not buying bread machines — making dough with their hands, waiting for it to rise, failing, trying again.
The easy read is nostalgia, and there’s truth in that. These things carry the scent of a slower time, and that scent sells. But the interesting part isn’t the people who buy a record player for the aesthetic. The interesting part is the people who actually use it — who clean the needle, flip the record, sit through the side. Who choose the friction.
Because that’s what these practices have in common: friction. Knitting requires patience and repetition. Developing film requires darkness and precision. Kneading dough takes twenty minutes of physical effort before you even get to the waiting. None of it is efficient. All of it demands something from you.
There is something quietly radical about choosing difficulty in a world optimized for speed. Every app, every service, every smart device is engineered to remove steps. Tap the button, get the result. Why wouldn’t you want that? Because sometimes the steps are the point. The repetition of a knitting pattern, the ritual of grinding coffee by hand, the small satisfaction of a letter written rather than typed — these aren’t inefficiencies waiting to be solved. They’re anchors. They pull you into the moment and hold you there.
Not everyone needs that, and not every moment needs that. But the resurgence of hands-on crafts suggests that enough people do. That the itch is real and persistent, and no amount of frictionless convenience has managed to scratch it.
The old ways weren’t better. They’re just different in a way that matters. And sometimes that difference is worth keeping a seat at the table for.