Something strange is happening among the generation raised entirely on smartphones and streaming. They are buying vinyl records, even though digital music is free and instantly accessible. They are joining knitting circles and pottery classes. They are reading print books and subscribing to paper magazines. They are, in short, doing everything the digital revolution was supposed to make obsolete.
The trend has acquired various names: analog wellness, the physical turn, the tangible movement. Whatever the label, the pattern is clear. After two decades in which every aspect of life migrated online, a countercurrent is emerging. Young people who have never known a world without the internet are seeking out the physical, the handmade, the emphatically non-digital. The question is why.
The Vinyl Paradox
The vinyl revival is perhaps the most visible manifestation of this shift. In 2025, vinyl record sales continued their remarkable resurgence, with younger buyers driving much of the growth. This makes no obvious sense. Vinyl is expensive, inconvenient, and objectively inferior to digital audio by most technical measures. You cannot skip tracks easily, you cannot create playlists, and the records themselves require careful handling and dedicated equipment.
Yet sales keep climbing. Record stores, once written off as nostalgic curiosities, are thriving. New pressing plants have opened to meet demand. Artists who built their careers on streaming are releasing elaborate vinyl editions. Something about the format appeals to people who have no memory of vinyl’s original dominance.
Part of the appeal is aesthetic. Album art at twelve inches square is more impressive than a thumbnail on Spotify. The ritual of removing a record from its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and lowering the needle creates a relationship with music that passive streaming cannot match. But the deeper appeal may be the physicality itself. A vinyl record is an object, something that takes up space, that can be held and displayed. In a world where everything is becoming ephemeral data, owning physical artifacts feels increasingly meaningful.
The Craft Revival
The turn to analog extends far beyond music. Enrollment in craft classes has surged across Western countries. Knitting groups have multiplied. Pottery studios report long waitlists. Woodworking, bookbinding, calligraphy, and other hands-on skills that seemed destined for extinction are finding new enthusiasts.
The demographics defy expectations. These are not retirees pursuing long-deferred hobbies but twentysomethings and thirtysomethings carving time from busy schedules. Many work in digital industries: software development, social media management, content creation. They spend their days staring at screens and manipulating abstract symbols. In their off hours, they seek the opposite: physical materials, tangible results, skills that cannot be accomplished with a keyboard.
Researchers who study this phenomenon point to several factors. One is the desire for competence in a world where many jobs feel abstract and their value is uncertain. Making something with your hands, whether a scarf or a bowl, produces undeniable proof of capability. Another factor is the social dimension. Craft groups provide community in an era of loneliness, and the shared activity gives people something to do together beyond staring at phones.
The Return of Print
Print media was supposed to be dead. Newspapers collapsed, magazines folded, and bookstores closed throughout the 2000s and 2010s. The Kindle and later the smartphone seemed to have made paper obsolete. Yet here, too, a reversal is underway.
Print book sales have stabilized and in some categories are growing. Independent bookstores, after years of decline, are opening again. Print magazines, particularly those with distinctive design and curation, are finding subscribers willing to pay premium prices. Even newsletters, the quintessential digital format, sometimes take physical form, with writers offering print editions to devoted fans.
The appeal of print overlaps with the appeal of vinyl. It is physical, finite, and resistant to distraction. A print book does not notify you of other things you could be reading. It does not track your reading speed or offer personalized recommendations. It simply sits there, waiting for attention. In an attention economy where every app competes to hijack your focus, the passivity of print becomes a feature rather than a bug.
Digital Fatigue
Behind these trends lies a growing unease with digital life. The average person now spends many hours daily looking at screens. For knowledge workers, the proportion is even higher. Apps are designed to be addictive, optimized to capture and hold attention regardless of user wellbeing. The result is widespread digital fatigue: a sense of being overwhelmed, scattered, and disconnected despite constant connectivity.
Young people, paradoxically, may feel this most acutely. They have no pre-digital baseline to romanticize, but they also have no illusions about technology as savior. They have grown up with social media and seen its costs: anxiety, comparison, the warping of self-presentation. They have watched attention spans fragment and deep focus become rare. They are, in a sense, the first generation to fully understand what digital life extracts from us.
The turn to analog can be understood as a response to this extraction. Physical objects do not demand engagement in the same way apps do. A knitting project can be picked up and put down without algorithm-driven notifications nagging you back. A vinyl record plays at a fixed pace; you cannot speed it up or skip to the best parts. These limitations, once seen as drawbacks, are now experienced as relief.
Meaning in Materiality
There is also something philosophical at stake. The digital world is characterized by abundance: infinite music, infinite video, infinite content of every kind. In a world of unlimited choice, nothing feels scarce and therefore nothing feels valuable. The physical world, by contrast, is defined by limits. A vinyl collection takes up space; you cannot have everything, so you must choose. A handmade sweater takes hours; you cannot produce unlimited quantity, so each one matters.
These limits create meaning. The effort required to acquire or create physical objects imbues them with value that free digital alternatives cannot match. The scarcity is real, not artificially manufactured, and the relationship with the object reflects that reality.
This may explain why the analog movement is strongest among people who could easily avoid it. Those with disposable income and cultural capital are choosing to spend money and time on vinyl, crafts, and print precisely because they have alternatives. The choice to engage with physical things becomes a statement about what matters.
The Bigger Picture
The analog wellness movement is not a rejection of technology wholesale. Most of its participants remain thoroughly digital in their work and much of their leisure. They stream music and watch videos online; they use social media and messaging apps. The turn to analog is not about going off-grid but about balance, about reclaiming some portion of life from the screen.
Whether this remains a niche phenomenon or grows into something larger depends on factors beyond individual choice. If digital platforms continue to prioritize engagement over wellbeing, the appeal of alternatives will grow. If work continues to be screen-based and abstract, demand for tangible hobbies will increase. If loneliness persists despite constant connectivity, people will seek other forms of community.
The analog rebellion may ultimately be less about the specific activities than about what they represent: a desire for presence, for slowness, for experiences that cannot be optimized or disrupted. In a world that increasingly feels weightless and ephemeral, the appeal of things you can touch, hold, and keep is not nostalgia. It is a rational response to conditions that leave people feeling empty despite having everything.
The young person flipping through vinyl records in a dusty shop is not trying to recreate their parents’ youth. They are trying to create something their own youth lacked: a relationship with objects that feels real, activities that cannot be reduced to data, and a life that leaves something tangible behind.
