Knitting, breadmaking, jigsaws: we’re craving nostalgia in iso
From jigsaws to walkie-talkies. Not to mention all that bread baking. And did someone say corned beef? We’re looking back to the future to soothe our lockdown anxiety.
Sales of jigsaw puzzles are soaring (just as the Prime Minister, whose family has embraced the pastime). Flour and yeast has vanished from supermarket shelves as a cake making and bread baking craze sweeps the nation. Online classes in needlepoint are on the rise, and social media feeds are deluged by snaps of slow cooked stews and corned beef as we collectively roast, knit and bake for Australia.
Yes, we are stuck indoors a lot nowadays, but have we also gone back in time?
Perhaps we’re embracing these analog pursuits as an antidote to the dialling up of screen time; during the day we’re connecting via video and chat for work, while downtime is inevitably spent streaming TV or thumbing various social platforms, or having ‘virtual’ catch ups with friends.
According to experts, it’s all that, and more.
Liam Fitzpatrick’s weekends now revolve around the multi-step process of baking bread.
Combine the ingredients, let rest to active yeast, knead, cover and allow to rise and then bake.
The Sydney graduate lawyer has always loved cooking for friends, but turned to churning out loaves during self-isolation.
“My entire day became structured around the bread, which provided me with a helpful break from what seems to be an otherwise dark time we are living in,” he said.
“It’s definitely more laborious and time consuming, but there’s something very gratifying about baking. And I thought why not spend my Sunday morning baking bread.”
The meditative steps of breaking bed are an antidote to the murky uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I think we are slowing our pace down and in the process realising the limitations of technology that Netflix and mobile phones don’t give us a sense of purpose.”
As coronavirus has drawn our lives indoors, some are called to master their grandmother’s carrot cake recipes, others reach for watercolour paints or pull a dusty jigsaw pizzle box from the shelf.
Toy and games store Hobbyco has reported a 300 per cent surge in online sales.
Retro hobbies indulge our childhood memories, injecting a nostalgia hit into our lives.
“Nostalgia is an emotion that prompts us to move forward confidently by understanding that even though time itself is irreversible, we carry the past with us as we move forward in time. We do that in our memories.” said Krystine Batcho, psychology professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.
Professor Batcho, who specialises in researching nostalgia, the emotion had valuable psychological functions, particularly during times of uncertainty. Nostalgic memories, which are often tied to social times in our life, link us to our very nature as social creatures.
“I saw the other day someone putting together a big jigsaw puzzle, which they hadn’t done since they were a child, but it’s a retro kind of activity that re-establishes the kind of relationships we developed over our whole lifetime.”
Nostalgia can even extend to an era one has not lived through.
“If you’re nostalgic from a time period before you were even born, I call that historical. The argument there is that it’s an independent phenomenon. We often feel that life must have been simpler before technology.”
For music publisher Tess Nicolaou knitting has become a simple past time during her time indoors.
“I think it was having way more time in my hands and wanting to delve into something meditative, using my hands, doing something never done before.”
“My abuela, which means grandmother in Spanish, used to knit a lot while I was growing up. So it’s a slight homage to her.”