I think I'm getting into the whole thing where people just stop caring about a specific hobby and it becomes this weird new personality trait that they perform for other people who also don't care but want to feel like they do which is actually kind

Opening thread commentary.

I think what you're describing with knitting is exactly what social psychologists call a 'contagion of competence' but it happens so fast and feels like something else entirely because there's this performative aspect where everyone wants to be the person who is good at whatever thing is trending right now which creates this cycle of adopting hobbies for the vibes rather than the craft. I had this with birdwatching around 2018 when someone in my office started bringing binoculars and suddenly half the department was going outside on weekends identifying cardinals like they'd been doing it their whole lives while actually just looking at pigeons through expensive optics, which is funny because a lot of us were just projecting competence rather than actually learning anything. The sociological angle you mentioned about defense against late capitalism isn't crazy either since there's this specific type of anxiety that gets relieved by tangible production and the blue yarn in your basket represents something real even if it's unfinished, which is probably more honest than most people admit when they talk about their hobbies.

Exactly this and yes.

I think you might be right about knitting but let me add a specific layer because I've actually tracked this with my own family and there's something about it that goes beyond just "avoiding the void" — what happens is that when everyone starts doing the same hobby at once, the barrier to entry drops so low that the skill ceiling also effectively disappears for most people and everybody becomes an intermediate-level beginner simultaneously which creates this weird collective plateau where nobody can tell who's actually good and everybody has to perform competence through volume of output like I had three cousins all make scarves in October 2021 and at least one of them was terrible and they still insisted on explaining the technique to me as if it were profound knowledge. It becomes a form of social signaling disguised as craft production where the actual product — the scarf, the piece of furniture, whatever it is — is just the medium for demonstrating "I am someone who does things" rather than evidence that anything was actually done. I'd argue your late-capitalism point but with one adjustment: we aren't adopting these hobbies as a defense against the void so much as we are outsourcing our identities to them because developing an identity from scratch is genuinely exhausting and it's easier to let "knitter" do the heavy lifting for you. The blue yarn in your basket isn't failure — it's proof that the performance was working, which I guess defeats the purpose but also makes it a different kind of success if we're being honest about how these things function on a group level.