People Are Buying Landlines Again

Yarn kit searches are up 1,200%. A researcher describes the fatigue in one word: sameness. Welcome to the analog backlash.

Welcome Back,

With homes and lives swarming with AI-powered devices, assistants, and chatbots, a real backlash is brewing, according to CNN Business. Pitched as "analog lifestyles," it's different from a short-term digital detox. Instead, it's an effort to slow down and find tangible ways to complete daily tasks and find entertainment, especially as generative AI platforms increasingly do the thinking and doing for people.

It's genuinely hard to quantify exactly how widespread this phenomenon is, but certain notably offline hobbies are exploding in popularity in ways that show up clearly in retail data. Arts and crafts company Michaels, which operates over 1,300 stores across North America, has seen searches for "analog hobbies" on its site increase by 136% in the past six months. Sales for guided craft kits rose 86% in 2025, with the company expecting another 30% to 40% increase this year, and searches for yarn kits, one of the most popular "grandma hobbies," jumped 1,200% in 2025 alone.

Today we look at exactly what's driving this fatigue according to the researchers studying it, one woman's genuinely thorough attempt to go analog and the honest limits she ran into, the real numbers behind how widespread this shift actually is, and why even the researcher most associated with this movement is careful not to call it anti-technology.

😩 The Fatigue Behind the Trend

People pursuing this lifestyle are described as tired of doomscrolling and AI slop, or simply frustrated that ChatGPT and other generative AI services are doing the thinking and creating for them. That frustration has a name attached to it from someone who studies this territory professionally.

That's a genuinely precise diagnosis of a feeling a lot of people have struggled to articulate. It's not that AI-generated content is offensive or even necessarily low-quality in isolation, it's the sheer volume and sameness of it, feed after feed of content that looks different at first glance but reads the same once you're several posts deep, that produces a distinct kind of exhaustion.

Crucially, analog participants don't describe themselves as anti-technology. Some people have simply picked up parts of the lifestyle piecemeal, replacing Spotify's AI-powered shuffle with an iPod, swapping endless smartphone photos for a single deliberate film photo you can actually hold, or buying a physical alarm clock instead of waking up to a phone. These are small, specific substitutions, not a wholesale rejection of modern life.

Yarn kit searches jumped 1,200% in 2025 alone, one of the clearest retail signals of the analog shift.

📞 "Call Me or Write Me a Letter"

One woman featured in the reporting, Barker, describes herself as an "AI hater to my core." She grew up listening to the radio and vinyl records, and has an extensive collection of cassettes, DVDs, VHS tapes, and records. Today she hosts tech-free craft nights and wine nights, writes physical notes, and sets strict limits on her own computer time.

But even for someone this committed, going fully offline turned out to be genuinely difficult in practice. The only way she can do outreach for the vintage shop she works at, or for her own "snail mail club," is the internet. "I'm a walking oxymoron," she said, capturing something honest and important, modern life makes complete digital withdrawal nearly impossible for almost anyone, even people who want it most.

📊 This Isn't a Niche Trend Anymore

The retail numbers behind this story are genuinely striking, and worth putting side by side to appreciate the scale. A 136% jump in "analog hobbies" searches on a single retailer's site over six months, an 86% rise in guided craft kit sales in 2025, and a 1,200% spike in yarn kit searches all point in the same direction, this isn't a handful of enthusiasts, it's a measurable shift in how people are choosing to spend both time and money.

That last figure, yarn kits, is worth sitting with for a moment. Knitting and crocheting, hobbies long associated with grandmothers and slow, deliberate handwork, jumping over tenfold in search interest in a single year is a genuinely unusual retail signal, and a strong indicator that this shift is reaching well beyond people who were already inclined toward vintage or nostalgic hobbies.

Guided craft kit sales rose 86% in 2025, with Michaels expecting another significant jump this year.

⏳ A Lifestyle Shift, Not a Weekend Detox

The framing distinction here genuinely matters, and it's the reason CNN's reporting draws such a sharp line between this movement and the "digital detox" trend that came before it. A detox implies a temporary break followed by a return to normal habits, a long weekend without your phone before diving back into the same feeds. What's being described here is structural and ongoing, permanent substitutions rather than a pause.

That reframing is genuinely the sharpest insight in the whole story. It repositions the analog lifestyle away from a nostalgia trip and toward something closer to a privacy strategy, the goal isn't withdrawing from information, it's withdrawing your own data trail from systems that would otherwise be constantly collecting, analyzing, and acting on it.

That framing also explains why even small, seemingly cosmetic swaps, a physical alarm clock, a film camera, a landline, carry real meaning for the people adopting them. Each one is a small, deliberate opt-out from a system quietly building a profile based on your behavior, not just a stylistic preference for old technology.

🧩 The Small Swaps People Are Actually Making

For anyone curious about what this actually looks like day to day, the reporting is genuinely specific about the small, achievable substitutions people are choosing, rather than a single dramatic lifestyle overhaul.

What's genuinely notable about this list is how low the barrier to entry actually is. Nobody described here needed to move off the grid or abandon their career to participate, they picked specific, meaningful friction points in their own daily routine and replaced them, one at a time, with something slower and more tangible.

Writing letters and using landlines have become deliberate, meaningful swaps for people pursuing the analog lifestyle.

🧠 AI Spotlight Analysis

There's a genuinely interesting irony sitting underneath this whole story, worth naming directly, this movement is itself partly a reaction to the very platforms and algorithms it's being discussed on. People are discovering "analog lifestyle" content through the same AI-curated feeds and short-form video platforms that the movement is a response to, a loop that doesn't undermine the sincerity of the trend, but does say something real about how difficult full disengagement actually is in 2026.

What separates this from earlier waves of "digital minimalism" is the specific target. Past movements were largely about screen time and social media generally. This one is pointed much more precisely at generative AI specifically, the sameness of AI-generated content, the sense of algorithms making decisions before you're even aware you had a choice, and a growing discomfort with how much personal data gets absorbed by AI-powered "all-in-one" tools and assistants.

That quote genuinely earns its second appearance in this newsletter, it's the single sentence that best explains why this trend feels different from every prior "unplug and relax" movement. This isn't really about screen time anxiety, it's about agency over one's own data and attention in an environment increasingly shaped by systems making decisions on a person's behalf.

🔗 Sources and Further Reading

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