The free, lightly feral hobby that will help you stop doomscrolling

Sifting through my pile, I feel the crisp edges of the glossy, technicolor marker that was previously nestled in the dirt of a bonnie green bell sweet pepper plant I bought from the farmers market this summer. I feel a pristine black-and-white receipt for one order of steamed dumplings and one dumpling soup; a thick bundle of political mailers; a Hadestown program that is gently shriveled from the torrential downpour on the night I saw it; a cellophane mailing envelope with Japanese postage. It’s garbage; it’s art supplies; it’s memories; and it’s all mine for the taking for use in my junk journal.

A junk journal is a collaged scrapbook that you fill with literal scraps, the ephemera of your everyday life: business cards, ticket stubs, fliers, price tags, labels, product packaging, mail, printed photos (you remember those, right?), stickers…anything, really. The basic idea is that these items can be rescued from the garbage or recycling bin and turned into a physical, visual record of a given moment in time. That it’s made from trash is key; the abundant, inexpensive materials mean that junk journaling has a really low barrier to entry, which reduces the pressure and ultimately infuses it with a fun, feral energy that is perfect for 2026.

So many slow-moving existential threats have accelerated and consolidated this year: climate change, inflation, war, surveillance, the erosion of free speech, oligarchs operating with impunity, the institutional collapse of both the humanities and science. At the same time, we live in an increasingly remote, digitized world, where we constantly have to question our reality thanks to AI, and where most everyone feels like their brain is a little broken. There are a lot of possible solutions to these interconnected crises, but experts agree that most involve being in the physical world. And your little pile of stuff is undeniably concrete.

Girija Kaimal, a professor and the chair of the Creative Arts Therapies Department at Drexel University, said that junk journaling can help us feel hopeful — which is important when you’re mired in digital malaise and existential dread. “Everything is getting more expensive or more difficult, or AI is going to take away all your jobs, and oh, these are all the diseases coming at you. It can really give you a sense of helplessness,” Kaimal told me. But generative acts, where you make something out of nothing, can help you push through that despair and remind you of your own agency.

“Even the smallest act of creating is sending a signal to your brain: Hey, I got this…” she said.

“I can bring a little beauty and meaning into this world,” Kaimal said. “I’m not this helpless pawn being tossed around by powerful forces. I mean, in a way I am, but I have something to give to this world.”

As a longtime diarist, former scrapbooker, and big fan of this new iteration of it, I’m all in favor — and the experts I spoke to all agree that it’s a hobby that is really well suited to this particular moment. So if you need a creative outlet or just want something to do with your hands that’s not scrolling through AI slop, here’s why you should give junk journaling a try.

The barrier to entry is incredibly low (and incredibly cheap)

Every form of entertainment, novelty, and inspiration right now is so, so expensive: concerts, live theater, movies, sports, travel, dinners out…the list goes on and on. Hobbies have gotten pricey too. Joann’s went under at the same time that tariffs started driving up the cost of yarn, art supplies, and so many other consumer goods. This is a real problem when it comes to both creative stimulation and human connection; a 2025 survey of 688 young people in Scotland found that cost was a significant barrier to engaging with a hobby for nearly half of respondents. That’s not good!

But even folks who can afford to spend $300 on a beginner ceramics class might still prefer to have the option to do something creatively stimulating for free. That’s why a hobby that anyone can cobble together from the garbage pile is so thrilling. (And many of us are already hanging onto the basic materials for sentimental reasons, hoping to do…something…meaningful with it all…someday. Instead of letting it collect dust in a drawer for years, you can give it a more permanent home!) You don’t even need to buy a journal to get started; you can use whatever notebook you have lying around (including your current daily planner!), or tear half the pages out of an old book (to create more room for everything you’re going to put in it) and use that as your base.

While some people’s junk journals include supplies they purchased specifically for it (i.e., the $30 “junk journaling kits” that craft retailers have started pushing), I strongly encourage you to resist the urge to shop, as I think this hobby works best when it’s done using stuff you already have or naturally acquire in your everyday life. Buying a bunch of preselected supplies adds pressure — because once you’ve invested money in something, there’s a desire to not just do it, but to do it right. It also turns the junk journal from a creation that’s really authentic and personal, akin to a diary, to something more curated and outward-facing; when you start with materials designed (often with faux-nostalgia undertones!) by someone else, you remove a fundamental bit of yourself from the process. It shifts from being personal, messy, and maybe even a little ugly, a place where you can make “mistakes” and change your mind, and becomes more about having a coherent aesthetic. That’s something to be very wary of in a moment in which every experience feels like fodder for social media. When you have an audience in mind, the blank page starts to feel like a subpoena instead of an invitation, leading to a paralysis that makes it harder to get started and more difficult to enjoy the process.

So not only is junk journaling a hobby that can be affordable, I’d argue it’s one that should be. The less cash you spend on supplies and the more you rely on a pile of detritus, the better off you’ll be. Speaking of which…

Junk journaling is a beautiful invitation to turn trash into art

Back in July, the air in New York City was thick with haze due to wildfires in Canada; it was dangerous to be outside, but I didn’t really want to go out anyway, thanks to the concurrent heat emergency we were dealing with. Meanwhile, more than 2.3 million acres across the state of Oregon burned between mid-July and mid-August, which also happened to be the hottest month ever recorded in the United States. At the same time, Europe was boiling. Nearly 3,000 people died in England’s heat waves in May and June.

While we need major systemic change to stop the progress of climate change, it’s hard to read all of this news and not feel a moral obligation to do something, or at least not directly contribute to the problem. Knowing that penguins are dying certainly makes me want to reduce my own consumption — and that includes trying to curb the amount of new hobby supplies I’m buying. Junk journaling dovetails perfectly with this.

And just on a creative level, there’s real value in the whole “turning trash into treasure” thing. Having limited resources is a really helpful starting point for imaginative thinking. Looking at a pile of garbage and being able to see art (or even just something lightly coherent) is really energizing and exciting, especially when you’ve been feeling bored and a little stuck. I’ve found that looking for items for my junk journal has helped me notice color, shape, texture, and artistry more in my everyday life, which ultimately makes me feel more connected and creative.

The trash element of junk journaling meets the demands of our current moment: “There’s a huge shift, and I kind of love it, towards being sustainable,” Kaimal said. “Everybody is talking about AI, this, that, but the new generation is really thinking about the environmental cost.”

My friend Ryan Swedenborg recently got her MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art & Design, where she focused on sculpture. She wrote her thesis on assemblage (kind of a 3-D version of a junk journal), arguing that it’s not just an art form, but that it’s a way of navigating complex systems — “just trying to stay alive while living with others,” as she put it. She said that instead of trying to master something, assemblage is an iterative way of working with what is already around you — “I mean, that’s how you stay alive,” she said.

Creative practices like assemblage and collage tend to flourish in times of instability, Ryan said; the irreverent and absurdist Dada movement was a direct response to World War I, machine culture, and mass media. The neo-Dada movement immediately followed World War II, and, like the earlier version, heavily featured collage. After 9/11, assemblage surged again, often as a direct response to the attacks. “I feel like, especially in New York…people [were] just literally taking these objects that live within the streets and building something new,” Ryan said.

Consciously or not, people want to feel a sense of control when it feels like the world is falling apart, and junk journaling is a very literal way of picking up the pieces.

Junk journaling is something creative to do with your hands

If you want to be on your phone less (and who among us doesn’t want that?), it’s important to find something else to fill your time. And a low-stakes project that’s both creative and tactile is a great alternative. (It’s also something that a lot of people are gathering to do together in person — Google your city plus “junk journaling events” to see what’s going on near you — which is a really fun bonus if you’re looking to get out and meet people.)

First, creativity is really, really good for your physical and mental health. According to a review of various scholarly studies of the topic published in the Journal of Creativity in 2024, art and other creative acts help with emotional regulation, reduce stress, and build self-esteem; they can also help you build community and cope with grief, chronic illness, pain, and loneliness. Journaling, too, is great for your mental health; a 2022 meta-analysis showed it helps with anxiety and PTSD, and another study found it “reduces intrusive and avoidant thoughts about negative events and improves working memory.”

The way you use your fingers to sort through, arrange, cut, layer, and paste the materials can also serve as a balm for your weary brain, said Mark Paterson, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies touch (and all five senses) in history and philosophy, as well as material culture and consumption. “We are manipulating machines. That is what we do. Everything from picking fruit, grabbing a branch of a tree and swinging in our early history, and so on. But also the feel of a typewriter, the tactile feel of a typewriter — all these things were part of the absolute background buzz of everyday life,” Paterson told me. “And it’s so strange in such a short time that it’s just become absent really, really quickly. And so things like scrapbooks, notebooks, that type of thing, are bringing us back to something which is a little bit more considered.”

Since talking to Paterson — and after reading my colleague Sara Herschander’s deep dive on how humans are losing our sense of touch — I’ve been focused on finding ways to consciously engage with my sense of touch every single day. And in combining this with other creative acts, I’ve found a really satisfying alternative to scrolling that I genuinely look forward to every day.

Kaimal, the creative arts therapies professor, said that having these tactile, creative experiences is good for our brains and our sense of self. “To me, doing things with your hands, using your hand-eye coordination, the sensory aspects…the choices you are making, all those reinforce a sense of confidence and a sense of valuing yourself like, ‘Hey, my vision really matters. I have something to say and do in this world that nobody else is saying or doing.’ And to me, having that space is a big part of creating a sort of mental respite.”

A junk journal is proof of something real

I’ve always been drawn to keeping diaries and scrapbooks, for reasons I can’t fully articulate.

But this deep, often-inexplicable desire isn’t unique; it spans cultures and millennia. “I think there’s a very human, timeless urge to just be like, ‘I was here.’ You think of archeologists digging up graffiti in Pompeii or other locations around the world where someone just wants to say, ‘I am a person, I existed, I am in this context, and I’m going to anchor myself to the physical,’” Mallory Furnier, a special collections and archives librarian at California State University Northridge, told me. “I think there’s a need to feel remembered.”

In more recent history, this desire took the form of things like commonplace books, yearbooks, and slam books. But in the past decade, we’ve taken this urge to social media, which feels the same, but just isn’t; Furnier said posting online is often more about status, about performance — I went to this event, I hung out with these friends. We all kind of agree that the things we see on social media aren’t real.

A junk journal, on the other hand, offers you literal, tangible proof that your experiences were real, along with an authenticity you simply don’t get when you’re posting for an audience. Technically, you could still lie or obfuscate reality in your junk journal, as 58-year-old Jane Hemmer did in The Onion’s “Local Woman’s Life Looks Bearable In Scrapbook,” but you probably won’t! So collecting and arranging your ephemera in this way serves as a nice antidote to the cozenage of both Instagram and AI slop, and the way that we now all have to constantly question our very reality.

Paterson, the sociologist, told me that humans have long seen a connection between our sense of touch and the idea of deeper truth and understanding; he pointed to noli me tangere, which comes from a scene in the New Testament in which Christ’s followers reach out to try and touch his wounds following his resurrection to confirm that he’s real. Shuffling through your pile of ephemera isn’t quite the same as rooting around in your buddy’s stitches, but it’s an instinctive, almost unconscious way that we validate what’s true nonetheless.

A junk journal is a way to make meaning out of your life, whether you use it to record things that are positive, negative, or neutral. “To track your life every day and to document it is to be more intentional about your personal narrative,” Furnier said. “Otherwise, you’re just going through life as a robot and not really making sense and making meaning and celebrating your little wins every day, processing what didn’t go well.” Furnier added that collaging takes this to an even deeper level because you’re deciding what to keep and how to position it. She told me that when scrapbooks are too old and fragile to handle, archivists sometimes have to disassemble them to preserve the individual elements, but they always take photos and scans before they do to keep a record of the original arrangement: “There is this meaning-making of juxtaposing different objects from different places together. There’s an authorship and a reimagining of these disparate, seemingly unconnected items that happen in a scrapbook when they’re brought together like that.”

My friend Ryan said that the ability to create a document that feels somewhat permanent in a moment of upheaval is a big part of what makes this such an appealing medium. “It is like an archival process,” she said. “You are putting a time and a place when you’re making these pieces, because you’re using objects that exist today. So it’s putting a timestamp on it. … Things that are seen as mundane in the moment really get to become part of the record. And I think that’s really exciting, especially as we look back at the lineage of assemblage and we can see how that played out.”

While you might get into junk journaling with future history in mind, you could also come at it from the opposite perspective, and try it precisely because things feel so unstable. “Today, with so much uncertainty in the world, I’m not sure that people — young people especially — imagine a scenario in which their story and their labor survives intact, unsullied for generations,” Danille Christensen, a professor at Virginia Tech who studies scrapbooks, folklore, and material culture, told me in an email. “Maybe an ethic of noticing and reusing or incorporating small incidents and things — ‘making beauty from ashes’ (to modify a phrase from Isaiah) — is the kind of hope that people can muster right now.”

A junk journal is a way of creating something that is yours and yours alone

Americans are awash in mass-produced crap: Influencers are constantly peddling fast fashion; gadgets and products we don’t need and that are destined to end up in landfills; furniture and other home decor that is both cheaply made and weirdly expensive. While pushing back on this can be hard, my junk journal has served as a really nice reminder that it’s possible to resist the commodification of everything and just make whatever we want, using whatever we have, simply because it feels good. In that sense, it can be another version of craftivism, which has been popular for generations and is currently having a renaissance.

Paterson drew a connection between junk journaling and bricolage, a French term that generally is used to mean “DIY project,” but has come to be associated with mixed media and using whatever materials you have on hand. “It’s this idea of an everyday art, of making do, of coping. So it’s not simply about the arts, but it’s actually about coping with everyday life and so on…” he said. “Maybe commenting on mass consumption and trying to do something about that.” He said that remixing widely available items, turning them into something new and personally meaningful isn’t a trend; in fact, it’s something that tends to cycle in and out of the culture as people discover it — and perhaps remember their need for it — anew. You see this in things like ripped jeans, punk, or, more recently, appliquéd or embroidered Trader Joe’s bags (another current project of mine). “Consumption is not just passive, but it can be a very creative act,” he said. The junk journal, then, is “an artistic statement. It’s very much ours. And maybe it means nothing to anybody else. Maybe it actually just looks just like a little junk, clearly. But of course it’s deeply meaningful for the person who puts it together.”

Furnier, the archivist, pointed out that as our lives have become more digital, they’ve also been commodified and sold back to us — you post a picture from the theater and then start getting Broadway-related ads. A nice memory that’s related to your identity and your relationships has been turned into a marketing opportunity. “It’s almost like we’re reclaiming our data by making it physical,” Furnier said. “And there’s something that feels almost radical and liberating with the idea that you can create something and you can share it in person or you can keep it for yourself, and you’re not going to get a targeted ad.”

When ownership writ large feels very out of reach and every moment in our lives is a new opportunity for both consumption and for performance, you can still have agency in this very small way. The fact that it doesn’t require you to enrich a billionaire in the process makes it even more appealing. “It’s no great mystery in many ways, especially with the acceleration and the frictionlessness of everyday life and the goal-orientedness…we need these speed bumps, these forms of friction to slow us down,” Paterson said. “And so I can see junk journaling as one of the most accessible ways of slowing the world down and making it slightly more one’s own.”