Can Junk Journaling Be an Answer To Digital Fatigue?
Think of all the average trash a person goes through in one day: Straw wrappers, stickers, receipts, plastic, paper, coffee cups, bags, tags, the whole lot. Now imagine pasting every one of those things in a journal and you’ve got down the basic tenets of junk journaling, TikTok’s newest trend, and the latest attempt to combat digital fatigue.
While junk journaling as a practice — using your everyday waste to track and catalog your life and experiences — sounds straightforward, the parameters of the craft can be hard for hobbyists to agree on, as it combines diary habits with the aesthetics of scrapbooking. Scrapbooking’s storied history as a way for women to create and hold family records and information prior to first-wave feminism means that people, frankly, take it incredibly seriously. Junk journaling, by its very nature, is about collecting things that are literally trash on their own, but work together to create a record. Online, it’s taken over for-you-pages as the go-to craft for the new year, with user after user documenting their shopping sprees, journaling sessions, and new journal purchases. At a time when creators and consumers alike are openly searching for ways to avoid screens, the resurgence of youth interest in another craft seems to be a straightforward effect of digital fatigue. But can people really use the internet to find ways to avoid, well, the internet? Or is junk journaling, and whatever crafting trends come next, just internet consumption with a different face?
As scrapbooking and journaling are pretty established pastimes, it’s hard to track when junk journaling first started attracting new contributors. Scrapbooks, usually memorializing a family or group history, were popularized in America during the Civil War, and used during the suffrage and abolition movement to preserve newspaper clippings. And almost every five years, a new popular iteration comes along. Around 2016, bullet journaling ruled supreme on Tumblr, with blogs posting the setups, calendars, and lists they drew using rulers and thin line markers. And prior to that, illustrator Keri Smith’s 2007 Wreck This Journal, which sold over 3 million copies, encouraged pre-teens and up to be creative by literally destroying the pages in the notebook with tea, scissors, water, dirt, and other mediums usually avoided by journalers.
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But in the past two months, there’s been a steady rise in interest in junk journaling, according to Google Trends. On TikTok alone, the amount of videos using junk journaling-related tags have doubled. People have referred to it as a relaxing form of self-care, and a hobby to improve the creativity that’s been absolutely crushed to death by scrolling. “Who knew that junk could turn into something so beautiful?” said one TikToker after discovering the trend. “By repurposing things I already have, like old receipts, magazines, and scraps, I can create something meaningful without spending a dime.” The #junkjournal hashtag has 400,000 posts on TikTok, and the top 100 videos have all been posted in the last three weeks. The r/junkjournals subreddit, a community with over 7,000 members, was inactive for almost five years before a moderator revamped the page in December because of renewed interest online.
New and old junk journalers have called the craft a sustainable and creative way to catalog your life, but just as junk journaling has begun to grow in popularity, so has the internet commodification of the trend. A quick scroll on the junk journal hashtag on TikTok will show hundreds of new crafters spending money on items to fill their journals, rather than actually using the trash they acquire in real life. “I spent $107 at Hobby Lobby on junk journaling supplies. This is everything I got,” said one creator, showing off mounds of stickers, tape, and paper. Another crafter posted a haul of stickers, paper, and ephemera she bought on Temu (the Chinese e-commerce giant known for its low price tags and allegations of forced labor) which received 20,000 views and hundreds of comments. While those who enjoy buying extra decorations for their journals have dubbed critics of this practice the “junk journal police,” the pushback against being able to effectively purchase a trend that began as a way to be creative shows just how inescapable digital practices are in the first place.
The internet thrives on consumerism. Even as trends that promote individuality emerge, the flattening nature of the algorithm means the average person interacts with them the way TikTok and other social media sites directly suggest: by spending money. Take, for example, the 2024 trend of Jane Birkin-ifying purses, which encouraged viewers to take inspiration from Birkin’s habit of putting beads and charms on her Hermes bag to document her life and activism. TikTok users ran to do this to their own bags, but what began as a way to display interesting tchotchkes coalesced into an aesthetic that’s now available for purchase on Amazon, Temu, and Shein. So it only makes sense that some people are getting into junk journaling the only way they know how: swiping their cards on a starter pack.
Buying stickers, or scrapbooking materials, or dressing up a junk journal filled with trash with a roll of washi tape here or there isn’t going to single-handedly ruin the climate or destabilize environmental efforts worldwide, but digital trends that seem like a way to escape the internet often incentivize people to jump back on the platform where they first found the trend. If the current iteration of Al Gore’s internet has proven anything, it’s that even the best attempts at individual style or thought eventually turn into mass-consumerism slop. For people who enjoy junk journaling a helpful self-care practice, there’s plenty of trash lying around waiting for the helping hand of a glue stick. But if your goal is to use your journal time to stay offline, maybe the first step should be not posting about it in the first place.