Nothing better to do on bitter cold days than to invite a friend to come for tea and talk especially when living alone. A good book fills the gap when a friend is unavailable. I am all for cozy but was unaware that it has become a thing. It was my favorite time with your mom Friddie.
For decades, I've been championing romances, rom coms, mysteries on the page and screen, etc... just because they bring pleasure and gotten a tsunami of contempt from my well-educated peers. It doesn't surprise me that cozy girls get criticized--the intelligentsia loathes art, indeed culture, that is accessible and understandable and enjoyed by many.
Perfectly put. As a Midwestern guy who works in a library, I'm surrounded by cozy girls. They've always been here, and they always will be. Three cheers for the cozy girls!
I just learned about the cozy girl trend from this post, but I have been one, or becoming one, for my forty years on this earth.
And: "theory slop" totally made my day, along with "no one is going to stop liking looseleaf tea and a cat curled up on their lap because some take-slinging thinkpiece wrangler says they should."
Gonna go back to working on my flannel-backed quilt now. Or maybe make some tea in my handmade orca mug. Will keep chunky sweater on regardless. Small quiet life for the win.
I think the fact that cozy core is so controversial is a good indicator that its not politically inert. Politics follows culture, and this particular culture is perceived by the more militant sectors of the left as trad-adjacent. Perceptive of them, I think.
(sigh) I guess we'll never be finished with the scolding from a certain so-called "left" who find flannel "problematic" but not private prisons or for-profit health insurance.
Is your perspective a bit warped from living and breathing in the media world? I believe that in certain areas you're probably correct but...
My wife and I are public schoolteachers in Maryland. After 15 years of this we combine for over $175,000 in salary. Throw in extra incomes (she has a cottage bakery, I help people use their frequent flier points for max value) from side jobs we both find enjoyable and we're close to 200k.
We bought a house in 2019 and pay a charmingly low 3.5% for it. We live in a wonderful little town where our daughters go to school. Almost everyone in this town has normal jobs. We are not social media influencers and neither are our neighbors.
Nothing about my life (well, other than ridiculously good timing for buying a home) isn't replicatable. Pretty much everywhere needs teachers. Plenty of communities need any number of other jobs. You don't have to enter an urban, media-savvy, hustle environment. There are other choices you can make.
His perspective is clearly warped by media, but his point is that all of ours are. The average American spends 6-10 hours a day consuming media, and a lot of minds are warped by that. Kudos to you for seeming to avoid the worst effects.
Your perspective is a good one, and one I wish was more widely held.
Don’t get me wrong - here responding on an internet comment board after all! - I’m happy to spend some time online, but yeah, being a teacher means I spend 7 hours a day with other humans, which I think has salutary effects
No I’m responding to the first part of his premise: “Life is a miserable grind of disappointment [and thus people need to be cozy]. I have no problem whatsoever with coziness - I take issue with the idea that life is just unending drudgery in the modern world. I think people in media propagate this a lot because THEIR field is a dying one where the survivors fight over the scraps. But it doesn’t have to apply to the rest of us
I think it's also down to some tough early experiences and shitty mental health. I tend to agree with Freddie on his crabby stoicism, but it's probably constitutional rather than truly philosophical. You also might have managed to work at schools in less deprived areas than me in the main? I do basically enjoy teaching, but dealing with the fallout of children's bad home lives can get me down.
Yeah the majority of my students are lower/middle class, and the community is pretty tight-knit which helps a lot. Our area also gets some retirees and tourists who bring in money, so we're not normally fighting for a budget or anything. Overall, it's a good place to teach and live
That does sound nice. I grew up in a super cosy village just within the Suffolk countryside (where my parents still live) in a smallish house (certainly by US standards) but well looked after and fed; enough toys, with some borrowed from the 'toy library' that would come through the village and a lot of books, with many borrowed from the library bus that'd also come through. I normally got a new videogame for Christmas and my birthday, but I didn't especially want loads because those old point 'n' click games took me months to complete.
By contrast, living and teaching in the nearest town, a lot of the children are from economically deprived households, with unemployed parents or a single parent on a minimum-wage or part-time job. They are sometimes malnourished (coming in eating sweet they they say is their breakfast and not always with money to buy school lunch) and sometimes with dirty clothes. However, they seem to have lots of toys (endless stim/fiddle toys) and have access to an infinite supply of games through Roblox and their phones. So many of them are angry and unhappy.
My parents had cultural capital (dad's parents were both teachers and both my parents have always read a lot) and I guess that goes a long way...
Curious as a teacher - What's the phone situation over there in the UK school system like? Are the students allowed to use their phones in schools? My district just banned them for middle school (11-13 year olds) and high schoolers are not supposed to have them out.
"She understands that the aggregate of many tiny pleasures is considerable happiness." I think something along these lines every night when I fall asleep swirled around my husband and cat
Don’t forget that there’s a stereotypically conservative coded flipside to this trend, particularly in Cottagecore Culture: women/girls who forego ambition and autonomy in order to tend to domestic needs and cater for a stay-at-home lifestyle. Take that for what you will, but regardless, it is an equally predictable outcome of capitalist strive-and-grind culture.
And while I don’t think the notion of Cozy Culture overextended as some sort of revolutionary political tactic is effective at a broad social scale, it is certainly vital to cultivate an individual level of balance and peace in one’s personal life, which Cozy Culture emphasizes, and this may be a sort of rebellion in its own right against the cultural mores wrought by our currently neurotic social conditions.
Oh, fun word of the day! Hygge: a word in Danish and Norwegian that describes a cozy, contented mood evoked by comfort and conviviality. Essential for the home, imo.
I think anybody complaining about Cozy Girls not being political, or not being proactive, or not being whatever, doesn't understand how coziness can be a centering vibe from which action -- political, artistic, communal -- can flow.
My Cozy Mom -- flannel shirts, herbal tea, quilts, the whole thing -- spends her retirement helping out refugees from Afghanistan. My Cozy Wife curls up with a cat and a bed warmer most nights -- and saves her energy up to sing complex jazz at live gigs every few weeks. My Cozy Librarian co-workers are wearing their cardigan sweaters and reading mysteries, and connecting homeless families with social programs.
Cozy is a place to draw up and store energy. Then you can pour that energy into your kids, or your church, or your job on a crisis hotline for deaf youth.
I know some older women who run a food bank in a small town, and one of the sweetest programs they run is getting their fellow Cozy Ladies to make quilts and knitted blankets for women and kids escaping domestic violence that are accessing the food bank.
I’m all in favor of downshifting and leaving the rat race. But this trend seems to conflate “rejecting status competition” with “rejecting difficulty”. I’m not sure that’s healthy. Maybe I’ve internalized bourgeois values, but I think there’s a satisfaction to doing hard things that cozy people (as described here) may be missing out on. I am not saying that needs to take the form of professional striving. But if you’re going to back away from that, I would recommend reading difficult novels, going on strenuous hikes, learning a new language, or at least finding some way to push yourself. Coziness is nice, but a life of nothing but coziness seems a bit empty to me.
In my experience, though, the cozy sorts are drawn to difficult (if traditionally feminine) arts and crafts where failure is an inevitability. Knitting, cross-stitch, that sort of thing. It's a chosen difficulty (not unlike my own miniature painting hobby) that makes it compatible with "cozy": there will be failure, but the consequences are not grave, and there are no deadlines to interfere with the meditative process of creation. When all is done, you slowly develop skills that will allow you look back upon your first efforts, compare them to your most recent, and recognize progress made and lessons learned.
Arts and crafts and knitting can absolutely be examples of self-imposed challenge. I did not mean to imply that stereotypically “hard” or “masculine” pursuits are superior to more feminine-coded ones. I was just reacting to the description of the trend in the piece which seemed to imply a retreat from difficulty.
I don't think this equates to "rejecting difficulty," because the framework that causes that phenomenon is quite different from what we're seeing here.
Like...I'm around the spaces/people where difficulty rejection is the norm, and they're nothing like cozy girls. It's often very drab, very depression and mental-illness driven. But I think most importantly, it's very, VERY infantile. It's people in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s talking like they're still teenagers or freshmen in college (or at worst, like they're 10 or 12). They spitball about the news, but when the world does something bad, they curl up into a fetal position and kvetch for lengths of time. They spend endless amounts of time online and on their devices, clearly addicted to them, but also spend a lot of time on extremely child-like things (specifically anime and video games meant for people under 18). What "adult" things they do are often very abstract.
But most of all, they have carried that mindset of the bitter 8 year old who got grounded for refusing to clean their room - "When I grow up, I'm gonna do whatever I want, dress however I want, eat whatever I want! And nobody is gonna stop me!" - all the way to adulthood, with predictable results. I've seen them cook: It's worse than McDonald's food. I've seen their clothes: Can't tell if they bought it from a thrift store or TJ Maxx/Walmart. They have no style, no taste, no real sense of self that extends beyond liking childish/nerdy shit. All because they refuse to grow up since being an adult is, well, difficult. And deeply ingrained in all that is a belief that it's not worth trying at all.
Cozy girls, on the other hand, are dealing with difficulty, just not in a direct way. They have a particular style and taste that helps blunt the excesses of that difficulty. People who reject difficulty would hate cozy girls because they try "too hard," which is to say they simply try.
I suppose my concern is that “coziness” as an ideal or overriding principle could become another form of rejecting difficulty and adulthood if taken too far. It’s not the stereotypical, male-coded “pot and video games” form of arrested development you allude to, but it could still be unhealthy if taken to an extreme. But maybe my concern is misplaced. I’ll admit I don’t pay enough attention to TikTok trends to be able to render a truly informed judgement. I’m just riffing on FDB’s article.
Right. Worth saying it's not limited to men. There's another demo that tends to be just as bad. But the commentariat here tends to be very...venomous to them, so I will say nothing else.
I think some of the anti-cozy stuff -- when it's not rooted in straight-up misogyny -- is people mistaking their extremely high neuroticism for political awareness, and thus assuming that anyone who isn't similarly neurotic must be obliviously sleepwalking through life.
Cozy culture feels a bit like a restatement of Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_, which presented "a unified concept of art and nature, of nature and art blended into a harmony of daily living." The ordinary can be transformed into both an art and a meditation when it is consciously engaged with care and awareness. The Cozy is a comfort in solitude, but also something immanently _sharable_ -- what better way to connect with someone than to share a hot drink, a delicious snack, the warmth of closeness? Doesn't everyone long for such moments that feel Good in and of themselves, with no further goal in mind?
Nothing better to do on bitter cold days than to invite a friend to come for tea and talk especially when living alone. A good book fills the gap when a friend is unavailable. I am all for cozy but was unaware that it has become a thing. It was my favorite time with your mom Friddie.
For decades, I've been championing romances, rom coms, mysteries on the page and screen, etc... just because they bring pleasure and gotten a tsunami of contempt from my well-educated peers. It doesn't surprise me that cozy girls get criticized--the intelligentsia loathes art, indeed culture, that is accessible and understandable and enjoyed by many.
Their loss.
Perfectly put. As a Midwestern guy who works in a library, I'm surrounded by cozy girls. They've always been here, and they always will be. Three cheers for the cozy girls!
I’ve been living the Cozy Girl Lifestyle for too long. I even have a pair of those shoes. It’s no longer the Taoist path it once was
Survival of the Coziest
I just learned about the cozy girl trend from this post, but I have been one, or becoming one, for my forty years on this earth.
And: "theory slop" totally made my day, along with "no one is going to stop liking looseleaf tea and a cat curled up on their lap because some take-slinging thinkpiece wrangler says they should."
Gonna go back to working on my flannel-backed quilt now. Or maybe make some tea in my handmade orca mug. Will keep chunky sweater on regardless. Small quiet life for the win.
I think the fact that cozy core is so controversial is a good indicator that its not politically inert. Politics follows culture, and this particular culture is perceived by the more militant sectors of the left as trad-adjacent. Perceptive of them, I think.
(sigh) I guess we'll never be finished with the scolding from a certain so-called "left" who find flannel "problematic" but not private prisons or for-profit health insurance.
Is your perspective a bit warped from living and breathing in the media world? I believe that in certain areas you're probably correct but...
My wife and I are public schoolteachers in Maryland. After 15 years of this we combine for over $175,000 in salary. Throw in extra incomes (she has a cottage bakery, I help people use their frequent flier points for max value) from side jobs we both find enjoyable and we're close to 200k.
We bought a house in 2019 and pay a charmingly low 3.5% for it. We live in a wonderful little town where our daughters go to school. Almost everyone in this town has normal jobs. We are not social media influencers and neither are our neighbors.
Nothing about my life (well, other than ridiculously good timing for buying a home) isn't replicatable. Pretty much everywhere needs teachers. Plenty of communities need any number of other jobs. You don't have to enter an urban, media-savvy, hustle environment. There are other choices you can make.
His perspective is clearly warped by media, but his point is that all of ours are. The average American spends 6-10 hours a day consuming media, and a lot of minds are warped by that. Kudos to you for seeming to avoid the worst effects.
Your perspective is a good one, and one I wish was more widely held.
Don’t get me wrong - here responding on an internet comment board after all! - I’m happy to spend some time online, but yeah, being a teacher means I spend 7 hours a day with other humans, which I think has salutary effects
Not sure what your point is? You can't be cozy and make a nice living too?
No I’m responding to the first part of his premise: “Life is a miserable grind of disappointment [and thus people need to be cozy]. I have no problem whatsoever with coziness - I take issue with the idea that life is just unending drudgery in the modern world. I think people in media propagate this a lot because THEIR field is a dying one where the survivors fight over the scraps. But it doesn’t have to apply to the rest of us
I think it's also down to some tough early experiences and shitty mental health. I tend to agree with Freddie on his crabby stoicism, but it's probably constitutional rather than truly philosophical. You also might have managed to work at schools in less deprived areas than me in the main? I do basically enjoy teaching, but dealing with the fallout of children's bad home lives can get me down.
Yeah the majority of my students are lower/middle class, and the community is pretty tight-knit which helps a lot. Our area also gets some retirees and tourists who bring in money, so we're not normally fighting for a budget or anything. Overall, it's a good place to teach and live
That does sound nice. I grew up in a super cosy village just within the Suffolk countryside (where my parents still live) in a smallish house (certainly by US standards) but well looked after and fed; enough toys, with some borrowed from the 'toy library' that would come through the village and a lot of books, with many borrowed from the library bus that'd also come through. I normally got a new videogame for Christmas and my birthday, but I didn't especially want loads because those old point 'n' click games took me months to complete.
By contrast, living and teaching in the nearest town, a lot of the children are from economically deprived households, with unemployed parents or a single parent on a minimum-wage or part-time job. They are sometimes malnourished (coming in eating sweet they they say is their breakfast and not always with money to buy school lunch) and sometimes with dirty clothes. However, they seem to have lots of toys (endless stim/fiddle toys) and have access to an infinite supply of games through Roblox and their phones. So many of them are angry and unhappy.
My parents had cultural capital (dad's parents were both teachers and both my parents have always read a lot) and I guess that goes a long way...
Cultural capital indeed goes a long way.
Curious as a teacher - What's the phone situation over there in the UK school system like? Are the students allowed to use their phones in schools? My district just banned them for middle school (11-13 year olds) and high schoolers are not supposed to have them out.
Have you read Rich Dad Poor Dad?
"She understands that the aggregate of many tiny pleasures is considerable happiness." I think something along these lines every night when I fall asleep swirled around my husband and cat
Don’t forget that there’s a stereotypically conservative coded flipside to this trend, particularly in Cottagecore Culture: women/girls who forego ambition and autonomy in order to tend to domestic needs and cater for a stay-at-home lifestyle. Take that for what you will, but regardless, it is an equally predictable outcome of capitalist strive-and-grind culture.
And while I don’t think the notion of Cozy Culture overextended as some sort of revolutionary political tactic is effective at a broad social scale, it is certainly vital to cultivate an individual level of balance and peace in one’s personal life, which Cozy Culture emphasizes, and this may be a sort of rebellion in its own right against the cultural mores wrought by our currently neurotic social conditions.
Oh, fun word of the day! Hygge: a word in Danish and Norwegian that describes a cozy, contented mood evoked by comfort and conviviality. Essential for the home, imo.
I think anybody complaining about Cozy Girls not being political, or not being proactive, or not being whatever, doesn't understand how coziness can be a centering vibe from which action -- political, artistic, communal -- can flow.
My Cozy Mom -- flannel shirts, herbal tea, quilts, the whole thing -- spends her retirement helping out refugees from Afghanistan. My Cozy Wife curls up with a cat and a bed warmer most nights -- and saves her energy up to sing complex jazz at live gigs every few weeks. My Cozy Librarian co-workers are wearing their cardigan sweaters and reading mysteries, and connecting homeless families with social programs.
Cozy is a place to draw up and store energy. Then you can pour that energy into your kids, or your church, or your job on a crisis hotline for deaf youth.
Lovely comment, thanks for that.
I know some older women who run a food bank in a small town, and one of the sweetest programs they run is getting their fellow Cozy Ladies to make quilts and knitted blankets for women and kids escaping domestic violence that are accessing the food bank.
I’m all in favor of downshifting and leaving the rat race. But this trend seems to conflate “rejecting status competition” with “rejecting difficulty”. I’m not sure that’s healthy. Maybe I’ve internalized bourgeois values, but I think there’s a satisfaction to doing hard things that cozy people (as described here) may be missing out on. I am not saying that needs to take the form of professional striving. But if you’re going to back away from that, I would recommend reading difficult novels, going on strenuous hikes, learning a new language, or at least finding some way to push yourself. Coziness is nice, but a life of nothing but coziness seems a bit empty to me.
In my experience, though, the cozy sorts are drawn to difficult (if traditionally feminine) arts and crafts where failure is an inevitability. Knitting, cross-stitch, that sort of thing. It's a chosen difficulty (not unlike my own miniature painting hobby) that makes it compatible with "cozy": there will be failure, but the consequences are not grave, and there are no deadlines to interfere with the meditative process of creation. When all is done, you slowly develop skills that will allow you look back upon your first efforts, compare them to your most recent, and recognize progress made and lessons learned.
Arts and crafts and knitting can absolutely be examples of self-imposed challenge. I did not mean to imply that stereotypically “hard” or “masculine” pursuits are superior to more feminine-coded ones. I was just reacting to the description of the trend in the piece which seemed to imply a retreat from difficulty.
I don't think this equates to "rejecting difficulty," because the framework that causes that phenomenon is quite different from what we're seeing here.
Like...I'm around the spaces/people where difficulty rejection is the norm, and they're nothing like cozy girls. It's often very drab, very depression and mental-illness driven. But I think most importantly, it's very, VERY infantile. It's people in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s talking like they're still teenagers or freshmen in college (or at worst, like they're 10 or 12). They spitball about the news, but when the world does something bad, they curl up into a fetal position and kvetch for lengths of time. They spend endless amounts of time online and on their devices, clearly addicted to them, but also spend a lot of time on extremely child-like things (specifically anime and video games meant for people under 18). What "adult" things they do are often very abstract.
But most of all, they have carried that mindset of the bitter 8 year old who got grounded for refusing to clean their room - "When I grow up, I'm gonna do whatever I want, dress however I want, eat whatever I want! And nobody is gonna stop me!" - all the way to adulthood, with predictable results. I've seen them cook: It's worse than McDonald's food. I've seen their clothes: Can't tell if they bought it from a thrift store or TJ Maxx/Walmart. They have no style, no taste, no real sense of self that extends beyond liking childish/nerdy shit. All because they refuse to grow up since being an adult is, well, difficult. And deeply ingrained in all that is a belief that it's not worth trying at all.
Cozy girls, on the other hand, are dealing with difficulty, just not in a direct way. They have a particular style and taste that helps blunt the excesses of that difficulty. People who reject difficulty would hate cozy girls because they try "too hard," which is to say they simply try.
I suppose my concern is that “coziness” as an ideal or overriding principle could become another form of rejecting difficulty and adulthood if taken too far. It’s not the stereotypical, male-coded “pot and video games” form of arrested development you allude to, but it could still be unhealthy if taken to an extreme. But maybe my concern is misplaced. I’ll admit I don’t pay enough attention to TikTok trends to be able to render a truly informed judgement. I’m just riffing on FDB’s article.
Right. Worth saying it's not limited to men. There's another demo that tends to be just as bad. But the commentariat here tends to be very...venomous to them, so I will say nothing else.
This sounds nightmarish, dude. Who are these people, and how do they pay the rent?
Probably my favorite piece you've written.
I think some of the anti-cozy stuff -- when it's not rooted in straight-up misogyny -- is people mistaking their extremely high neuroticism for political awareness, and thus assuming that anyone who isn't similarly neurotic must be obliviously sleepwalking through life.
+1000
Haha dead on
Cozy culture feels a bit like a restatement of Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_, which presented "a unified concept of art and nature, of nature and art blended into a harmony of daily living." The ordinary can be transformed into both an art and a meditation when it is consciously engaged with care and awareness. The Cozy is a comfort in solitude, but also something immanently _sharable_ -- what better way to connect with someone than to share a hot drink, a delicious snack, the warmth of closeness? Doesn't everyone long for such moments that feel Good in and of themselves, with no further goal in mind?