The latest must-have accessory is a “stop-scrolling bag” – a tote packed with analog activities like watercolors and crossword puzzles. We spend hours glued to our screens. “Analog bags,” as they’re also called, are one way millennials and Gen Zers are reclaiming that time. “I basically just put everything I could grab for instead of my phone into a bag,” including knitting, a scrapbook and a Polaroid camera, says Sierra Campbell, the content creator behind the trend.
The 31-year-old keeps one bag at home in Northern California, carrying it from room to room, and another in her car. The trend has quickly spread on social media, part of a bigger shift to unplug. Roughly 1,600 TikTok posts were tagged #AnalogLife during the first nine months of 2025 – up over 330% from the same period last year, according to TikTok data shared with Axios.
“It speaks to an incredible desperation and desire for experiences that return our attention to us, that fight brain-rotting, that are tactile … that involve creating over scrolling,” says Beth McGroarty, vice president of research at the Global Wellness Institute.
Depends on the cutoff line. But i would typically say Zoomers are too young to remember 9/11 and old enough to have grown up with Marvel movies. Born late 90’s-early 2010’s. 30 is around the cutoff between Millennials and Zoomers so that wwill come down to individuals. But also, generations are pretty suspect as a concept outside of the Baby Boomers since that was an actual charatable phenomen
I see it as anybody too young to remember a world that wasn’t connected 24/7, somebody who in their child/teen years that didn’t make heavy use of the phone attached to the kitchen wall to contact friends. Someone who’s never had to seriously use dialup Internet or an 8/16 bit computer.
It’s typically best not to use things dependent on wealth to assess age groups. A kid growing up in Hamtramck had very different experiences from a kid growing up in Birmingham Michigan, even though those two areas are only 10 miles apart.
i mean culturally i also relate to the older generation in the case of digitalization if i grew up rurally with poorer parents. so a zoomer in a millenial cultural upbringing since poor + rural = lagging on trends. i’d call it millenial
Yeah, I typically use 1996 (unlikely to remember 9/11) to 2015 (in school for the pandemic).