i have a problem with pinterest

and it's probably not for the reason you think...

don’t get me wrong, i really love pinterest. i have a whoooole bunch of boards for multiple projects and mood boards for months and for characters (see the one pictured here which is for Matthew de Clairmont from the All Souls Trilogy) and i will probably keep making pinterest boards until the planet burns up into a husk. there is a post floating around substack about a better way to use pinterest that i may come back and link here if i remember and can fid it.

as i said, i have years worth of collections of images for different parts of my life that i find beneficial to put images to. but the more and more images i see that have comments underneath with people asking where someone got something or for the link and more often than not the photos show something customised or personalised or handmade or something like that, and i can understand the desire to want something that you see and like the look of, but i cannot understand the unwillingness to not use the tools the internet has to offer. how hard is it to google it? or to do a reverse image search? or to, i don’t know, just not want to become a part of a homogenised society where everyone looks the same and acts the same and owns the same things and does the same things.

am i seriously the only person who owns craft supplies that have no purpose or too many notebooks, or went through a sticker phase? do people not have access to google or bing or ask jeeves? are we no longer able to use our hands for anything other than scrolling?

with this first image there is very obvious sign posting if someone wanted to go look for themselves and hunt down the information, instead this person just throws into the comments “how much are they?” (they did not get a reply with a price). why not go look it up? i mean, a quick bit of digging, or even clicking on the profile on the pin, takes you to a website where the nails are not. which sure, is a bit of a bummer if you wanted to buy these nails, but at least i was able to very quickly find out that they are not available. i didn’t just ask a question under a pin that was likely to get lost into the void. i used my initiative.

with the second one, it seems like the poster at the very least doesn’t own the quilt. for some reason i was silly and didn’t save the pin, but i was able to find multiple images of the quilt posted by a couple of different users. one of them even provided me a flickr link with a bit more information and it seems like the person asking where they can get it is going to be very disappointed. this is not a mass produced home good available on shein or wherever the girlies are buying their planet killing plastic goods. no, this one is from the 2011 Tokyo International Quilt Show. so it is almost certainly and one of one and if someone wants it they will probably have to try and recreate it. i’m sure if they look hard enough they will be able to find a sewing machine to borrow and can learn how to quilt.

look, maybe i am being a bit harsh here. but this constant need to own the same thing everyone else does or to pretend to have a personality by buying things that look cool on pinterest because they’re cheap or mass produced is getting a bit tiring. i’m not saying i’m above it, my 2023 Macbook Air is resting on an Ikea shark. i bought into the hobonichi trend which resulted in me discovering i actually did not enjoy using a hobo cousin in 2024. i am however, using it up and just using it as a notebook. i am currently drawing my weekly pages in october 2024 and looking forward to the day when i can move back into my travellers notebooks. i love Le Creuset and if i had the money my kitchen would be full of it and the grip the Fresh Soya Face Cleanser has on me is unreal. but i am able to also recognise that i do not need most of these things.

the tiktokification of aesthetics is something i did a presentation on during my masters and is something i still think about a lot a year later. we are so busy consuming that our personalities are being eaten away by the things these companies want us to think are cool and fashionable. easy access is killing our senses of self and i know i am not the first person to write about this, but i still feel the need to write about it because thinking about it causes a small part of me to die everytime i thinking about it. you are worth so much more than what these corporations tell you you are worth. you are a whole person. a living being with a connection to those around you and the planet. allow yourself to be the multi-faceted person you are. stop narrowing yourself down. it’s not cool.

i am wildly grateful that i did most of my growing before tiktok was launched and was still music.ly or however it was branded. insta wasn’t addicting yet when i was a teenager and it wasn’t until i turned 16 when i started to actually notice a shift in how we interact with the internet. it has become people’s personality, and i am not much better, but i don’t have insta or youtube on my phone, i deleted my tiktok account and who knows when the last time i used twitter/x was. i have ad block on chrome and that must have such a huge affect on how i interact with the world. adverts were interesting when i was a child. now they’re just exhausting and harmful.

when i was younger, the older generations were constantly raging against the millennials for their being rewarded for little achievement and i can’t help but think that that is what is happening now. i’m not saying that we need to achieve things to deserve nice clothing or makeup or home goods, no. these companies need to actually start putting in effort and making good quality items that don’t disintegrate after the first wash or drop to earn our money and attention. we have to stop going for the easy option and actually start putting effort into our entire lives, multinational conglomerates included.

the instant gratification that is being forced onto us is making us lazy and perhaps even stupider. literacy is down in the us (i’m not going to provide sources, look it up babes. put effort into your education and learning), degree courses are being cut in the uk (i have much first hand experience of this) and we are allowing our politicians to walk all over us. they serve us and we have allowed them to convince us otherwise. we need to reclaim our time and attention and i think that that’s going to start with looking things up and not just throwing a comment on a pin. put time into your interests. you’re worth it.

chloe

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below is the kind of energy i want from my pinterest experience. this is adding to joy, not simply asking for others to do work you could have done yourself.