INTRODUCTION.

For those who have followed this for a while, you may know by now this blog is our personal playground. It is closer to a game than work for us. In the sake of full transparency, the only part that feels like real work is this damn intro. So in honor of this quarter’s blog topic, we will respectfully decline and move on to the good stuff. Let’s get to playing.

TRIVIAL PURSUITS.

We love to roll up our sleeves and get to work here at GG, but we’ve got a bone to pick with Hustle Culture. We hereby declare it the silent killer of hobbies. For years now, it hasn’t been enough to create for fun. What would’ve been an experimental pastry or pottery class vase in 2005 needed to be marketed and monetized by 2015.

This isn’t without reason. The 08’ financial crisis left many of us in need of an extra buck or thousand. Every minute of the day became a precious opportunity to better our situations. If we had to choose between losing our hobbies to another 5 hours of work or turning our hobbies into a new form of work, you can be sure we’d transform every side project into a sellable product. However, it turns out hobbies are a little less fulfilling and a whole lot less pleasurable with the added pressure of supporting ourselves.

Lately though, we see a sea change. The simultaneous burnouts of work and social media align to a rise in fewer commutes and more flexible hours, making time for a new form of escapism. The hints of such a shift emerged with the revival of second life games like The Sims and Roller Coaster Tycoon back in 2020. That continues to snowball into an even more referential, tactile, and most importantly hedonistically indulgent evolution. This new escapism is unabashed in its lack of commercial value, centered entirely on the satisfaction of doing something for the hell of it.

The result is a highly experimental, wildly nostalgic, incredibly thoughtful, and often so-bad-its good creative expression. Welcome to Trivial Pursuits.

IN THE WORLD.

You don’t have to look far to find signs of grown-up-kids content in culture today. Most obvious is the summer juggernaut Barbie. Though Gerwig is sure to infuse a healthy dose of cynical maturity into the beloved character, Barbie has lost none of the nostalgic luster her millennial audience craves.

Beyond film, food is another space infatuated with the old-is-new idea. Popular streetwear brand Cactus Plant Flea Market partnered with McDonald’s to release the first ever Adult Happy Meal. The limited edition, quadruple-eyed collectibles were sold alongside sweatsuits donned with the iconic Golden Arches, sending fast food lovers and fashionistas alike into a frenzy.

Most relevant to our line of work is the explosion of high end toys for the home. Leather bound basketball hoops, marble pool tables and raw wood rock climbing walls take over our feeds, cementing the “silly kids, play is for adults” mantra to come.

IN DESIGN.

From playful objects of the home, we can turn our attention to the home itself. When it comes to interior design the only style worth talking about is the highly contested postmodernism.

Postmodernism challenges everything we know about “good taste.” It prioritizes the coexistence of leftover objects and new needs at all costs, reveling in the beauty of the resulting aesthetic conflict. The jarring palettes, oversized accents, and delightfully incoherent curation is intended to honestly reflect the complexity of the people interacting with the spaces. It is an ode to the good, bad and ugly of human creation.

Though intriguing in its own right, it is far more fascinating to consider the evolution it would undergo if it were to reemerge in our era. With society’s heightened digitization, rising indoor-outdoor living and peak kitchen culture in mind, we like to imagine it taking shape as a whimsical backyard kitchen.

The first way we envision the movement is by going to the source of postmodern pride: Vegas. Architect Venturi, the originator of the phrase “less is a bore,” lauded the city as the ultimate communication tool. The neon billboards, flashing poker tables and gaudy theme-park casinos are all proudly put on display. That obvious spectacle of the those attractions is what cemented Vegas as the play place of adulthood over the competition. In today’s oversaturated content economy, attracting eyeballs has become an art form that could learn a thing or two from Vegas. However, we’re more curious about what the art of display looks like offline. Turning to our domestic playground, aka the kitchen, we can swap flashy slots for shiny appliances. We show them off not on shelves but instead nestled between rock climbing holds at precarious angles. As a little bonus nod, we can even throw in a neon light for a supernatural strip-like glow.

The second looks to the lighthearted, anti-functional furniture of the time. Milan’s Memphis Group was known for their clashing geometries, funky proportions, and oversaturated primary color blocking at a time when practicality ruled. The chaotic combinations seemingly refused to acknowledge the theory of white space. In today’s landscape of food as culture, we consider what it would look like to apply these ideas of color and form to jello, aka the least functional dish of all. A food void of nutrition, it feels as though jello’s main purpose is to delight through its unnatural colors and highly manipulated forms. Similarly to bookshelves of the past, these jiggly sculptures say balance be damned.

What would this look like all together? See below and let us know what you think!