I bought a magazine (don't interfere, it's a canon event)
The case for finding inspiration offline
As a kid in the early oughts, I spent most of my early teenage years sitting cross legged on a hot pink comforter, surrounded by magazines. To be honest, there wasn’t anything better to do - I had four tv channels at home (The FOMO I felt every time my friends discussed Hannah Montana plot points was excruciating), scarce access to the internet and nowhere to go.
My after-school hours were devoted to absolute boredom at my parents’ workplace, which was the Worst Place on Earth™️ for a middle-schooler starving for any kind of mental stimulation. After drawing on napkins and bothering customers, my dad would be so fed up with me, he’d get me out the door with some change so I could buy myself a magazine next door and sit somewhere quiet. And so it began.
Here’s a short timeline of my early life as a magazine reader:
7 - 8 years old: I read Barbie magazine, mostly for the free goodies. I became aware of the Barbie Membership Club, something I was never a part of and which would ultimately lead me to creating my own pink membership card (aHA!).
8 - 12 years old: My giant collection of W.I.T.C.H. magazines is still gathering dust on my childhood bedroom’s shelves, and anyone who wants to get rid of it will have to pry it from my cold dead hands.
12 - 15 years old: My mom sends me the occasional picture of a lost earring or plastic keychain that came with the many editions of Bravo I read over the years, and I still find Zac Efron’s smiley face folded between pages of my old school notebooks.
13: I also remember my mom surreptitiously ripping out two pages full of vibrator pictures from a Ragazza magazine I bought to keep me company at the hospital when I was 13. Ragazza saw me through some things… my first attempt at waxing my legs happened when I bought an issue that came with two sample wax strips from Veet. I waited until I was home alone, applied one to my leg, and then tried to rip it off but chickened out, so I ended up with remnants of wax on my leg for a couple days.
For most of these years, I was also reading Vogue. I had decided I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was 6 (very decisive child), and reading Vogue opened doors to this glamorous world I could only dream of; it was like a monthly transfusion of knowledge and inspiration. I still remember so many runway collections from that time because I looked at those pictures until my eyes hurt.
I’ll save the long version of this story for another time, but here’s how the following years of my life went: in school, I was an avid magazine reader and yapped about my outfits every week on my blog(s). Once I went to university to study Fashion, the time to read anything became scarce. I was also broke.
I interned at a magazine after graduating and discovered the allure of international indie publications then (mostly thanks to the editor-in-chief who let me take his copies home once he’d finished reading them), but eventually, as my work became more social media focused, I stopped reading magazines altogether and turned my full attention to the interweb. I can’t remember the last time I purchased a physical magazine, but it has to have been before 2020.
Now it’s 2024, and my chronic online-ness has reached an all-time high: I do all my work online, my hobbies are online and when I want to learn something or find inspiration for a creative project, I do that online, too. I don’t read magazines anymore and, though it pains me to admit it, I can’t remember the last time I went to a museum or an exhibition, either.
But for about a year now, I’ve missed the analog as much as I’ve been tired of the digital. It’s not that the internet doesn’t bring me joy anymore, because it does - I’m writing this on Substack, I love connecting with people on Instagram, I discuss books every month on Discord -, it’s just that it doesn’t give me everything my creative brain asks for. Nor should it, nor should I expect it to.
When I came up with the idea for my first book swap, I did so because I missed being face-to-face with people in a context that felt purposeful and exciting, and the internet couldn’t give me that. I think the situation is similar when it comes to my creative pursuits; browsing through Pinterest is quick and useful, but it won’t replace the magic of sitting on that hot pink comforter with my magazines.
There is also something to be said about how what we find online is most likely the product of a cushy echo chamber we’ve created for ourselves; after all, we’re being fed by algorithms 24/7. If inspiration comes from unlikely places, from what shocks us and confuses us and makes us think, should the internet be our sole source of information?
I’m sure it can be. I’m sure there are some extremely diligent and intentional internet browsers out there, but that’s not me. And that realisation, paired with how much I miss the nostalgic feeling of logging off and spending a lazy afternoon leafing through a magazine instead of doom-scrolling through 100 different versions of the same image (which I will still do, of course), finally pushed me to buy a fresh copy of anOther. It could’ve been any other indie publication, for all I cared - I just wanted to browse through a magazine again.
Logging off completely might be near impossible, but from now on, I’m planning on buying a magazine every month as a little treat for myself. I want to explore different publications and themes, from interior design to food magazines, and be more intentional about what I feed my brain, making sure I keep in touch with the world outside my for you page.
If you miss finding inspiration offline too, here are two things you can do this week:
Go to a park/museum/cafe in your neighbourhood, and take your notebook with you. Draw the people around you, the dogs in the park, or write about what you see.
Do what I did and get yourself a magazine! Buy one or go through a friend’s collection. Read it with page markers near you, so you can mark your favourite articles and images to revisit later.
Omg nao é Scratch, é Patch haha é uma revista de vídeo jogos muito fixe 😅
Eu a ler a Bravo e a Super Pop até aos 21 anos 😂 Depois passou a ser a Cosmopolitan e a National Geographic. Agora é a Scratch, embora ainda não tenha comprado um número em papel, mas vou comprar em breve! Tantas recordações neste post.