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Woman reads a book by the fireplace.
‘ Coziness is a heightened, almost erotic feeling of belonging: you are in your own space, and if there’s anyone in there with you, they are allies who truly know you.’ Photograph: Creative-Family/Getty Images/iStockphoto
‘ Coziness is a heightened, almost erotic feeling of belonging: you are in your own space, and if there’s anyone in there with you, they are allies who truly know you.’ Photograph: Creative-Family/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Is the ‘cozy season’ trend a secret cry for help?

This article is more than 2 years old

Coziness has become a powerful aesthetic, but are we using it to chase a feeling that the outside world denies us?

Take a peek on social media, and it’s obvious we are burrowed deep within “cozy season”. It surrounds us with clouds of neutral-toned knits and the steam of freshly brewed hot drinks. Our socks encase our ankles with seasonal droopiness. Our beanies threaten to envelop our entire heads in their snuggly embrace. We have a candle burning, a new book ready to crack. We are not getting up from this spot.

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At the start of the season, I noticed that coziness was coming on with extra ferocity this year, even though seasons always announce themselves so loudly online. Coziness has become a powerful social media aesthetic, probably due to the pandemic and people being homebound. But do we really need another round of buffalo-plaid throw blankets lined with petroleum-based fleece? Do we really want another year’s worth of manufactured-to-look-handmade mugs with phrases like “Baby, it’s cold outside” stamped on them?

Instagram representations of coziness are primarily about safety and comfort, but they are also about order and control. Everything is in its right place. The house is cleaned, the candles lit. Just as important as what we see – the couch, the socks, the candle – are the things we don’t: any mess, disorder, or the unpredictable reality of the world outside.

What if our obsession with coziness has risen in step with our growing feeling of collective precariousness? My bed is beside a window we keep cracked open at night to heighten the feeling of being cozy in bed. You can’t really get that feeling of being safe and warm without the awareness that it’s cold out there. Likewise, the colder and more brutal it is in the outside world, the more it feels precious and delicious to be inside our homes.


Whatever the origins of the aesthetic of coziness online might be, it started out as a feeling, not a collection of objects. Coziness is a heightened, almost erotic feeling of belonging: you are in your own space, and if there’s anyone in there with you, they are allies who truly know you, because you wouldn’t share this sock-footed intimacy with just anyone. This is the melty core of coziness. This is the dragon we’re all chasing.

When people buy candles and fuzzy blankets and try to conjure that feeling, maybe they are looking for a feeling that the world outside their homes denies them.

Instagram does a bad job of representing the actual experience of being human. Family life is so thick with meaning, and I am forever fascinated with the way we expect momfluencers to do that justice with tools – their iPhones – that are completely inadequate. It’s challenging to express embodied experiences through pictures on a screen. Same deal with coziness. In both cases, what’s being attempted is the commodification of the un-commodifiable in a market-driven environment controlled by a growth-oriented algorithm. We like our images to be visually clean, easily read by the scanning eye and above all, shoppable.

Coziness can, however, be conjured in novels, paintings, songs and photographs. The Wind in the Willows? A holy book of coziness, in my opinion. The scene in War and Peace where Kitty and her brother stay over with their “uncle” after the wolf hunt? High cozy. In both cases, coziness comes from characters finding ecstasy in simple details that they dissolve into the moment.

Coziness is an embodied human experience, a feeling of relaxation and ease of mind and body, and the way we’ve historically done our best work of conjuring what it feels like to be ourselves is through art, not commerce.

We have always been able to represent coziness through art. In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder made The Harvesters, a painting depicting a group of people resting together under a tree during a break from harvesting wheat. This kind of image is proof that coziness does not require wintertime or interior spaces to exist; the painting represents late summer, and a feeling of easy, casual camaraderie, belonging and even relief.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Harvesters. Photograph: Google Art Project/public domain

Maybe it is inevitable that at some point we’d bump up against the limitations of social media’s ability to represent ourselves. That’s happening with coziness – we’re reaching for it, but on Instagram it will always be out of our grasp.

Over the past few years around Christmastime in North America, we’ve tried to conjure hygge, the Danish concept and practice of wintertime coziness. We’ve mainly understood hygge as a set of products and aesthetics. We buy books about it, we decorate our homes with ornaments and centerpieces marketed to us as hygge-conjuring. But hygge is not something that you look at. It is not a style of decor. It’s a psychological state, a way of approaching life during the darker months. It is essentially about creating the conditions for people to feel a powerful sense of comfort and belonging, both in our homes and with friends. This is not a question of lighting a balsam-scented candle. Like coziness, you can’t buy it – you have to do it.

It’s necessity that has led Scandinavian countries to have such robust traditions for making wintertime a season for feeling like you belong. Winter is long; darkness is painful in isolation.

In Norway, people incorporate the practice of friluftsliv outdoor living – into their lives year-round. Doing friluftsliv has surely been commercialized with outdoor clothing and gear, but Norwegians tend to be adamant that it’s above all an approach to living: being enthusiastically outside even when it’s dark and cold, and making outside living comfortable, year-round.

Meanwhile in North America, many of us are atomized in our nuclear households and stressed in our jobs. We need to develop our own hygge, and quick. Cozy season on social media might be a cry for help. We all want so badly to belong somewhere, and the perfect artifacts of coziness can’t help us achieve that feeling.

If Instagram’s algorithm worked differently – in such a way that did not revolve around engagement metrics and perpetual growth – maybe coziness would exist as a thriving subgenre of a new art form native to the platform. Can you imagine?

This is an edited excerpt of a piece that originally appeared in Mothers Under the Influence. Looking for more great work? Here are some suggestions:

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