Feels the the homogenization of culture driven by social media and online communities. Somebody makes a chicken, and it gets a good reaction, so everybody starts making chickens. At first it's organic but it turns into clout chasing. Pretty soon the chickens will start to disappear and something else will take their place.
Why wouldn't you knit a chicken???
If I don't have any cotton wool or if i'm not interested in knitting, of course!
Interesting. Seems chickens in general are just 'in'. I assumed it was because of egg prices, but perhaps there's more to it?
My wife is part of some backyard chicken community, and said it's absolutely exploded with new members. Luckily I didn't need any chicks this year, but everyone I know who did was shocked that every single hatchery was out of stock for females. Even TSC didn't have any around until a week or two ago. Never seen anything like it.
+1 to this comment! Until this post was not aware of knit chickens being trendy but have noticed chicken content picking up steam, at least on my feed (e.g. drinking with chickens on Instagram etc).
Im going to start calling every unoriginal bastard a chicken knitter!
I hope this is catching.
Reminds me of the Blender Donut. It's a good beginner project and the outcome is pleasing.
The emotional support chicken isn't a great beginner project.
You want to start with a scarf and move onto a beanie.
Funny you say that. The top projects on Ravely are:
#1: Musselburgh (a beanie)
#2: Sophie Scarf
#3: Emotional Support Chicken
It’s a great project to leave the beginners bracket.
Framing everything in terms of mental health is one of those things were I can't tell if people are participating in some kind of mass social joke, or are serious.
I think it is a little of both :) Emotional support animals are a real thing, but they are expensive and require a lot of maintenance and there are limits on where they may be taken. Stuffed animals can make people feel better for similar reasons, it's a companion to "talk to" or a nice familiar sight, and they have a lot lower bar to ownership than real animals do. So a stuffed animal can be reasonably considered to be in the same category as a real emotional support animal, but they are obviously a lot less serious than a real animal. So it's fun and funny to choose an animal with a bit of silliness and humor to it, like a chicken.
It is a joke, yeah, but it can also be a mood booster. So it's both.
Speaking of the benefits of someone to "talk to", programmers have long known the benefits of rubber duck debugging, in speaking aloud the problem (to an inanimate object) to help align their thinking.
Perhaps we all could benefit from some knitted Coding Support Chickens?
There are also obviously some people that take advantage of the rules around emotional support animals. Like Great Danes on airplanes (second hand anecdote). So the effect is that people tend to suspect everyone is taking advantage. There are even a ton of services to make it super easy to classify a pet as an emotional support animal. So, I am all for these ridiculous chickens. Might buy some for my kids (I am not into knitting).
As far as I know, no major airlines have any special treatment for "emotional support animals." Most U.S. airlines allow pets on domestic flights to fly if they stay inside carriers within approved size limits. Emotional support animals and therapy animals fly as pets regardless of any certifications. So I'm pretty sure there's no service that makes it easy to fly with your Great Dane as an emotional support animal. You might be thinking of other animal-related exceptions, like having a pet in your apartment where the lease normally doesn't allow pets.
Service dogs on commercial flights are a separate USDOT category. The dog needs to be trained for a specific task for a disabled passenger, and the passenger must provide an attestation form. Airlines must allow service dogs, but they can still deny transport if the dog poses a safety risk or causes significant disruption before or after boarding. I'm not sure how enforcement works in practice, but I certainly wouldn't try to fly with a dog using a false attestation.
My understanding that those services that classify your animal are all unnecessary and sort of a scam.
Yup. A pretty clear giveaway that a service animal is fake is those vests with “SERVICE ANIMAL” in size 9000 font on the side.
Clearly not a pet person.
I am a total fan of emotional support chickens, real or knitted. I am also a fan of rotisserie chickens.
We are in a time where it's fashionable to have mental health issues. It's very strange.
Fashionable? I disagree. Acceptable? Hopefully.
People have been stigmatized and isolated for generations for being “different” in some way. Emotional and psychological reasons included. People are all different. We all have different issues. We all have different experiences. No one should be shunned for seeking out others with similarities to get advice and support. And how can you do that without making people aware?
Do we have more mental health issues than in the past? I don’t think so. I think we’re more aware and more accepting than past generations.
> We are in a time where it's fashionable to have mental health issues. It's very strange
I'd argue it isn't. The first edition of the DSM was published in 1952 [1]. This is right after "the routine annual comprehensive physical examination (PE) became a fixture in American medical practice" [2].
Add 25 years for a generation to be educated, another 25 for the old guard to retire, and you'd expect the paradigm shift around mental health to land around the millenium. Unless you have evidence we had a nonlinear jump between then and now, I'd argue the trend is analagous to folks becoming aware of and culturally assimilating the concept of blood type.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Man...
Something can be causal or even predictable but still strange and difficult to reconcile.
I do think that there is a component of fashion or social currency that has piggybacked on medical awareness, or perhaps as a byproduct of its mixing with moral credentialism of disadvantage.
Only certain mental health issues. Being a full on schizophrenic newspaper hoarder won’t ever be in style.
Yesterday newspaper hoarder was just replaced with 90's videogames, mangas or hifi / computer manuals.
Not physically, but digital hoarding is in full swing.
That's what I fell about the 21 pilots track I'm so stressed out.
isn't it mostly about childhood nostalgia? "I'm more stressed then when I was a kid" seems pretty basic
Yeah I remember a constant trend in my child->young adult years was hearing "oh you think it's hard now? wait until you get to "next thing"'.
Every single time without fail (except maybe the jump from kindergarten to school) what actually happened was that the adults around me breathed down my neck a little bit less and I got access to a little more freedom to do fun stuff.
Being a kid in school is horrible. You're entirely reliant on your parents to buy you everything and enable you to experience things, nobody trusts you, everything is full of arbitrary rules.
The jump from school to university was especially stark - I kept being told it was going to be really hard, I'd need to work way harder than in highschool etc etc. Turns out what actually happened was I went from 6 straight hours of unavoidable class a day to maybe 2 or 3 much more interesting ones that were recorded and posted online and could be skipped when needed with no consequence, roughly the same amount of homework and I got to live with people my age 5 minutes walk from a 24 hour McDonalds.
And working... they pay you quite a lot of money to be there (seriously even a minimum wage job is unfathomable to a kid, do you know how many gameboys you could buy with that?), there's no homework and you get to do something you're really good at.
Maybe I just had an easy time but 7-12 was a lot less stressful than office work and arbitrary meetings all day. I probably just miss the predictable schedule
My school had a lot of field trips. I have never been part of a job that included trips to "the little farm. "I asked a friend from Hong Kong, if he had trips to A little farm, and he said he did.
I've seen this plenty of times, young people almost boasting about their diagnosis like the old upper class used to be proud of gout
Some health care professionals are becoming hesitant to talk about diagnoses because it hurts the patient when they start identifying with the diagnosis it makes the condition worse when the patient starts to act more like the diagnosed condition because that's how they're supposed to act
I'm curious what you think counts as "framing in terms of mental health." Or more interestingly, if you think this article constitutes "framing in terms of mental health," I'm curious what you wouldn't consider as such.
This article does use words related to mental states, like "comforting" and "relaxing." But that's pretty difficult to avoid in most writing of non-trivial length.
The name they've decided to give these, "emergency" chickens, knitting them for hurricane survivors. It's all a step up from just "we like these and they're nice" and into "these are Helpful with a capital H".
My point is exactly that that kind of thing reads like a joking exaggeration, but this sort of approach to things is really common now and I truly have trouble telling when people are joking or being serious about it. Most of it reads like joking to me, but I don't know. It's also been going on long enough that it's making me wonder even more, since, judged as a joke, it was played out and over-done years ago.
I think you're pretty clearly experiencing a false positive on your "major cultural problem" detector. The chickens are cute and comforting, no doubt, and people are referring to them as "emotional support chickens" and "emergency chickens" as a tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. Note how the chickens are given names like "Hennifer Lopez" and "Lindsey LoHEN." You even say that it reads like a joking exaggeration, but apparently your confirmation bias is strong enough to override that observation?
There's lots of research showing stuffed animals can reduce stress even in adults. There is no joke here.
You're weirdly concerned about how much I'm reacting, which is pretty minimally. Like, I can't imagine how I could have raised this while reacting any less. But yes, I also saw your other post and got your message that you're bothered I brought this up at all. [EDIT] Ah, ninja-edited this paragraph into irrelevance! :-)
Maybe you need a chicken. [EDIT] But perhaps we all need chickens?
But thank you for helping me understand this. The framing is 100% serious, I guess.
I would say that it is 99% joke, but the 1% is important in validating, justifying, and elevating the concept in the current culture.
I would say the topic framed in terms of mental health. For one, the chicken itself is called an "emotional support chicken" - this itself is indicative of cultural currency. The idea and purpose of a knit chicken can be framed in many ways. It can be simply fun, creative, or artistic. In this case the purpose is psychologically palliative opposed to recreational. It is medicalized. You see this elsewhere. A day off work to rest, relax, and enjoy isn't just vacation (which also implies these concepts), but a mental health day.
One of the leading stories in the article is about delivering them to survivors of Hurricane Helene - an interesting linguistic choice in its own right (Helene impacted roughly 2 million people, killing about 200. It had a 99.995% survival rate).
I suspect most people make these chickens simply for fun and decoration.
Your comment is seething with confirmation bias. You're seeing things only because you're looking for them.
You conflate "health" with the word "palliative," when the latter specifically refers specifically to serious health problems. I go to the gym for my physical health and my mental health, but that doesn't imply that skipping one gym session would lead to a serious physical or mental health problem. Same goes for "mental health days." There's nothing sensational about referring to one's health.
And yes, we always refer to people who survive natural disasters as "survivors." Google "survivors of hurricane helene" and you'll find countless articles with headlines like "Survivors Describe Their Frightening Experiences," "4 Ways to Help Hurricane Helene Survivors," "Federal Assistance for Hurricane Helene Survivors Surpasses $137 Million," etc.
You claimed that it's an "interesting linguistic choice" in the context of an alleged "cultural currency" which overly frames topics in terms of mental health, describes the purpose of comforting toys as "psychologically palliative" and "medicalized." You claimed that this phenomenon is everywhere, then gave two more alleged examples: the term "mental health day" and the term "survivor."
I disagree with all of it. Using the term "survivor" in its most basic and widespread sense is not at all interesting in the context of your false argument about "cultural currency."
You've hit the nail on the head, and it points to what's actually driving it.
> It is medicalized... A day off work to rest, relax, and enjoy isn't just vacation (which also implies these concepts), but a mental health day.
The destruction of individual agency, in favor of top-down systems of control. The culture is a self-reinforcing thing, but what's pushing the culture is individuals having to express their own needs in terms of what the system will allow them. The "day off" isn't allowed - paid ones are not required to be provided by law, and the wealth-centralizing economic treadmill has made it so most people do not have the finances to lose a day of pay.
Similarly with emotional support animals. Airlines have policies that certain types of pets need to travel in the cold cargo hold, getting left waiting on a hot tarmac, with horror stories abounding. Landlords outright prohibit pets or put you over the barrel for "pet rent" (it's not like paying pet rent gets you extra space or amenities, or makes it so that chewing on the woodwork then becomes "normal wear and tear".
So enter people skirting their systems by any means possible, in this case the federal laws that created the legal concept of emotional support animals. And then comes the crab bucket mentality of rolling our eyes at people who we deem to be inappropriately using the escape hatch.
To avoid the euphemism/abstraction treadmill, we would need to be having these conversations maturely. But politics always seems to just end up going sideways (/me loosely gestures at the current ongoing destructionist catastrophe)
My thoughts went down a similar track as well. It is about justification. As collectivist attitudes increase socially, individuals feel the need to frame or justify and defend their individual actions and desires. Its not just that I want a vacation day and have leverage to take it (socially unacceptable), but I need it - it is necessary maintenance, but ultimately for the greater good. Like you said, it is a play on values that are socially acceptable to express to get what people want anyways.
As a result a recreational hobby gets dressed up as self care or pro-social action. There can be an element of truth to this of course, but I do think it introduces a lot of exaggeration and conflation.
Putting my biases on the table, the whole thing strikes me as childish and dishonest. Kind of of like a kid rationalizing to a parent how they will use some new toy to get their homework done faster.
I suspect they are all in support of the soon to be 28th amendment "The right to bear, breed, harvest, and sell chickens shall not be infringed."
You are overreacting. There's nothing about mental health in there. They are called Emotional Support Chicken because they are comforting. Calm down.
They could knit some eggs, and watch them hatch and grow up to be knitted chickens.
They could knit some pink flamingos.
I feel this may be an appropriate place to link this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkDJueqppHo
I've gotten into knitting over the past couple of years. (By the way, if you are a software type, I would highly recommend knitting. It's an excellent hobby. I can explain more why if people are interested.)
I'm well aware of the Emotional Support Chicken, though I haven't made one myself.
I think what we're witnessing here is simply another example of power laws[1] in effect. Say you have a set of objects that vary in desirability. Then you have a forum where people can talk about which objects they like. People will end up talking about the objects they like more, which will make them more visible to other people, who then end up also talking about them more. Meanwhile, slightly less desirable objects get talked about slightly less, which means fewer people discover them and talk about them.
Turn the crank on that iterative process many times and what was originally a linear distribution in object popularity will quickly become a huge spike on the few things at the top with a long tail of forgotten stuff.
In this case, Ravely is the center of the knitting world and has incredible impact on the fiber arts community. I'd guess that it's literally where most knitters across the world go to find patterns.
Emotional Support Chicken is currently the 3rd most popular knitting pattern on the site. It got there, I think by being cute and hitting the mental health zeitgeist at just the right time during COVID and then having the power law math work its magic.
Another pattern that hit the zeitgeist at just the right time and rocketed to popularity is the Non Cooperation Brick, released just after Trump was inaugurated.
For those who are curious, the top pattern is YSolda Teague's Musselburge hat. It's extremely common but also sort of generic looking so you probably don't realize how often people make and wear it. It's a good, simple start project, and Teague is a knitting celebrity.
Number two is PetiteKnit's Sophie scarf which is, honestly, not a very good article of clothing, but it is a very good tutorial project on how to knit. I suspect there are thousands of unworn Sophie scarves sitting in closets, having already completed their purpose of turning its owner into a knitter.
If one were to want to absorb knitting culture and be able to come across as "in the know" as quickly as possible, skimming the top patterns page on Ravelry is an excellent shortcut to get there.
"Everybody"? Knitting chickens?
I'm sorry, this is just kooky. I find it _really_ hard to believe that any significant portion of the US population is... knitting chickens?
I don't have anything against people's hobbies, whatever they are. And this being a physical 3D space thing, instead of "I wrote an app that let's you pretend you're knitting chickens", means I like it even more.
But no where near "everybody" is knitting chickens.
This is just wrong, and a highlight of the way articles reach traction on HN.
In this, I also find it hard to believe that the submitter's 80,000 karma points had nothing to do with that.
I have very low karma, and the few times I've submitted articles (each of which I felt were very in line with interest on HN) I've never seen one reach the hntop list.
Maybe I was triggered by this because of my dislike for headlines that assume group membership with assertions like "we" and "our", and... "everybody".
But come on.
My grandmother loved "tatting" doilies, Maybe my next submission will be on that, instead of the tech news that I thought for sure would gain some readership...
Actually there is a reason everybody is knitting chickens, but the FDA has asked the court for a 75 year slow FOIA records release.
Leave it to hacker news to figure out why knitting chickens is actually a sign of cultural collapse.
This predates online communities.
My grandmother bought a bunch of knitted chickens in the 60’s-80’s, as did a family dinner I used to go to etc. It’s a relatively simple shape to get right, there’s many options, and they end up looking fairly cute.
Trends have been happening since long before social media. I don't see the problem with "everybody" getting involved in knitting and making chickens anyway, what's the harm here?
I think the "homogenization" is the keyword here. It's not that trends are bad, it's just that, in the 'old days' a trend might start as a community-wide phenomena that over time might spread into neighboring communities, finally becoming part of the local / regional zeitgeist.
These trends would spread slowly enough that other trends in other communities would have time and room to grow and develop. The result is you get a bunch of localized cultures, all unique in some way.
The best analogy I can think of is a plant mono-crop. Instead of different species of plant gradually finding their niche, we plant 50,000 acres with corn or soy.
I have to say, even over the last 20+ years or so, it really does feel like you can go anywhere in the world and get a very similar experience. You can go to the local 7-11, buy a coca-cola, hit up your local costco, listen to people arguing about American politics. It just feels like different countries have gradually been losing their unique culture, and we just have this global homogenized version with slight regional differences.
People have been saying the exact opposite- that we used to all have the same 20 TV shows but now with internet microgenres we don't have enough shared culture anymore.
If you think of the ravelry community as valid as an in person community this will be nicer I think.
Independent thought still exists and is expressed but the network effects of influencers and copycats outranks independent thought on a platform like tiktok that group ideas and people together. Independent thought only has a place under an existing topic or brand.
The harm is homogenization of culture stymies concurrent evolution of new ideas. Whether that’s more important than the sheer speed of good ideas traveling the world is an open question.
But there’s definitely less creative work produced without the direct or indirect influence of outside forces. As an artist you simply can’t unsee things. So we may end up at some local maxima of creativity.
[dead]
Social media is just accelerating trend adoption, peaking, and obsolescence to the point that it can sometimes happen in days, or even shorter.
"Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification." - William Gibson, Neuromancer
He continues to be the most prophetic science fiction writer, nailing the zeitgeist of the early 21st century in the 1980s.
think you're reading a bit too much into this one
Its fun to do things your friends are doing, even e-friends. It gives you something to talk about. Not every trend needs to last forever.
I'm a pretty cynical guy, especially with regards to social media, but this seems like totally harmless fun.