Jul 01, 2025
Comfort Culture is all about finding softness in a world that feels increasingly sharp-edged and uncertain. With polycrisis intensifying, we're seeing a widespread turn towards sensory refuge and emotional buffering: soft aesthetics, cosy storytelling, and mood-soothing content are wildly popular. Crucially, we’re seeing that it’s not just about retreat, but about creating spaces that feel safe to rest, reflect, and reset in. Comfort is care, a form of quiet resilience that helps people face reality with a little more gentleness.
Where It’s Going: Comfort Culture is extending beyond what we watch or how we unwind, it’s becoming something we buy. From collectible figurines like Labubu to scented candles and cosy-core merch, people are turning to small, sensory purchases as acts of everyday emotional care. This is comfort as a retail category.
In early 2025, Grow A Garden, a gentle, plant-based simulation game on Roblox, broke global records with over 16 million concurrent players, surpassing even Fortnite’s peak. Created by Splitting Point Studios, the game invites users to cultivate a patch of land at their own pace: planting seeds, harvesting produce, and tending to their virtual garden, even while offline. With its soft soundtrack and low-stakes mechanics, the experience is intentionally slow. There are no bosses to defeat or territories to conquer, just the quiet thrill of watching something grow. Millions are embracing its patience, simplicity, and ambient charm as a welcome escape from overstimulation.
So What: Grow A Garden is comfort in pixelated form. Rest and repetition can be powerful emotional tools, especially in a time where audiences crave gentle, soft spaces to retreat into. The game is an invitation to breathe, tend, and (literally) take root.
Richard Osman’s ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ is a cornerstone of the cosy crime genre – and it’s getting a film adaptation this year.
Amazon’s current #8 most sold book of 2025 is a cosy colouring book, called ‘Girl Moments: Cute and Cosy Coloring Book’. The rest of the top charts are peppered with similar offerings.
The Korean Soul App has curated over 20 poetry installations across a park designed to offer quiet moments of reflection in urban environments.