During the discussion on the most recent episode of The Editors podcast about how smartphones and social media are hurting kids today, I mentioned my gratitude for my own childhood. Though (relatively) young, I am just old enough to have grown up before the modern trappings of digital life had assumed their current forms and omnipresence. I have many great memories of life without phone or internet, of wandering around the neighborhood and playing in the creek with my buds.
The New York Times recently reminded me of a related part of my childhood that I had, if not forgotten, then at least not dwelt upon extensively of late: sticks. The Times profiles Boone Hogg and Logan Jugler, the geniuses behind “Official Stick Reviews” on Instagram, which they created to assess the quality of arboreal ephemera. “From their free-associative silliness” on a trip to Utah’s Arches National Park “came the notion of reviewing a stick as you might a sculpture or valuable antique.” Now the account is a brand, with merchandise and thousands of followers.
Their idea was both brilliant and wistfully familiar. Anyone with some woods-romping in his childhood can recall the hunt for a good stick, and the pleasure of finding a particularly satisfactory one. I myself can recall a few treasures. One, like a find the Times covers, resembled a handgun. Another held almost the exact shape of a small sword, similar to Sting. And perhaps my greatest find seemed an exact replica of a wizard’s staff. I was fortunate to have read and watched The Lord of the Rings at a young enough age for the comparisons to suggest themselves readily (as was the case for one of the sticks the Times mentions).
Unlike those Tolkien artifacts, the staves and rods of my childhood and of Official Stick Reviews likely lack actual magic powers. But they convey a different kind of wonder. It is likely no coincidence that Hogg and Jugler are both the same age as me (30). They both probably realize they are trying to recapture some element of childhood affection for the physical world, and the imaginative power that goes with it:
What started as a wilderness jest has by now morphed into something slightly less tongue-in-cheek. The act of finding, handling and appreciating a good stick seems to speak to one’s inner 5-year-old.
“Sometimes it’s a bit, with people leaning into the internet-ness of it,” Mr. Hogg said. “But a lot of time it’s a sincere thing that people are connecting with. They’re appreciating something as basic as a stick.”
There are many negative senses in which young people today are refusing to progress beyond childhood. But this doesn’t seem like one of them. There are, likewise, many ways in which social media are making life worse, but this account doesn’t seem like one, either.
The stick reviewers have come to a new appreciation for a blessedly tactile aspect of their youths. It serves as a reminder of the kind of childhood we should restore to those growing up today. And it returns even digital-saturated adults into a world of physical pleasure away from their screens. Best of luck to them all as they continue their search for a good stick. Maybe the rest of us should join them.