Everyone knows how much gasoline prices matter. The recent spike in gas prices triggered by the war with Iran has fueled deep pessimism about the economy and weighed heavily on President Donald Trump’s approval ratings.

But diesel fuel — the lifeblood of shipping, agriculture, and heavy industry — usually flies under the radar. Its price has surged too, and while truckers and farmers are feeling the initial blow, the rest of the country won’t be far behind.

“Most products in America are shipped along the road via trucks,” Nathan Bomey, a business reporter at Axios, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. Diesel prices “directly affect their cost of doing business, which then eventually trickles down and affects the consumer.”

On the podcast, Bomey discusses what’s driving the price spike, how quickly it’s going to become a problem for everyday consumers, and whether electric semi trucks could offer a way out.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What is happening with diesel?

There was one major geopolitical event this year that disrupted the entire energy economy, which is the US and Israel attacking Iran. Iran is at the center of the oil economy in some ways, but primarily you have to look at the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the jockeying over it that has happened in the months since.

Once they closed the strait, it disrupted the entire global energy economy because it handles a substantial portion of the shipping bringing supplies out of the Middle East. That affected diesel prices, gasoline prices, jet fuel prices, and effectively everything based on crude oil.

Who are the people right now that are profoundly freaked out about the cost of diesel?

First off, truckers are freaked out because their cost of doing business is going much higher. Farmers are also freaked out because they’re already facing real pressures from trade wars and things that are out of control, like climate issues, that have caused their costs to go higher. 

The price of diesel affecting farmers eventually affects the price they charge, which ultimately gets to the consumer because it ends up costing more to pay for things like an ear of corn.

How stark do you think this might be? In a month or two, do you think I could go down to Walmart and see that something I buy all the time is now a dollar more expensive? 

I think the impact is imminent. This flows through very quickly. We’re not talking about months; we’re talking about weeks, if not days, before people will start to notice increases, especially in the grocery aisle. That’s the first place people will notice it because fresh food has to be shipped on a weekly basis. Diesel prices are going to have a big effect on food inflation. This is coming off of several years of food price increases that we experienced in the wake of the pandemic.

We’re also barreling toward the holiday shopping season, which is going to be affected by this as well. If a toy, for example, is made with a resin affected by the cost of crude oil, which also affects the cost of diesel, and then it’s shipped over the road to Walmart in a truck that uses diesel, all of these things add up and will probably lead to higher prices.

We’ve also got an issue with heating oil, which is a fuel used primarily by households in the Northeast to heat their homes. Heating oil, diesel, and all of these oil-based products are caught up in this vortex right now. Ultimately, it is not something the ordinary person can do much about.

Do the industries that rely on diesel have any other options?

There are definitely alternatives to diesel, but in many cases, they cannot be switched to quickly. If you think about the trucking industry, they are invested heavily in big rigs that take products from place A to place B. If you are invested in a truck, yes, you could theoretically switch, but you would be scrapping this huge investment you’ve made. Diesel trucks are not really going anywhere immediately. A lot of times, they’re simply still the best way to get somewhere.

You can switch to rail; railroads are definitely a competitor to trucking, but really only best for certain types of products. There are other types of trucks you can buy. Compressed natural gas or liquid natural gas is an alternative fuel for some trucks, and biodiesel can actually be good. Hydrogen is more of a futuristic thing down the road.

In the short term, there is the possibility of using electric trucks. That is starting to become more realistic. In fact, in recent days, Tesla began major production of the Tesla Semi, an electric semitruck we’ve been waiting for for years. I remember covering this in 2018 when Tesla debuted the semi, and we all thought it was going to be coming out soon.

It has taken nearly a decade for this to finally become a reality in large proportions, but the Tesla Semi is an electric truck that could be an alternative for some. There are other companies making electric trucks too, so that could be viable. But the problem with electric trucks is that the battery is so heavy, making it tough to compete with diesel on shipping heavy items.

It was often joked that when the Tesla Semi first debuted, the very first thing it shipped was a bunch of bags of Cheetos because they were so light and the truck couldn’t handle extra weight. They had a deal with PepsiCo, and it wasn’t ready at the time to ship anything heavy. 

It’s a lot better now, but the issue is still how heavy electric truck batteries are, which will make them somewhat limited in capacity. However, we are seeing some demand for the Tesla Semi that indicates it might become more competitive because of the price of diesel.

So when prices are high, generally somebody somewhere is benefiting. Who is it, in this case?

The people benefiting from diesel prices being so high are the refineries, which a lot of people don’t think about much because they’re the middle person in this entire process. They take the crude oil and turn it into usable diesel for a pickup truck, a semi truck, or farming equipment. 

The refinery business is experiencing high demand right now, and there’s limited capacity to do this because of issues in Russia, Iran, and other places throughout the world. There’s really nowhere else to do this, and therefore they can charge higher prices. That means higher profits for the refineries.

All of this is shaping up to potentially mean a really ugly winter. One thing I think about a lot is that American consumers will accept a lot of pain. We had Covid — the inflation, and shortages of literally everything. Then we had the war in Ukraine, and prices went up again. 

People still keep spending money, even as we predict this one’s going to get bad. People go to the store and spend money, and maybe they gripe, but it’s not like we’re out in the streets. Do you think this coming diesel shock — imminent, in your words — is going to be different?

I’m not an economist, but there is an interesting phenomenon emerging in the economy where consumer sentiment is at rock bottom, but consumer spending is actually really strong. There’s a gap emerging between what people say they feel and what they’re actually doing — in this case, they’re still spending. 

Maybe it’s YOLO spending. They’re thinking they don’t have much going for them, so they’re just going to keep spending. I’ve experienced that a little bit, so I don’t blame anybody.

At the end of the day, the numbers matter a little bit more than what people say they feel. But I do think people are going to hit a breaking point because they simply cannot continue this level of spending if the underlying fundamentals of the economy start to collapse.

Nearly a third of Anthropic's IPO prospectus spotlighted AI 'risk factors.' Less than 50 pages were dedicated to business metrics, while 80 of 261 pages were about potential risks of AI.

The Soviet Union famously churned out tens of thousands of new apartment buildings in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s — some assembled in as little as 12 days — together comprising tens of millions of individual apartments. Such speed is not unique to communist command economies, or even to grim concrete mega-blocks. In Sweden and Japan today, modern, high-quality new homes can be factory-built and assembled in a matter of weeks using the same basic method — prefabrication — as the Soviets.

The US, alas, evinces no such urgency to build housing. 

In some of our highest-cost cities — San Francisco, New York, Miami — it takes, somewhat astonishingly, nearly five years to erect a modestly sized apartment building, from the time an application is first submitted to building completion. That was one of the top-line findings of a remarkable new economics working paper on housing construction timelines across 60 US cities. The gaps between the fastest and slowest cities were just as striking: In Raleigh, North Carolina, a builder can complete a 20-unit apartment building in about as much time as it takes just to approve the permit for one in San Francisco, where applications languish for more than a year. In Indianapolis, a single-family home can be built in six months from proposal to completion, less than one-eighth the time it takes in San Francisco.

Such delays have costs — in delayed housing supply at a time when America is millions of homes in the hole, in lost staff time that developers ultimately bake into the cost of the new homes, and in homes that simply never get built because the process is discouraging to anyone but the best-resourced developers. The authors, Leonardo D’Amico, Evan Soltas, and Audrey Wang, found that longer permitting lengths are correlated with higher housing prices and lower rates of housing production, though they don’t claim to have shown that these are causal relationships. The research (which has not yet been through peer review and, like any working paper, may be revised before final publication) represents the first such comprehensive dataset comparing homebuilding timelines across the US. To build it, the researchers assembled 1.1 million permits covering 2.7 million housing units between 2000 and 2025 — about one in 13 new homes permitted nationally over that period, they write. 

It probably won’t come as a shock to you that housing can be built faster in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, than in Los Angeles or pretty much anywhere in California. But perhaps the most notable takeaway (to me, anyway) from the paper was how massively home permitting times have lengthened across the board over the past 25 years. Across the cities in their sample, the researchers estimate that permitting time for a standardized multifamily building rose from 0.6 years in 2000 to 1.5 years in 2023, and, for a single-family home, from 1.6 months in 2000 to 4.9 months in 2023. 

Is there really any good reason why we should take nearly a year longer to approve an apartment building than, Soltas joked in a recent interview, “the barbarians of 2006”? Shouldn’t we be getting faster and more efficient at building housing over time, not slower — especially at a time of acute housing scarcity? 

You would think. So what is going on here?

One building, very different wait times

Permitting refers to everything that happens after a developer submits an application to build a house or multifamily building, before they’re allowed to break ground. The proposal is then reviewed for compliance with a range of different sets of rules, from building safety and energy codes to plumbing to zoning and, in some places, aesthetic design. Initial applications will often be found noncompliant and then sent back to the builder for revisions, Soltas, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton, told me.  

The gulf between housing starts in California and Texas has become something of a meme in housing abundance circles. But, for all that, we have until now lacked rigorous apples-to-apples comparisons of permitting and building times in different metro areas, Soltas said. That gap in seemingly basic knowledge, what should be “step zero” facts for the national housing reform debate, became apparent to him when he was teaching an urban economics class, which became one of the impetuses for the new paper. “I realized if I needed that information to teach my students, that it might be useful for other people,” he said. 

Rather than merely pulling permits from different cities and comparing how long whatever happened to be built in each city took to approve, the researchers used the data to estimate how long an identical, standardized project would take in each place between 2015 and 2019, keeping constant its size and the density of the surrounding neighborhood. Their uniform archetypes were a 2,800-square-foot detached single-family home on a 0.15-acre lot and a 20-unit multifamily building with 1,200 square feet per apartment.

Cities with longer permitting times also tended to have longer construction periods — the longer it takes to get an application approved, the longer it then takes to do the building itself, which compounds the gap between the fastest- and slowest-building cities (it’s possible that “cities that make the permitting process difficult also put in lots of burdens that slow the construction process,” Soltas said). One advantage of the researchers’ method is that the differences across cities can’t merely be chalked up to something like the complexity of building within already-dense environments like Manhattan — the analysis already controls for that. So the enormous gaps between different places become harder to dismiss as inevitable features of development in big cities.

The study wasn’t designed to answer the “why” of it all — those will be questions for future research. “Our paper doesn’t directly identify any smoking guns,” Soltas said. Still, some of the culprits are likely obvious — California, for example, has long subjected some housing projects to extensive environmental review requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Apartment buildings, especially larger ones, are more likely to have to go through CEQA review, though they’re more environmentally friendly than single-family homes (recognizing this as an obstacle to housing affordability, California has been moving to exempt many housing projects from such reviews). 

Why are we taking so much longer to permit housing?

But why, as the study finds, is permitting becoming slower across the country, not just in the most regulated cities? “We estimate that, in 2000, our standardized multi-family project had a 71-percent probability of approval within six months of applying for a permit,” the researchers write. “In 2025, that project had a 44-percent approval probability within six months.” Permitting times have come down a bit since 2023, but it’s unclear whether that just represents the reversal of pandemic-era highs, or if it reflects real progress from the pro-housing policies that have been passed in many cities and states in recent years. 

That discovery dovetails with other economics research finding that zoning codes, which were first widely adopted in the US in the early-to-mid 20th century, have continued to become more restrictive even in recent years, making it harder to build housing. 

Without knowing why exactly permitting lengths have ballooned, it’s hard to say whether those increases have occurred for good reasons. At least some of it may have to do with the aforementioned intensification of zoning and other land-use restrictions, which, I can say from having written a lot about zoning, tend to be pretty ill-conceived and hard to justify. 

The slowdown may also be connected to expanding building code requirements. I’ve written at length about that issue, too; although ever-more stringent rules might seem like a great idea — who could be opposed to more safety? — they tend to be biased against multi-family housing and likely inflate the cost of building, all without having to show that the benefits are worth the costs. Particularly the cost in housing supply that never gets built, which has the effect of keeping more Americans living in older housing stock. And do we really think a home built to 2005 standards is dangerously subpar today?  

We might ultimately decide that many of today’s building requirements — particularly ones like stronger energy efficiency standards — are worth it, but first we’d need to determine what their full costs are, which we remain far from doing. 

At a minimum, it seems unlikely that an apartment building that’s okay to build in Grand Rapids today would be unsafe for New York. So what, exactly, is all that extra permitting time buying the city? Now, at least, Mayor Zohran Mamdani can put an exact number on the delay. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson plans to visit California on Wednesday to stump and fundraise for Republican candidates in a state that could determine control of the U.S. House of Representatives during President Trump's final two years in office.

On most fronts, President Donald Trump has shown little concern for reducing Americans’ cost of living ahead of November’s midterms. 

Trump has refused to accept Iran’s ceasefire proposals, even as the conflict pushes fuel costs to new heights. And he’s declined to abandon his trade wars — with US adversaries and allies alike — even as tariffs nudge up Americans’ expenses. 

Yet there is one area where Trump has recently tried to lower consumer prices in an economically coherent way, and it’s been a political disaster.

In late August, the president lowered tariffs on up to 661 million pounds of imported lean beef trimmings, a key ingredient in hamburger meat.

This policy directly addressed a genuine problem facing US consumers: Ground beef prices were roughly 8 percent higher last month than they had been one year earlier. And unlike many of the White House’s other ideas for increasing affordability, the meat imports proposal comported with conventional economic logic: If you reduce input costs for meat processors, they’ll be able to sell beef at lower prices. 

By endorsing this reasoning, the Trump administration was implicitly rebuking its own theory of trade economics (which holds that tariffs increase costs for foreign companies, not American consumers). In doing so, Trump also put voters’ material interests — and economists’ conventional wisdom — above his ideological hangups.

And he’s paying dearly for it. 

Instead of appeasing cash-strapped shoppers, the beef imports policy has mostly just aggravated (already aggrieved) agricultural firms. All across the farm belt, cattle ranchers are incensed by Trump aiding their foreign competition — after the president had already depressed their sales through tariffs and increased their costs via his Iran war and immigration policies. 

Cowpokes aren’t alone in resenting the White House’s affronts to agricultural interests. In dark red states like Kansas and Iowa, Democratic candidates have become highly competitive, while Republicans are racing to distance themselves from the president, in part by going after his beef plan directly.

Which raises the question: How and why did Trump’s plan for cheaper hamburgers go so wrong?

The answer partly concerns that measure’s particular flaws. But it also reflects broader problems with the administration’s governance, which now threaten to cost Republicans badly: A persistent failure to account for its policies’ economic consequences, a reliance on symbolic, last-minute fixes instead of far-sighted planning, and inattention to the material concerns of voters — even those as deeply conservative as cattle ranchers.

Trump’s cheap beef policy is small potatoes

As a political matter, the fundamental flaw with Trump’s beef import policy is simple: Its benefits to individual consumers are minuscule while its costs to certain cattle ranchers are substantial.

Trump’s tariff exemption has a tiny impact on consumer prices for two reasons. First, it just doesn’t affect that much meat. Although 661 million pounds may sound like a lot, that adds up to only about 6.8 percent of America’s annual ground beef supply. And most of these imports go to restaurants and fast-food joints, since grocers tend to prefer fresh, domestic ground beef. 

Second, only a small fraction of beef importers’ savings is likely to pass through to consumers. When a meat processor sees the costs of imported beef fall, it will generally try to pocket as much of its savings as it can, perhaps passing a small chunk along to the distributors it contracts with.

The distributors will then try to retain as much of that small chunk as they can before passing a slimmer fraction of the initial savings along to retailers or restaurants, who will then try to do much the same before selling to customers. In this way, past USDA research has suggested that only about 19 percent of any decline in wholesale beef prices reaches consumers.

Combine this reality with the narrow scale of Trump’s tariff relief, and the consumer benefit becomes microscopic. According to the Purdue University economists Ken Foster and Bernhard Dalheimer, Trump’s policy will reduce wholesale ground beef prices by at most 1.41 percent. If only 19 percent of that decline passes through to consumers, as the USDA’s research suggests, then shoppers will pay just 0.27 percent less for ground beef. In other words, in the best-case scenario, Trump’s policy would knock about two cents off the price of a pound of hamburger meat. 

For context, that price has risen by $1.32 cents — or 23 percent — since Trump took office.

Why cattle country is beefing with the White House

Looking at these numbers, one might ask: So what are these ranchers complaining about? If Trump’s policy only lets in enough cheap foreign beef to cut prices by a couple cents, how much could it really hurt domestic cattle producers?

It is true that the president’s tariff relief has not condemned cattle ranchers to penury. But it does hurt farmers more than it helps individual consumers for two reasons.

First, the impact is highly concentrated on certain cattle operations. The new imports soften demand for domestic cull cows — breeding females who’ve gotten old enough to be worth more dead than alive — because their meat tends to be low-fat. No ranch specializes in producing such cattle. But ranchers who happen to have older herds at the moment are more reliant on cull cow sales. 

Second, from the perspective of all ranchers, Trump’s policy sets a disconcerting precedent. To build a herd, ranchers must hold back young female cows today — passing up immediate earnings from selling their meat — so as to breed more future cattle, which won’t come to market for years. 

In effect, this means that ranchers must perennially sink money into bets on the trajectory of future beef prices. If there happens to be a hamburger glut when today’s calves become ripe for slaughter, then their investments could produce a shabby return. But this downside risk is typically offset by the potential for outsize gains: If beef prices soar three years from now, ranchers who rebuild their herds today will reap large profits.

Yet Trump policy threatens this upside: If the government makes a habit of letting in cheap foreign beef every time hamburger prices spike, then it will effectively lower the ceiling on domestic ranchers’ future profits. 

As Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, and dozens of other farm-state members of Congress put the point in a letter to Trump, “Cattle markets are cyclical, and ranchers use the upswings to prepare for the inevitable downturn.” The lawmakers therefore urge Trump to abandon any “intervention in the natural system” that might depress those upswings, so as not to “undermine the long-term viability of family-owned cattle operations throughout the supply chain.”

Trump’s unintentional war on agriculture

For these reasons, Trump’s beef tariff exemption was inevitably going to attract more complaints from ranchers than applause for consumers. What’s made it especially politically toxic, however, is the broader policy context it emerged from. 

Simply put, when your foreign policy costs the average US household more than $500 in excess gasoline expenses — while your tariffs cost them $1,100 in elevated consumer prices — they’re probably not going to thank you for making a pound of ground beef two cents cheaper.

Meanwhile, ranchers may have been a bit less apoplectic about heightened foreign competition if Trump hadn’t already been squeezing them with his broader agenda.

Thanks largely to the president’s trade war with China, American beef exports fell 12 percent in 2025, as Beijing erected retaliatory barriers to US meat. This year, Trump’s trade war with Canada has further cut American farmers’ sales.

And while their foreign markets have been shrinking, US agricultural firms’ expenses have been skyrocketing due to the Iran War.

Farmers in general — and ranchers in particular — rely heavily on diesel fuel to power tractors, trucks, trailers, and myriad other agricultural machines. Thus, as the Iran War has throttled the global energy supply and triggered a record-breaking surge in diesel prices, US farmers have been hammered. 

In July 2026, American farms were paying 22 percent more for fuel than when Trump took office. Over the same period, fertilizer costs have risen by 8 percent, due to the Iran War’s impact on natural gas prices. 

If this weren’t enough cause for farmbelt consternation, Trump’s immigration enforcement surge has provided an additional source of pain. Ranchers, like other farmers, rely heavily on the labor of immigrants, some of whom are undocumented. For this reason, US agricultural businesses have been wary of Trump’s approach to interior enforcement, despite their deeply conservative bent. 

Bizarrely, even as the administration has tried to placate rancher anger in recent weeks, it also launched a series of ICE raids targeted at beef-producing areas. These actions have triggered “work force disruptions” at feed yards and dairies — as immigrant workers were intimidated into staying home — according to a joint statement from the Cattlemen Associations for Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The groups allege that thousands of cattle shipments have been delayed as a result, saddling producers with millions in lost revenue and unexpected costs.

Ironically, by engineering these ICE-induced disruptions, the White House also plausibly raised beef prices for consumers, undermining its own politically costly push for hamburger affordability.

Republicans are losing ground in the countryside

The political fallout from Trump’s beef policies — and broader affronts to agricultural interests — has been profound. 

Trump won Kansas in 2024 by more than 16 points. Yet Democratic minister Adam Hamilton is polling just 1.5 points behind sitting Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average. 

By itself, this could be chalked up to some peculiar, race-specific factor. But in Iowa, a farm belt state that went for Trump by 13 points in 2024, Democrats are also mounting improbably competitive campaigns. Democratic state representative Josh Turek leads Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson (who is publicly concerned about the beef issue) by half a point in polls of Iowa’s Senate race, while Democratic state lawmaker Lindsay James narrowly leads the House race in Iowa’s Second District, which Trump won by 10 points in 2024.

Meanwhile, in heavily agricultural Nebraska — where Trump beat Kamala Harris by more than 20 points — Democrat-aligned independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn is attacking Trump’s beef imports policy and running neck-and-neck with incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts. And in the Cornhusker State’s First District, which backed Trump by 13 points two years ago, Democrat Chris Backenmeyer is polling about two points behind the Republican incumbent Mike Flood.

Critically, Democrats’ gains in these jurisdictions don’t merely reflect the nationwide backlash against Trump and his party. The Democratic Party margin over Republicans in the national generic ballot is now about 9 points — a 10.5-point improvement over Harris’s showing in 2024. In the Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska Senate races, Democrats are outperforming Harris’s showing by 13 points or more. 

Now, it’s conceivable that Democrats’ apparent strength in the farm belt could reflect some kind of systematic polling error. For example, if pollsters were undersampling less-educated rural white voters, then that might inflate Democratic candidates’ numbers more in agricultural states than in the country as a whole. 

But Republicans in the farm belt seem to think the rural backlash is real — and driven, at least partly, by Trump’s unintentional assaults on the agricultural sector.

A little bit of free trade goes a short way

Ultimately, the lesson of Trump’s ground beef fiasco isn’t that the president should have just ignored voters’ demands for cheaper meat — or economists’ warnings about tariffs’ negative impacts on affordability.

Had Trump prioritized low prices — and heeded basic economics — from day one, ranchers might still have ended up bitter about facing heightened foreign competition. But in a world without Trump’s trade conflicts or Iran War, such cattle producers would enjoy lower costs and larger foreign markets — and might therefore be more willing to take higher beef imports in stride. 

Meanwhile, if the prices of fuel and consumer goods were broadly lower, shoppers might be more appreciative of Trump’s economic governance. To be sure, even in that scenario, Americans probably wouldn’t notice the impact of loosening constraints on foreign lean beef trimmings. But if the administration were replicating such affordability measures across all policy fronts, the consequent savings could eventually add up to something large enough to attract voters’ notice and approval. 

In our world, however, Trump’s half-hearted embrace of ground-beef globalism was too little, too late. And in November, his party’s farm-belt candidates might pay the price.

Sifting through my pile, I feel the crisp edges of the glossy, technicolor marker that was previously nestled in the dirt of a bonnie green bell sweet pepper plant I bought from the farmers market this summer. I feel a pristine black-and-white receipt for one order of steamed dumplings and one dumpling soup; a thick bundle of political mailers; a Hadestown program that is gently shriveled from the torrential downpour on the night I saw it; a cellophane mailing envelope with Japanese postage. It’s garbage; it’s art supplies; it’s memories; and it’s all mine for the taking for use in my junk journal. 

A junk journal is a collaged scrapbook that you fill with literal scraps, the ephemera of your everyday life: business cards, ticket stubs, fliers, price tags, labels, product packaging, mail, printed photos (you remember those, right?), stickers…anything, really. The basic idea is that these items can be rescued from the garbage or recycling bin and turned into a physical, visual record of a given moment in time. That it’s made from trash is key; the abundant, inexpensive materials mean that junk journaling has a really low barrier to entry, which reduces the pressure and ultimately infuses it with a fun, feral energy that is perfect for 2026.   

So many slow-moving existential threats have accelerated and consolidated this year: climate change, inflation, war, surveillance, the erosion of free speech, oligarchs operating with impunity, the institutional collapse of both the humanities and science. At the same time, we live in an increasingly remote, digitized world, where we constantly have to question our reality thanks to AI, and where most everyone feels like their brain is a little broken. There are a lot of possible solutions to these interconnected crises, but experts agree that most involve being in the physical world. And your little pile of stuff is undeniably concrete. 

Girija Kaimal, a professor and the chair of the Creative Arts Therapies Department at Drexel University, said that junk journaling can help us feel hopeful — which is important when you’re mired in digital malaise and existential dread. “Everything is getting more expensive or more difficult, or AI is going to take away all your jobs, and oh, these are all the diseases coming at you. It can really give you a sense of helplessness,” Kaimal told me. But generative acts, where you make something out of nothing, can help you push through that despair and remind you of your own agency. 

“Even the smallest act of creating is sending a signal to your brain: Hey, I got this…” she said.

“I can bring a little beauty and meaning into this world,” Kaimal said. “I’m not this helpless pawn being tossed around by powerful forces. I mean, in a way I am, but I have something to give to this world.” 

As a longtime diarist, former scrapbooker, and big fan of this new iteration of it, I’m all in favor — and the experts I spoke to all agree that it’s a hobby that is really well suited to this particular moment. So if you need a creative outlet or just want something to do with your hands that’s not scrolling through AI slop, here’s why you should give junk journaling a try. 

The barrier to entry is incredibly low (and incredibly cheap)

Every form of entertainment, novelty, and inspiration right now is so, so expensive: concerts, live theater, movies, sports, travel, dinners out…the list goes on and on. Hobbies have gotten pricey too. Joann’s went under at the same time that tariffs started driving up the cost of yarn, art supplies, and so many other consumer goods. This is a real problem when it comes to both creative stimulation and human connection; a 2025 survey of 688 young people in Scotland found that cost was a significant barrier to engaging with a hobby for nearly half of respondents. That’s not good! 

But even folks who can afford to spend $300 on a beginner ceramics class might still prefer to have the option to do something creatively stimulating for free. That’s why a hobby that anyone can cobble together from the garbage pile is so thrilling. (And many of us are already hanging onto the basic materials for sentimental reasons, hoping to do…something…meaningful with it all…someday. Instead of letting it collect dust in a drawer for years, you can give it a more permanent home!) You don’t even need to buy a journal to get started; you can use whatever notebook you have lying around (including your current daily planner!), or tear half the pages out of an old book (to create more room for everything you’re going to put in it) and use that as your base. 

While some people’s junk journals include supplies they purchased specifically for it (i.e., the $30 “junk journaling kits” that craft retailers have started pushing), I strongly encourage you to resist the urge to shop, as I think this hobby works best when it’s done using stuff you already have or naturally acquire in your everyday life. Buying a bunch of preselected supplies adds pressure — because once you’ve invested money in something, there’s a desire to not just do it, but to do it right. It also turns the junk journal from a creation that’s really authentic and personal, akin to a diary, to something more curated and outward-facing; when you start with materials designed (often with faux-nostalgia undertones!) by someone else, you remove a fundamental bit of yourself from the process. It shifts from being personal, messy, and maybe even a little ugly, a place where you can make “mistakes” and change your mind, and becomes more about having a coherent aesthetic. That’s something to be very wary of in a moment in which every experience feels like fodder for social media. When you have an audience in mind, the blank page starts to feel like a subpoena instead of an invitation, leading to a paralysis that makes it harder to get started and more difficult to enjoy the process. 

So not only is junk journaling a hobby that can be affordable, I’d argue it’s one that should be. The less cash you spend on supplies and the more you rely on a pile of detritus, the better off you’ll be. Speaking of which… 

Junk journaling is a beautiful invitation to turn trash into art 

Back in July, the air in New York City was thick with haze due to wildfires in Canada; it was dangerous to be outside, but I didn’t really want to go out anyway, thanks to the concurrent heat emergency we were dealing with. Meanwhile, more than 2.3 million acres across the state of Oregon burned between mid-July and mid-August, which also happened to be the hottest month ever recorded in the United States. At the same time, Europe was boiling. Nearly 3,000 people died in England’s heat waves in May and June. 

While we need major systemic change to stop the progress of climate change, it’s hard to read all of this news and not feel a moral obligation to do something, or at least not directly contribute to the problem. Knowing that penguins are dying certainly makes me want to reduce my own consumption — and that includes trying to curb the amount of new hobby supplies I’m buying. Junk journaling dovetails perfectly with this. 

And just on a creative level, there’s real value in the whole “turning trash into treasure” thing. Having limited resources is a really helpful starting point for imaginative thinking. Looking at a pile of garbage and being able to see art (or even just something lightly coherent) is really energizing and exciting, especially when you’ve been feeling bored and a little stuck. I’ve found that looking for items for my junk journal has helped me notice color, shape, texture, and artistry more in my everyday life, which ultimately makes me feel more connected and creative. 

The trash element of junk journaling meets the demands of our current moment: “There’s a huge shift, and I kind of love it, towards being sustainable,” Kaimal said. “Everybody is talking about AI, this, that, but the new generation is really thinking about the environmental cost.” 

My friend Ryan Swedenborg recently got her MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art & Design, where she focused on sculpture. She wrote her thesis on assemblage (kind of a 3-D version of a junk journal), arguing that it’s not just an art form, but that it’s a way of navigating complex systems — “just trying to stay alive while living with others,” as she put it. She said that instead of trying to master something, assemblage is an iterative way of working with what is already around you — “I mean, that’s how you stay alive,” she said. 

Creative practices like assemblage and collage tend to flourish in times of instability, Ryan said; the irreverent and absurdist Dada movement was a direct response to World War I, machine culture, and mass media. The neo-Dada movement immediately followed World War II, and, like the earlier version, heavily featured collage. After 9/11, assemblage surged again, often as a direct response to the attacks. “I feel like, especially in New York…people [were] just literally taking these objects that live within the streets and building something new,” Ryan said. 

Consciously or not, people want to feel a sense of control when it feels like the world is falling apart, and junk journaling is a very literal way of picking up the pieces. 

Junk journaling is something creative to do with your hands

If you want to be on your phone less (and who among us doesn’t want that?), it’s important to find something else to fill your time. And a low-stakes project that’s both creative and tactile is a great alternative. (It’s also something that a lot of people are gathering to do together in person — Google your city plus “junk journaling events” to see what’s going on near you — which is a really fun bonus if you’re looking to get out and meet people.)

First, creativity is really, really good for your physical and mental health. According to a review of various scholarly studies of the topic published in the Journal of Creativity in 2024, art and other creative acts help with emotional regulation, reduce stress, and build self-esteem; they can also help you build community and cope with grief, chronic illness, pain, and loneliness. Journaling, too, is great for your mental health; a 2022 meta-analysis showed it helps with anxiety and PTSD, and another study found it “reduces intrusive and avoidant thoughts about negative events and improves working memory.”

The way you use your fingers to sort through, arrange, cut, layer, and paste the materials can also serve as a balm for your weary brain, said Mark Paterson, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies touch (and all five senses) in history and philosophy, as well as material culture and consumption. “We are manipulating machines. That is what we do. Everything from picking fruit, grabbing a branch of a tree and swinging in our early history, and so on. But also the feel of a typewriter, the tactile feel of a typewriter — all these things were part of the absolute background buzz of everyday life,” Paterson told me. “And it’s so strange in such a short time that it’s just become absent really, really quickly. And so things like scrapbooks, notebooks, that type of thing, are bringing us back to something which is a little bit more considered.” 

Since talking to Paterson — and after reading my colleague Sara Herschander’s deep dive on how humans are losing our sense of touch — I’ve been focused on finding ways to consciously engage with my sense of touch every single day. And in combining this with other creative acts, I’ve found a really satisfying alternative to scrolling that I genuinely look forward to every day. 

Kaimal, the creative arts therapies professor, said that having these tactile, creative experiences is good for our brains and our sense of self. “To me, doing things with your hands, using your hand-eye coordination, the sensory aspects…the choices you are making, all those reinforce a sense of confidence and a sense of valuing yourself like, ‘Hey, my vision really matters. I have something to say and do in this world that nobody else is saying or doing.’ And to me, having that space is a big part of creating a sort of mental respite.”

A junk journal is proof of something real

I’ve always been drawn to keeping diaries and scrapbooks, for reasons I can’t fully articulate. 

But this deep, often-inexplicable desire isn’t unique; it spans cultures and millennia. “I think there’s a very human, timeless urge to just be like, ‘I was here.’ You think of archeologists digging up graffiti in Pompeii or other locations around the world where someone just wants to say, ‘I am a person, I existed, I am in this context, and I’m going to anchor myself to the physical,’” Mallory Furnier, a special collections and archives librarian at California State University Northridge, told me. “I think there’s a need to feel remembered.” 

In more recent history, this desire took the form of things like commonplace books, yearbooks, and slam books. But in the past decade, we’ve taken this urge to social media, which feels the same, but just isn’t; Furnier said posting online is often more about status, about performance — I went to this event, I hung out with these friends. We all kind of agree that the things we see on social media aren’t real.

A junk journal, on the other hand, offers you literal, tangible proof that your experiences were real, along with an authenticity you simply don’t get when you’re posting for an audience. Technically, you could still lie or obfuscate reality in your junk journal, as 58-year-old Jane Hemmer did in The Onion’s “Local Woman’s Life Looks Bearable In Scrapbook,” but you probably won’t! So collecting and arranging your ephemera in this way serves as a nice antidote to the cozenage of both Instagram and AI slop, and the way that we now all have to constantly question our very reality. 

Paterson, the sociologist, told me that humans have long seen a connection between our sense of touch and the idea of deeper truth and understanding; he pointed to noli me tangere, which comes from a scene in the New Testament in which Christ’s followers reach out to try and touch his wounds following his resurrection to confirm that he’s real. Shuffling through your pile of ephemera isn’t quite the same as rooting around in your buddy’s stitches, but it’s an instinctive, almost unconscious way that we validate what’s true nonetheless. 

A junk journal is a way to make meaning out of your life, whether you use it to record things that are positive, negative, or neutral. “To track your life every day and to document it is to be more intentional about your personal narrative,” Furnier said. “Otherwise, you’re just going through life as a robot and not really making sense and making meaning and celebrating your little wins every day, processing what didn’t go well.” Furnier added that collaging takes this to an even deeper level because you’re deciding what to keep and how to position it. She told me that when scrapbooks are too old and fragile to handle, archivists sometimes have to disassemble them to preserve the individual elements, but they always take photos and scans before they do to keep a record of the original arrangement: “There is this meaning-making of juxtaposing different objects from different places together. There’s an authorship and a reimagining of these disparate, seemingly unconnected items that happen in a scrapbook when they’re brought together like that.”

My friend Ryan said that the ability to create a document that feels somewhat permanent in a moment of upheaval is a big part of what makes this such an appealing medium. “It is like an archival process,” she said. “You are putting a time and a place when you’re making these pieces, because you’re using objects that exist today. So it’s putting a timestamp on it. … Things that are seen as mundane in the moment really get to become part of the record. And I think that’s really exciting, especially as we look back at the lineage of assemblage and we can see how that played out.” 

While you might get into junk journaling with future history in mind, you could also come at it from the opposite perspective, and try it precisely because things feel so unstable. “Today, with so much uncertainty in the world, I’m not sure that people — young people especially — imagine a scenario in which their story and their labor survives intact, unsullied for generations,” Danille Christensen, a professor at Virginia Tech who studies scrapbooks, folklore, and material culture, told me in an email. “Maybe an ethic of noticing and reusing or incorporating small incidents and things — ‘making beauty from ashes’ (to modify a phrase from Isaiah) — is the kind of hope that people can muster right now.” 

A junk journal is a way of creating something that is yours and yours alone

Americans are awash in mass-produced crap: Influencers are constantly peddling fast fashion; gadgets and products we don’t need and that are destined to end up in landfills; furniture and other home decor that is both cheaply made and weirdly expensive. While pushing back on this can be hard, my junk journal has served as a really nice reminder that it’s possible to resist the commodification of everything and just make whatever we want, using whatever we have, simply because it feels good. In that sense, it can be another version of craftivism, which has been popular for generations and is currently having a renaissance.

Paterson drew a connection between junk journaling and bricolage, a French term that generally is used to mean “DIY project,” but has come to be associated with mixed media and using whatever materials you have on hand. “It’s this idea of an everyday art, of making do, of coping. So it’s not simply about the arts, but it’s actually about coping with everyday life and so on…” he said. “Maybe commenting on mass consumption and trying to do something about that.” He said that remixing widely available items, turning them into something new and personally meaningful isn’t a trend; in fact, it’s something that tends to cycle in and out of the culture as people discover it — and perhaps remember their need for it — anew. You see this in things like ripped jeans, punk, or, more recently, appliquéd or embroidered Trader Joe’s bags (another current project of mine). “Consumption is not just passive, but it can be a very creative act,” he said. The junk journal, then, is “an artistic statement. It’s very much ours. And maybe it means nothing to anybody else. Maybe it actually just looks just like a little junk, clearly. But of course it’s deeply meaningful for the person who puts it together.” 

Furnier, the archivist, pointed out that as our lives have become more digital, they’ve also been commodified and sold back to us — you post a picture from the theater and then start getting Broadway-related ads. A nice memory that’s related to your identity and your relationships has been turned into a marketing opportunity. “It’s almost like we’re reclaiming our data by making it physical,” Furnier said. “And there’s something that feels almost radical and liberating with the idea that you can create something and you can share it in person or you can keep it for yourself, and you’re not going to get a targeted ad.” 

When ownership writ large feels very out of reach and every moment in our lives is a new opportunity for both consumption and for performance, you can still have agency in this very small way. The fact that it doesn’t require you to enrich a billionaire in the process makes it even more appealing. “It’s no great mystery in many ways, especially with the acceleration and the frictionlessness of everyday life and the goal-orientedness…we need these speed bumps, these forms of friction to slow us down,” Paterson said. “And so I can see junk journaling as one of the most accessible ways of slowing the world down and making it slightly more one’s own.” 

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