Eventually, he started a pinball league in Chicago. “I really enjoy competing, and now there’s a bunch of people competing with me,” Vigeant said.
In a 2023 Teen Vogue article, Aiyana Ishmael interviewed Gen Zers who revisited hobbies they loved earlier in life, from swimming to fashion, as a means of “healing their inner child.” Revisiting childhood activities, in particular, can feel like a chance to reclaim part of your own story.
According to Hollen Reischer, visiting assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo, narrative identity refers to the “internalized, evolving story of the self,” including the past as we remember it, the present, and the future we imagine.
“Returning to a hobby abandoned in childhood has the potential to engage all three of these temporal selves at once: It draws on our reconstructed memory of what the activity meant to us then, it alters what we are actually doing in the present, and it gestures toward some version of ourselves we hope to become,” she said.