One story we often tell ourselves is that the modern world has made miracles impossible. Once, the story goes, the world was filled with inexplicable wonders — dragons, dog saints, flying monks. Then the gods absconded, or were evicted. Now nothing is unknowable; every phenomenon has a rational scientific explanation. No sooner did people sense the leeching of mystery from everyday life than did they start trying, somehow, to put it back. Every advance in disenchantment has its re-enchanting flip side: hence Romanticism following on the heels of Enlightenment; hence Victorian spirit photography; hence the rise of New Age after the Nixon years.
Re-enchanters tend to have a word for the lost quality of magic that they seek to bring back into modern life. For the Romantics it was the “sublime”; for the Victorians it was “spirit”; for the New Agers it was “energy.” Recently another word seems to be gathering a similar charge: “whimsy.” “According to The Internet, 2026 is The Year Of Whimsy,” one commentator declares on Substack. Social media, as you may have noticed, is currently full of instructional content on “how I add whimsy into everyday life,” “6 rules for a more whimsical life,” “free ways to whimsy-fy your life.” To do these things, you might eat dessert before dinner, deck your room out in fairy lights or buy yourself a little treat, just because. Whimsy is a foreign substance that introduces “curiosity, playfulness and a bit of magic” into the greige everyday. It’s even a medicinal substance: “Whimsy,” one poster testifies, “saved my life.”
“Whimsy” is a word with uncertain origins. The first related word — “whim-wham,” meaning either a “fantastic notion” or, figuratively, a “fantastic object” — appeared in 1529; the Oxford English Dictionary speculates that it might be a “symbolic” word, a silly verbal fancy created in an effort to find frivolous sounds to denote frivolous things. “Whimsy” followed in the early 17th century, and then “whim” a few decades behind it. At first, both of these words mostly referred to trivial stuff, impulsive ideas, rash actions. But as the 18th century gathered steam, a curious new branch of meanings appeared. In these years, “whim” and “whimsy” came also to mean a specific kind of device: a rotating drum or capstan, attached to a rope, that could lower and raise materials into and out of a mine. In a process that words like “engine” also underwent, the innate human capacities that “whim” and “whimsy” originally described were transferred outward to a technology. A power became an object; the fantastical became mechanical.
You don’t hear much about the mine-shaft variety of “whimsy” anymore. The first branch of meanings came to dominate after all: Whimsy became something we see in Andy Warhol’s drawings, Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy novels, high-stepping Italian Greyhounds. This was whimsy as childlike playfulness, openness to new experiences, an improvisational attitude toward life. Whimsy’s more recent evangelists say that these are qualities we need now more than ever. Isn’t life today a bit too mechanical? Aren’t we treating ourselves too much like machines? One moment, we’re eating some kind of goop to optimize our nutritional stack; the next, we’re having a computer write emails for us while we vacantly scroll our feed, letting an algorithm remote-control our attention. “Everyone is a little burnt out,” observes a pink graphic on Instagram adorned with little stars and charms, using one of the master “body as machine” metaphors of our time. “Maybe the answer is whimsy.”
If whimsy is really the answer to our ills, it’s understandable that people would want more and more of it. There has been a lot of talk online lately of something called whimsymaxxing, a paradoxical microtrend where people try to optimize their lives for all the things that resist optimization. While perhaps incoherent in theory, in practice, whimsymaxxing has a specific look. Mostly it seems to involve affixing plastic gems, charms and shiny stickers to everyday objects, often but not always disposable cups. It’s all the more fitting that the whimsymaxxer immediately throws away the gem-studded cup. Whimsy is a kind of profligacy, a revolt against efficiency. Landfills swell and oceans choke with the detritus of re-enchantment.
In a shift that seems part meme language, part sheer accident and part unintentional revival of a valid old usage, people are now even using “whimsy” as an adjective: “ways to be whimsy,” “have a whimsy and productive week.” Maybe this is on some level a consequence of whimsy’s hardening from a quality of spontaneity into a bunch of consumer objects. When whimsy takes on a tangible, concrete form, perhaps the more abstract “whimsical” starts to evaporate out of usage.
But there is also a ghostly residue of whimsy’s other, mechanical meaning in all this. We know by now that anything that can be “-maxxed” is something that a significant portion of our culture sees as quantifiable — truly measurable things, like protein, but also the ineffable, as with a character’s stats in a video game: looks, personality, style. Whimsymaxxers talk about bringing out the magic in the everyday, but increasingly that magic is seen as something to be measured and harnessed. It is no surprise, then, that whimsy slots so comfortably into the jargon of our wellness-saturated culture. One social media guru breaks whimsy down into a series of salutary “microhabits”; another speaks of whimsy as a means of maximizing the return on investment of one’s “inner child.” Whimsymaxxing is presented as part of a “low-cortisol morning” routine. A medical spa shows off a bedazzled box of Botox vials.
Whimsy here starts to look less like magic and more like the mining device, turning in circles, working on the self, dredging some things up from its depths and shuttling others down from the surface. Buy yourself a little treat. Invest in your inner child. Let your impulses drive. “Fun is a medicinal bath,” as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it more than 80 years ago. “The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it.”
Mitch Therieau is a writer and an assistant professor of English at West Virginia University. He often writes about literature, music and digital culture.
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