My library buddy called my zine hobby recycling, hit weird

Last Tuesday I was at the downtown branch cutting up old magazines for a collage zine I'm making, and this older guy next to me asked what I was doing. I told him it was a hobby, that I make little booklets about my neighborhood for free. He laughed and said, "So you're just saving the city from waste, that's recycling with extra steps." At first I was annoyed, but then I realized he had a point. I've spent $0 on this hobby in 6 months, all my materials come from the library's discard pile and stuff people leave on the curb. He made me see that the COOLEST part isn't the art, it's that I'm turning trash into something people actually read. Has anyone else had a hobby that felt creative but was secretly just free environmentalism? How do you frame it to make it feel like art and not chores?

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umab351mo ago

You ever notice how the best stuff comes from junk? I once spent a whole summer collecting bottle caps from the alley behind a bar, turned them into a mosaic for my bathroom floor. People called it trash art, but the real kick was that I saved a bunch of caps from a landfill and got a floor that looks like a disco ball for free. So yeah, your zine thing is recycling, but it's also the kind of thing that makes a neighborhood actually feel like a place, not just a spot for garbage. Keep cutting those magazines, man.