There comes a point in adulthood when you have to accept that some things are probably no longer going to happen for you. You are probably not going to suddenly become famous. You are probably not going to wake up one morning with a six-pack, although Ozempic has at least reopened negotiations.
You may also never own the house you once assumed adulthood would eventually provide and, if you do, a surprising amount of your emotional life will be devoted to the mattresses inside that said house. As an adult, you are also generally expected to stop playing with toys. And I am not talking about Wordle, or whatever this year’s version of Snake on the Nokia is—remember, fellow millennials?—but actual toys.
Especially the sort of toys the children you now likely have are themselves obsessed with, the ones colonizing their beds and every available surface of your home. And yet, increasingly, adults are playing with those too. In the first half of 2026, toy sales to Americans aged 18 and older grew 25 percent, making adults the biggest contributor to the industry’s growth, according to Circana.
Households without children accounted for 55 percent of toy sales during the period studied, meaning that most of those toys were going into homes with no children in them. Even more specifically, the research firm found earlier this year that “squishy” toys were posting triple-digit growth, helped along by social media, limited editions and, apparently, the fact that human beings find squeezing things satisfying. If you have somehow escaped them, a Squishmallow is essentially a stuffed animal that has been deprived of most of the anatomical features normally required of an animal.
They are extremely round, extremely soft and available as cows, frogs, cats, mushrooms, axolotls and assorted creatures that appear to have been invented after zoology ran out. My daughters, who are 7 and 5, are obsessed with them, which seems entirely appropriate because they are 7 and 5. What I had not realized until recently was how many people closer to my age—mid-to-late 30s, smack-dab millennials—are obsessed with them too.
It turns out that they also really want to talk about that obsession and the collections it has produced. Jamie Bolker is 39, has a Ph.D. in English and works as a freelance editor and petsitter after previously teaching at the college level. She bought her first Squishmallow at a Walgreens in New York City in 2018, while completing a postdoctoral teaching fellowship.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
