By Chris Taylor NEW YORK (Reuters) - Beth Martin may be a designer in Charleston, South Carolina, but, in her head, she is in the south of France, touring a 1700s chateau. Real estate site Zillow is where Martin tends to take a break, procrastinate and wonder what she would buy if money were no object. “I’m not really going to buy all these things, whether it’s an $11 million house or a $30,000 vintage Hermes bag,” laughs Martin, 40.
“But I do like to look at them. That’s my daydreaming.” Martin is hardly alone.
There is even a term for her hobby: "Dreamscrolling," according to financial services firm Empower. Empower’s new study found that Americans spend 2.5 hours a day, or 873 hours per year, modern-day window shopping and gazing at dream purchases.
“It’s an outlet for everything they’re dreaming about – picturing their ideal retirement, looking at homes, picking vacation destinations,” says Rebecca Rickert, head of communications for Empower. It’s the opposite of ‘doomscrolling,’ the term popularized by Canadian journalist Karen K. Ho at the height of the COVID pandemic.
Since we all tend to ingest so much bad news all day long, Ho – now a senior writer at ARTNews – became known as the "doomscrolling reminder lady," telling people to put down their phones once in awhile. Ho suggests we also should be careful about dreamscrolling. Fun and distracting as it may be, we cannot spend all day in a dreamy haze about Bali or high-end bathroom r.