According to the picture given, put together the colorful, round, plastic thin sheets and press them together to make a slight clicking sound. This seemingly simple game that can be played by children is attracting a large number of adults in the city to fully concentrate on it, and has led to the creation of an industry that has reached an astonishing scale.
From Yiwu factory to urban showcase
Many factory workshops are located in Yiwu, Zhejiang. Injection molding machines are continuously running, day and night, to produce plastic pellets called "spell beans". They are packaged according to color and then supplied to the global market. According to industry estimates, in 2025 alone, the number of spell beans flowing from Yiwu to the world will exceed one billion. These low-cost raw materials, after careful commercial packaging, appear in trendy stores in shopping malls in first-tier cities.
The store will put the loose beans into beautifully designed iron boxes together with authorized drawings of popular anime and game characters, and the prices can reach hundreds of yuan. A cup of milk tea and a box of spelled beans form a popular "healing consumption" combination. Merchants keenly capture the selling point of emotional needs. For the premium part, buyers often pay for psychological comfort rather than the material itself.
"Pixel practice" for migrant workers after get off work
The main buyers of these products are not children, but young office workers aged 20 to 35. After finishing their busy or boring work for the day, they will spend two or three hours concentrating on piecing thousands of beans into pixel patterns. This process requires a high degree of meticulousness and patience, which is completely different from the rapid processing of information when facing a computer screen during the day.
Some people share their works on social platforms. The works are either a Pikachu or a small flower, and are accompanied by copywriting such as "Concentrate for two hours and forget all your worries." The most common thing that appears in the comment area is a request for a purchase link. This kind of activity gives a direction that is clear and predictable, that is, as long as you operate according to the drawings, you will definitely get a complete work.
A sense of certainty combats modern anxiety
Contemporary society is full of uncertainties, work results cannot be measured immediately, and interpersonal relationships are complex and changeable. In contrast, the Doudou activity has clear rules and precise goals. The position corresponding to each bean is numbered and color-coded, and there is a pixel-level precise correspondence between effort and reward. Such certainty brings a strong sense of control and completion.
According to psychology, repetitive manual work is beneficial to alleviating anxiety. When a person's attention is focused entirely on the simple task at hand, it can effectively block repeated thoughts about events that can cause upset. Pindou happens to provide such a focused scene with low threshold and high feedback characteristics, thus becoming a cheap and easily available psychological adjustment tool.
The quiet replacement of old and new handicrafts
The analogy to "cross-stitch in the electronic age" is often made of beans. In the past, women used embroidery to express their emotions, kill time through embroidery, and create practical value through embroidery. Nowadays, the younger generation uses plastic beans to collage animated images and gain recognition through social media displays. The core form of manual labor is similar, but the materials have been completely updated, the patterns have been completely updated, and the display platform has also been completely updated.
Modern handicrafts such as Pindou are different from traditional handicrafts that carry the inheritance of culture and skills. They focus more on immediate personal emotional satisfaction and social sharing. It removes the restrictions of cumbersome and complex skills, allowing anyone to quickly get started and produce "works." This is in line with people's pursuit of "low investment and high return" leisure methods in today's fast-paced life.
Derived scenarios and potential concerns
The application of Pinduo has gone beyond the scope of personal entertainment. Child development centers in some cities use it to train the concentration of children with ADHD. Some community service centers introduce cooperative Pinduo as a means to ease emotions when mediating conflicts between couples. In these scenarios, it plays the role of an auxiliary therapeutic tool.
However, over-indulgence can cause problems, such as cervical spine discomfort caused by working with your head down for a long time, and irrational consumption caused by the pursuit of collecting a full range of colors or limited editions. Any activity that can provide a strong sense of instant gratification must be wary of its addictive nature. The key lies in whether the user can use it as an adjustment tool rather than as the only way to escape reality.
Will virtualization be the future?
As technology continues to develop, Pindou continues to explore the integration with augmented reality, or AR. After scanning physical works, it is possible to generate dynamic 3D virtual images on mobile phones. Some people even imagine that in the future, artificial intelligence can directly transform user photos into Pindou drawings. Although this adds interest, it also triggers thinking.
If the entire process from design to results presentation is simplified or even replaced by technology, will the significance of hands-on work itself diminish? Its core function of relieving anxiety is probably derived from the slight sound and touch of the beans when they are placed by hand. Regarding this, perhaps technology cannot completely replace it.
In the short term, have you ever tried to do a certain type of handicraft, and then gained a sense of peace and satisfaction from it that cannot be maintained in the long term? You are welcome to share your experience in the comment area. If you feel that this article has inspired you, please give a like to support it.
