The new year is upon us… and so is the time for New Year’s resolutions. Are you going to try to pick up a hobby, start a new habit, or just maintain your sanity? Amid all of those possibilities, a new (and slightly-confusing) option has entered the fray… and TikTok has quickly become obsessed with it.
Towards the end of 2025, a TikTok from user @hush.bug went viral. Set to audio from The Devil Wears Prada and captioned “How serious I’m taking this 2026 rebrand,” it leaned into the idea of going overboard with your self care in preparation for the new year.
The TikTok went viral, in part, because of that… and because of one comment buried underneath it. Posted by user @flylikeadove, also known as “Tamara”, it read “I’m getting 365 buttons one for each day because I want to do more stuff and I’m scared of time so I want to be more conscious of it.” This, naturally, begged follow-up questions from other users. When a commenter asked “Yes queen, but [what do you mean] buttons? Like to wear?”, Tamara provided the following answer: “Just to have to see how quick days pass and to remind myself that time passes and I just have fun and to do a lot of stuff.”
Another commenter doubled down, clarifying: “What are you doing with the buttons everyday is what they’re asking. Are you putting them in a jar, are you wearing them[?]” But instead of actually answering the question, Tamara hit them with the following bit of poetry: “Hey so it actually only has to make sense to me for me to do it and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else.” When another comment pointed out that other people just want to know the plans so they can maybe do something similar, Tamara replied: “I don’t know and I don’t have to know okay I just want to carry around a button everyday.”
What Are 365 Buttons?
I feel lucky to say that I happened across @hush.bug’s original TikTok about a week or so ago, by which time Tamara’s comments had already risen to the top of the post. But in the ensuing days, maybe influenced by the madness of the holiday season, the concept of “365 Buttons” has taken on a life of its own. Minecraft jokes, aesthetic posts, and videos of people pitching the idea to their significant others have become more and more prevalent on TikTok. Some have quickly turned the idea into a craft project, vowing to sew a new button onto a garment every day for the entire year. (I will be honest, that project does sound tempting.) Even the official Philadelphia Eagles account got in on the trend, albeit with pin-back buttons and not the kind that Tamara was (presumably) talking about.
On that note, some have also made their best attempts to figure out Tamara’s logic, a task that is only made more difficult by the fact that she was so vague with her answers. The best consensus has been that it’s a unique sort of calendar, in order to visually see the days of the year laid out in a single setting. But there are still plenty of questions within that. Does Tamara simply transfer the buttons from one jar to another over the course of the year? Does every button need to be carried around in her pocket for exactly one day? What happens if you forget or lose a button? And do the buttons have to be the same style and size, or can they be a colorful menagerie of options?
There’s really no knowing, and I think that ambiguity is part of why 365 Buttons has captured TikTok’s heart. No matter how you interpret it, it’s a trend that has a tangible, offline element to it, much less with an item that is often overlooked and under-appreciated in the world of crafting and garments. And let’s be honest, Tamara’s comment about how “it actually only has to make sense to me for me to do it and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else” is a little aspirational, in its own way. Half of the fun of the TikTok trend has been people turning that quote into an inspirational copy pasta or a brat-esque graphic… not just because it’s a funny sentence in and of itself, but because it is the kind of energy that a lot of us didn’t know we needed to bring into 2026. So thank you, Tamara, for getting us there.
(featured image: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
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