5 Genuinely Wholesome Things Happening on Video Calls Right Now

September 11, 2026

Bad news travels with its own press office. The good stuff tends to happen quietly, one screen at a time, and almost never gets written up. Behind the billions of daily video calls sit some truly heart-lifting rituals that people invented on their own, with zero encouragement from anyone. Five of the loveliest, below. Sappiness levels vary.

1. Grandparents Reading Bedtime Stories From 1,000 Miles Away

The sweetest use of a camera ever devised: a grandmother in Ohio, a picture book, and a four-year-old in pajamas two time zones west. AARP's research puts numbers on it — nearly 40% of grandparents were logging on daily or a few times a week to see their grandkids, 56% swear by FaceTime specifically, and only 14% skip video altogether. What the numbers can't capture is the production quality. The book gets held up to the camera, upside down roughly a third of the time. Page turns are announced. And the dramatic voices are mandatory — one grandmother reports that her four-year-old critic accepts no substitutions, and that the troll voice in particular must never, ever change.

Several families say the ritual has outlasted every other bedtime routine, including the ones that happen in person.

2. The Sunday Cooking Call

Different kitchens, same recipe. Adult kids attempting their mother's arroz con pollo while she supervises from a propped-up phone, wooden spoon in hand, issuing corrections with the authority of a Michelin inspector. The measurements arrive by gesture — more, more, stop — because the flour in this family has never once been weighed. Nobody's dish comes out quite like hers. Everyone privately suspects a withheld ingredient, a charge she has never denied.

The tradition spreads anyway, one family group call at a time, which means somewhere right now a kitchen in Phoenix is being scolded, lovingly, from a kitchen in San Juan.

3. Friendships That Started With a Shared Hobby and a Camera

All over the map, people are hopping on video chat to talk with someone they picked out for a shared passion — a fellow birdwatcher in Wales, a chess partner in Buenos Aires who is gracious about winning, someone learning your language while you butcher theirs, half the call in English and half in Portuguese with both sides apologizing constantly. Twenty minutes of face-to-face conversation with a person who lights up about the same obscure thing you do turns out to be a reliable mood repair kit. Cheaper than most, too.

A lot of these pairs end up talking weekly for years. The birdwatchers, reportedly, now argue about warblers like an old married couple.

4. The Long-Distance Best Friend Movie Night

Two couches, one film, synchronized play buttons, and a call running on the side so neither friend laughs alone. The long-running duos develop infrastructure: hand signals for "pause it, I need snacks," a strict treaty against pausing without consent — violated exactly once, during a plot twist in 2023, and never forgotten.

It isn't the same as sharing a couch. It is, by the veterans' testimony, about 85% of the way there, which beats zero by a lot.

5. Veterans' Coffee Hours and Virtual Choirs

Community groups quietly moved their gathering places on screen and then stayed, for the simplest reason on record: attendance went up.

• Veterans' morning coffee calls where nobody has to drive or park
• Church choirs rehearsing in grids of little squares, sopranos perpetually half a beat ahead thanks to lag — a quirk the choir has voted to consider "character"
• A knitting circle spanning eleven states, average age 74, whose gossip is, by all accounts, spectacular

The Wholesome Five, At a Glance

The habit	Who's doing it	The good part
Bedtime stories	Grandparents, far away	The troll voice must never change
Sunday cooking call	Whole families	The withheld secret ingredient
Hobby friendships	Fans of the same obscure thing	Weekly calls that last for years
Synced movie night	Long-distance best friends	Nobody laughs alone
Community hours	Choirs, veterans, knitters	Attendance went up

The camera has absorbed a lot of blame over the years, most of it earned by meetings that could have been emails. Aim the same lens at a picture book or a pot of rice, though, and it does something almost old-fashioned. People keep showing up for each other. Nobody had to drive anywhere. The knitting circle sends its regards.