Physical writing envy
I sure wish I could commit to writing with pen and paper. There are very compelling arguments for why one should write by hand. It’s good for your brain! Science proves it! I’ve been in meetings with people who enter the room with a pen and notebook. They seem so much more attentive and engaged than the people typing something in their laptops.
I’ve tried. I wrote in a journal for an entire year, and then a few weeks into the second, before I let the habit fade away.
At the root of it, I feel that if I put that much effort into writing something down, I want the result to be accessible. Mostly, that means searchable. I want to be able to do something with it later.
If I write something down in a notebook, I’m probably not going to look at it again. And if I am going to look at it again, like that nice recipe for lemon pasta I found, I want it somewhere that’s easy to find – not buried in the middle of a notebook from 2024, or was it 2023?
For some people there’s an immediate therapeutic value in getting thoughts into writing, and there I think the act of writing itself is tangible. I don’t feel this, though, so writing for the sake of writing feel too much like busywork.