📷 the case for analog

Do you ever feel like you’re just mindlessly scrolling away on your phone at times? I mean, we’re glued to our phones more than ever these days. I remember feeling this way now and then over the past few years, and I'd remedy it by taking a step back, deleting social media off of my phone for a bit and returning when it seemed fit (or when I felt like I had life under my control again).

I recently turned 25, and with the growing trend of moving analog, I couldn't help but get sucked into it. It started off with a bullet journal I bought in December 2024. I got myself a Leuchtturm1917 in a pretty little cobalt blue. I didn’t really expect to keep up with it. In fact, I decided that if this book joined the already-long collection of notebooks I’ve half-filled, I’m going to never try this again.

That didn’t happen though. I stuck with it. I finished that book in December 2025. Some time halfway through 2025, I moved the “productivity focused” section to a little pocket notebook (it was easier to carry around than an A5 hardcover notebook). The Leuchtturm became my journal. It felt like a place where I could dump my thoughts and memories into. Something physical and tangible that I can hold, flip through, and remember as being mine.

This got me thinking — what else in life would be better if it wasn’t on a screen? Reading! I always read on my iPad Mini. Even calling it the “perfect reading device”. It had its pros, I can’t deny it that. Finding books was easier than ever, also highlighting and writing notes about each book. All of that went down the drain when my Apple account decided that switching stores meant losing all the book I accrued over the past 6 years during medical school. All of them, gone. Poof.

Reading physical books seemed like a natural transition, but this time I gave myself no rules. Everything I loved about an eBook was to be done on physical books too. I now find the routine of going out to a book store, chatting with the store attendant and finding a book to be so rewarding. Even more rewarding is reading it, anywhere, marking it up, truly making it my book.

Let’s get back to the title of this essay — is this a trend? Is this something that’s going to die off when no one cares to click like anymore? I’m going to argue against it being “just a trend”. At least for me, this new approach (or should I say, old approach), is calming. I think we’ve hit a bell curve with technology. It was built for our convenience. We got sold social media because we wanted to feel more connected to those that we’re close to. Instead, we’re more disconnected than ever before.

Cal Newport puts it very well in his book titled “Digital Minimalism” — conversation and connection are not the same. Conversation, whether that’s face-to-face, on the phone or even a letter, tends to be something that the human condition craves. We want to talk to people. That’s our normalcy. We’re social animals, and we need social moments to feel human.

I’ve noticed this within my social circle quite a bit. We’re mostly 20-something year olds that now prefer in-person chats or phone calls over plain texting. I’ve noticed that the connections I’ve kept towards the conversation end of the spectrum tend to be the ones that transcend time and distance. It doesn’t matter if we’ve only spoken once in three months and we live in two continents. We’re in touch.

So what’s the point? It’s to feel more connected to yourself and others. It’s to be able to think again, write something, read and learn. I encourage anyone reading this to take a walk outside soon. Leave your phone at home. Mentally count how many times you itched to scroll. That should be a wake up call to how disconnected we are in our seemingly-connected world.