The road paved with parchment
I constantly feel pulled between digital and analogue.
It is somewhat odd that I enjoy and appreciate paper and pen to the degree that I do, especially considering my atrocious handwriting and spelling (it runs in the family!), and yet I do.
As someone who spends their work days clicking and staring at a screen all day, I feel called to physical items that allow me to not have to deal with screens in order to do something.
There's something timelessly alluring to me about pen and paper. A romanticised vision I have in my head of scholars in messy offices, with piles of papers stacked on top of mountains of books, or of old-school architects sketching away on giant movable desks. Maybe if I used pen and paper I could capture some of their ability to just get things done; to do important work. Maybe the direct connection between pen and hand and brain is a cleaner, more natural line than other methods. The thoughts that flow out of me might be clearer, more coherent, more me.
Maybe the paper and pen will transform me in to the kind of person I wish I really was, someone more disconnected from the online world, who doesn't have the compulsion to check his phone and refresh social media apps the second he encounters even a gram of discomfort, difficulty or, god forbid, boredom.
My YouTube homepage is full of people talking about how carrying a pocket notebook changed their lives, and how it could change mine too. I want them to be right, I want a solution, and I want that solution to be something I already find romantic and compelling.
I want all this, but I know I can't have it. That notebook; no notebook, no product of any kind really, is going to change my life, only I have the power to do that.
I’m a technologist at heart. My command of consumer technology has been a central part of my life since I could remember. I was always the person my parents would ask technology questions to. To this day I am the Lehmann family tech support, communing with the horse-like spirits trapped in devices and appliances, trying to make them do the things we bought them for.
And I love having access to nearly all human knowledge in my pocket. It might not surprise you to know I am the kind of person who has Wikipedia open on his phone while watching a TV show. I love to Know Things, I love to Learn Things, and digital technology is one of the best ways to do that.
Digital technology and social media has brought me so much joy, knowledge and nourishment over the years. I would be a vastly different person without the works of people like Hank and John Green, Austin Kleon, Leena Norms and Rowan Ellis to just name a few. I might never have found these people without the internet and digital technology, and what a shame that would be.
But I also have to ask myself: what art have I not seen, what books have I not read, what people have I not spoken to because so much of my time has been monopolised by social media apps?
The answer is, of course, unknowable.
As Oliver Burkeman says about Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken: "you're inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways". And so it is that my life has been shaped by my choosing, repeatedly, to spend large chunks of my life online and at screens. But I can make the decision now, and tomorrow and the day after to pull away from screens, and find the joy in the physical, where it makes the most sense.
This blog was of course written on screens and will be delivered to you online via a screen and I can't do my job on pen and paper alone. But perhaps when presented with two options, just like in in Frost's poem, with the possibility of using a screen or using paper, I should take the road that's paved with parchment.
With a nod to the great Austin Kleon: this is a hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication that was written by Steven Lehmann.