Why are we choosing inconvenience again?
Why are we choosing inconvenience again?
Last weekend, I spent a few hours making jewelry out of silver clay with a friend. We both wanted to learn something new and spend a few hours away from the screens.
She found the workshop online and booked it online. Before leaving, I checked the address on my phone. Then I paid money to sit at a table and slowly make something with my hands. I took photos of what I made and sent them to my friends afterwards.
There is a certain irony to that sequence.
We often talk about the return of analog as if it were an escape from digital life.
We want to spend less time on our phones, so we pick up film cameras. We listen to records because streaming feels too immediate. We go to crafting workshops because spending an evening making something sounds better than spending another one looking at a screen.
But most of the time, the digital world is exactly how we get there. I might discover a workshop through Instagram. I hear an album on a streaming platform and decide I want the vinyl. I see someone carrying an old camera online, spend half an hour researching it and eventually order one from eBay.
Listening to Florian Kaps on the curious made me think about this contradiction again.
Florian has spent a large part of his life trying to keep analog technologies alive, most famously through his involvement in saving the last Polaroid factory. But he is also very clear that he doesn’t see digital and analog as enemies. The interesting part, for him, is what happens when the two work together.
Maybe that is a better way of looking at our current fascination with analog things too. We started loving many of them when we stopped actually needing them. There was a time when shooting on film was simply photography. Listening to a vinyl record was simply listening to music. Their limitations were not charming, they were just limitations. And now we have the luxury of choosing them.
I worked in analog photography for four years, and one of the things I always found interesting was how many of the qualities people loved about film were exactly the things digital photography had spent years trying to fix. You couldn’t immediately see whether the picture had worked, sometimes the colours came out strangely, more often something just went wrong.
None of this automatically makes a photograph better. Plenty of badly exposed photographs are just badly exposed photographs, but there is something quite nice about using a tool that doesn’t promise perfection. And perhaps this is also why the phenomenon has already moved beyond analog.
Old compact digital cameras from the early 2000s are everywhere again. Cameras that were replaced because our phones became significantly better at taking pictures are suddenly desirable precisely because the results can look a little bad.
Even the dumb phone keeps returning to the conversation. We already invented a phone that does everything, and some people are now deliberately buying one that does much less.
So maybe analog isn’t really the point. Maybe we are becoming more interested in choosing our inconveniences. I find that idea quite comforting.
We live in a culture that asks us to constantly improve things, including ourselves. There is usually a faster way to do something, a more productive way to spend an hour, or a better version of whatever we already own waiting to be released. Even hobbies can somehow become another area to perform well in.
And then you sit down with a piece of silver clay and make a slightly uneven ring. There is some relief in that.
Crafting and analog in general feels like an ode to imperfection.
You make something with your hands or with your mind, and the evidence that you made it stays there. The line isn’t entirely straight, or your photograph has grain, and the object looks like someone touched it.
Maybe that is part of what we are craving.
Of course, romanticising all of this is very easy. Analog photography is expensive, buying vinyl is expensive. The workshop I went to last weekend wasn’t exactly a free evening activity either. And I’m also not convinced that all of us buying vinyl are doing it because we have developed a profound new relationship with music. Sometimes I look at my own records and wonder how many I bought because I genuinely wanted to listen to them and how many because, well, they look cool.
But I’ve decided I don’t think that matters very much.
If someone signs up for a pottery workshop because it looks cool on Instagram and then discovers that they really enjoy spending two hours working with clay, something still happened. You don’t always need pure intentions to find something you like.
The same digital world we sometimes want a break from can introduce us to experiences we would never otherwise have found. The relationship between the two is much less clean than “digital bad, analog good”. It has probably always been that way.
Florian’s own Polaroid story depended partly on the internet. When it became increasingly difficult to find film in traditional shops, people searching for it online found his business instead. A digital tool helped keep an analog one in use.
I like that more than the idea that we are all trying to return to some imaginary pre-digital life. I don’t want to give up Google Maps or streaming platforms, and despite often having a very strong desire to launch my phone into the distance, I know I’ll probably be looking for it five minutes later.
But I do understand the desire to step outside that logic for a while. To make something without needing to make it efficiently, or to use a tool partly because of what it cannot do.
This is also part of what interests me about the workshops and offline experiences we are building around the curious.
You might discover one while scrolling on your phone, then, for a few hours, get to put it somewhere else and see what happens when your hands and mind have something to do instead.
Maybe looking backwards doesn’t have to mean wanting to go back. Sometimes an older tool, or a slower way of doing something, simply reminds us that progress doesn’t require us to leave everything else behind. And if it looks cool too, I’m fine with that.
- Ludovica
