If you’ve spent any time with me the last few years, you must have come across my beloved leather journals.
Rule #1 Don’t Touch Them. They are mine. Treat all my journals like broken glass on the side of the street: none of your business.
My journals have a bunch of flaws and people constantly pester me to go digital. “Your notes will be searchable, your work will be backed up on the cloud, and you’ll have your notebook across all of your devices”, they plead.
Not interested (for now). The haters are right; all my blog posts, dear diary entries, thoughts, and ideas could all be put on a Google Doc or a similar note-taking app. It would be safe, secure, and convenient. The only problem is that, if I went digital, the files would be near empty.
Let me explain.
Unlucky for me, two centimeters away from my Google Docs app is the most addicting application known to man: Tiktok. And I’m an undisciplined piece of shit. So 9 times out of 10, while I’m writing in my Notes app I’ll be salivating about how the greatest digital dopamine hit is just two finger strokes away.
My journal solves most of this problem. It even serves as an alternative to using my phone in many situations. I bring it to the bathroom when I poop (ew), to work, to comedy stuff, and even to the grocery store. What if you lose it? What if you spill something on it? What if it gets stolen? In my opinion, I’d rather have a journal filled to the brim with ideas get stolen, than those ideas never come to fruition in the first place because I spent all my time on Instagram Reels.
There are a few more advantages to being analog. The first and most obvious is drawing. Some loser is gonna say, “Well um on Notion there is actually functionality to seamlessly blend text and drawings into the same doc”. Stfu loser. Drawing is better with a pen and paper.
The second advantage is flipping through old journal entries. On Google Docs, one can indeed open one file at a time reading through old notes. It doesn’t, however, pack the same punch as physically sifting through a notebook. The pages grazing the tips of your fingers as they simultaneously make that rippling sound, the coffee stains that you remember cursing at yourself about, and the slow dulling effect the lack of ink had on that one entry.
The last advantage of analog is its permanence. Yes, technically your Google Doc is more permanent than my notebook. But all of my bad entries failed jokes, and questionable ideas still reside within the leather covers. If I hate the last few paragraphs written, I can’t just hit Ctrl-A + Delete, I have to power through knowing that these few paragraphs will reside in my journal as a record of my failure.
But now that I write it out, even records of failure are invaluable, aren't they?
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-Raj