A few months ago I switched to a paper calendar. Not for any grand reason. I just wanted to try.
And it was good. Better than I expected, honestly. There was something about it that felt more flexible, more natural. I could write "afternoon, probably" instead of picking a start time, an end time and a colour. I could draw an arrow. I could cross something out and still see what used to be there. Nothing asked me to confirm, sync or allow notifications. The calendar didn't want anything from me.
Then, one day, someone asked me if I was free on Thursday, and I had no idea. The calendar was at home. A week later it happened again. And again. Slowly, the thing I liked started to lose against the thing I needed.
I'm back on the digital calendar now.
I'm telling this story because it's the opposite of the one you usually hear. The usual story is "I quit my smartphone and found peace". Mine is "I tried, I liked it, and I gave up". But I think the failed version is more interesting, because it leaves a question hanging: why did I like the paper one so much, and why wasn't that enough?
Everyone seems to be going backwards
Look around and the pattern is everywhere. People are buying "dumb phones" that look like the phones we had twenty years ago, small screen and all. Teenagers are hunting for old digital cameras from 2005 because the photos look worse, which apparently is the point. Notebooks, fountain pens, mechanical watches, board games, film. Sweden, one of the most digital countries in the world, decided to put printed textbooks back into its schools. Even car makers are quietly bringing back physical buttons after years of touchscreens, because it turns out you can't find a button on glass without looking at it.
Every one of these things is, on paper, worse. Less convenient, less accessible, less connected. The digital version does more, costs less and is always with you. That's hard to argue with. And yet.
I don't want to turn this into a critique of people who choose one or the other. Taste is real. Some people just like the feel of paper, and that's a good enough reason. But as someone who works in design, I can't help reading it differently. If the better product is losing, even a little, even only in some corners of people's lives, maybe we've been measuring "better" with the wrong ruler.
Advancing is not the same as progressing
Here is a distinction I keep coming back to. Technology advances: it gets faster, more capable, more connected. Progress is something else. Progress is when life actually gets better. Most of the time the two move together, which is why we treat them as the same word. But they're not, and the analog revival might be the place where they come apart.
When I used the paper calendar, nothing had advanced. If anything, I had gone back thirty years. But something had progressed. I felt more in control of my own week. The tool was dumber, and I was, somehow, smarter.
So maybe the people "going backwards" aren't rejecting progress at all. Maybe they're rejecting advancement that stopped delivering it.
What are they actually looking for?
This is the question I wanted to ask. Not "why are people being irrational", but "what do these old things give them that the new ones don't?" When I read what people write about their notebooks, their film cameras, their brick phones, the same words come back again and again. And none of them are about nostalgia.
They talk about limits. A notebook ends. A roll of film has thirty-six shots. A record is forty minutes long. Then it stops, and you have to do something: turn it over, change the roll, buy a new one. The digital version never stops. The feed is infinite, the storage is infinite, the choice is infinite, and infinity, it turns out, is exhausting.
They talk about doing one thing. A camera takes pictures. A calendar holds your days. A phone, the old kind, makes calls. Every digital tool, by contrast, is a door to every other tool. You open your calendar and three taps later you're somewhere else, and you don't remember why you picked up the phone.
They talk about owning things. The book on your shelf is yours. The ebook is a licence. In 2009 Amazon deleted copies of 1984 from people's Kindles because of a rights issue, which is the kind of irony you couldn't write on purpose. People are buying Blu-rays again because films keep disappearing from streaming catalogues. They're not collecting out of nostalgia. They're collecting because they've been burned.
And they talk, without using the word, about friction. The effort of writing by hand. The wait for the film to be developed. The small ritual of putting a record on. All the things design has spent twenty years trying to remove.
Friction is the product
If there is one dogma in my field, it's this: remove friction. Don't make the user think. Make it one tap. Make it instant. And for a lot of things this is simply right. I don't want to think when I buy a train ticket. Friction there is just waste.
But at some point we took a principle that was built for checkout forms and applied it to everything. Including the parts of life where the friction was the point.
There's a well-known study showing that students who take notes by hand understand the material better than those who type, precisely because handwriting is slower. You can't write everything down, so you have to decide what matters. The inefficiency is the mechanism. Make it efficient and you kill it.
I think my paper calendar was the same. It was "flexible" because it was slightly harder. I had to pick up a pen, find the page, write with my own hand. That tiny cost made each thing I wrote down feel like a decision. The app asked for less, and so each entry meant less.
So maybe the question for designers isn't "how do we make this smoother?" but "is this a tool for a task, or a tool for a life?". Booking a train: a task, zero friction please. Keeping a journal, choosing what to read, remembering your week: a life. And in a life, a little resistance is not a bug.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote that "the smooth is the signature of the present time". Smooth screens, smooth interfaces, smooth experiences. Maybe what people are reaching for, when they pick up a notebook, is simply something rough.
The uncomfortable part
I should be honest, though, because there's a side of this that doesn't flatter anyone, including me.
A lot of the analog revival is, in fact, digital. The beautiful notebook gets photographed for Instagram. The film photo gets scanned and posted. The vinyl is bought online, and according to more than one survey a surprising number of buyers don't even own a turntable. And the "dumb phone" often lives in a drawer, next to the smartphone that's still doing all the real work.
So are we really escaping the digital world, or are we buying an aesthetic of escaping it? Is the notebook a tool, or a costume? I genuinely don't know. Probably both, depending on the day. I'm not sure it matters as much as it seems. Even if the gesture is partly performance, the need underneath it is real. People don't perform a craving they don't have.
Why the digital calendar won
Back to my own small failure. My paper calendar didn't lose because it was worse. It lost because it wasn't in my pocket.
That's a strange kind of victory, if you think about it. The phone doesn't win because we love it. It wins because it's already there. It's the closest tool, always, and the closest tool is the one you use. I didn't choose the app. I just stopped resisting it.
And this is where I think designers, myself included, might be forgetting something. In my field, a product is successful when it gets used: active users, time in the app, how many times a day you open it. The more, the better.
But look at what happened with my calendar. The app got used more, every day. Not because I preferred it. Because it was there. Usage was measuring how close the tool was to me, not how much I actually wanted it. Those are two different things, and our numbers can't tell them apart.
The problem is that the closest tool will always get used more. Always. Whether or not it's the one that makes your life better. So if usage is the only thing we optimise for, we'll keep building things that win without being good, and we'll keep calling that success.
Meanwhile, people keep buying notebooks. Quietly, without showing up in any dashboard. That's the preference. We're just not measuring it.
Something that was here
One last thought, because I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening now.
We're entering a time when any text, any image, any voice can be generated in seconds. Perfect, smooth, and from nowhere. And at exactly that moment, people are getting attached to handwriting, to grainy photos, to things with mistakes in them. A crossed-out word on a page is proof that someone was there. A generated image proves nothing.
Maybe the analog revival isn't about the past at all. Maybe it's about leaving a trace.
I don't have a conclusion. I have a drawer with a paper calendar in it, a phone that knows my week better than I do, and a few questions I can't shake.
What are we actually optimising for, when we make something effortless? Who decided that effort was the enemy? If a tool is always with you but never quite yours, is it really a better tool? And when we go "backwards", what exactly are we trying to get back?
I'd like to think the answer is somewhere between the notebook and the app. I just haven't seen anyone design it yet.
