Two. Friction is the feature

Notice how many of these pleasures make you work: the pencil must be sharpened. The record must be flipped. The letter must be written, stamped, walked to the box and then waited upon.

We treat friction as a cost, the price we pay for the pleasure. Turn it over and you find the friction is the pleasure. Effort makes a thing ours; waiting sweetens it; resistance is how the self knows it is there. A perfectly frictionless life is subtly deadening, because it leaves you nothing to push against.

Friction has a second gift, which is competence. You sharpened it. You lit it. You caught it. You got the fire to take on the second match rather than the ninth. Modern life is extraordinarily good at doing things on your behalf, and every one of those kindnesses removes a small opportunity to be capable. An egg white will stiffen to meringue in a wide bowl with a fork and a wrist, and the wrist will ache by the end, and it will know it has done something. None of these victories will necessarily impress anybody.

But it can be a sheer delight for you.

Why We Love Analogue Before we get to the pleasures themselves, it is worth asking what causes the joy. It helps to know why a sharpened pencil can satisfy in a way that a thousand frictionless swipes do not. Five things are going on, I suggest:

One. Wanting is not liking There is wanting: the itch, the pull, the lean-forward hunger of anticipation. And there is liking: the quieter, warmer business of being satisfied. They are not the same and they do not run on the same chemistry. The distinction belongs to Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist who showed that the brain’s wanting and liking systems can be separated: that you can want something intensely and enjoy it very little, or the reverse.

A great deal of the digital world is engineered, with real genius, to maximise wanting. The feed scrolls for ever precisely so that you are always pulled onward and never quite fed. The skip button is a wanting machine: it answers the itch at once and manufactures another.

Liking is slower, and needs the one thing wanting cannot supply, which is time.

Analogue pleasures tend to work the other way. You finish the loaf. You reach the end of the second side. You come out of the sea. And you feel sated, which is a feeling the infinite scroll can never give you, because it is built never to end.

Why We Love Analogue

It worth asking what causes the joy. It helps to know why a sharpened pencil can satisfy in a way that a thousand frictionless swipes do not. Five things are going on.

TBC

It’s now in paperback.

I read it on kindle. It is excellent and quality summer reading.

Read more, scroll less.