Hunter Gatherer 21C
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.
