Analog Living: Learning to Spend More of My Life Offline

Somewhere Along the Way, Being Bored Became an Emergency

Welcome to My Analog Living Series
This series follows my attempt to spend more of everyday life offline, from changing the way I use my home and free time to rediscovering hobbies, skills, dates and simple activities that do not need a screen to feel worthwhile. Keep reading to explore the series.

I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the way, every empty moment apparently became a problem that needed to be solved.

Waiting for something? Check the phone.

Eating? Find something to watch.

Sitting outside? Check the phone.

Go to the bathroom for what should have been a perfectly reasonable amount of time? Come back twenty minutes later with absolutely no idea how you ended up watching somebody restore a table you will never own.

It is ridiculously easy.

And I’m not going to sit here pretending technology is the enemy while writing an article on a website, using a computer, that I will eventually promote on Pinterest.

That would be a little awkward.

Technology has made my life easier in more ways than I could count. I can find information almost instantly, listen to practically any song I want, speak to people miles away and get directions before I have the opportunity to become properly lost.

I like those things.

What started bothering me was how easily technology could move from being something I use into something that quietly fills every available space.

Sometimes I don’t need another video.

Sometimes I probably just need to sit down.

I Don’t Want to Get Rid of Technology—I Just Want More Life Around It

That is where analog living started making sense to me.

Not as some dramatic rejection of modern life where I throw away my phone, buy a typewriter and suddenly start churning butter.

I have no immediate plans for the butter.

For me, it is much simpler than that.

It is about deliberately creating parts of life where a screen does not automatically become the main event.

Reading an actual book. Playing cards. Cooking something without needing entertainment beside me. Going somewhere with somebody and actually experiencing the place together. Picking up a hobby simply because it is enjoyable instead of wondering whether it could become content, a side hustle or another thing that needs its own social-media account.

Even the home itself can make a difference.

A chair beside a window with a book nearby invites something very different from a chair permanently facing a television. A deck of cards left somewhere visible might actually get played. A notebook sitting within reach has a much better chance of being written in than one buried underneath twelve other things in a drawer.

None of this means I suddenly want everything to become inconvenient.

If I’m lost, please give me Google Maps.

Immediately.

But there is something appealing about knowing that technology is available without feeling as though I need to be using it every second that I am awake.

So I Started Looking at the Different Parts of an Analog Life

Once I started thinking about analog living, I realized it was much bigger than simply reducing screen time.

It touches almost everything.

There is the way we create our homes.

The things we do when nobody else is around.

The way couples spend time together.

The hobbies we choose.

The practical skills we still know how to do without immediately asking a device for instructions.

And then there is the bigger question of how to create an analog life without turning it into another complicated lifestyle project that somehow requires buying forty-seven new things.

That is what this series is about.

Some of it will be simple.

Some of it will probably remind me of things I used to do before my phone became capable of doing practically everything except washing the dishes.

And some of it is really just an experiment in becoming a little more intentional about where my attention goes.

I’m not trying to live in the past.

I just think there are still some very good things back there worth bringing forward.