Christine Rosen

It's actually a necessary and healthy practice in daily life that more and more of us should try to integrate into our lives.

I think the first instinct we all have is to say, oh, nostalgia trip, isn't that cute?

It's just a small group of people who, you know, the guy who always wants to only listen to things on vinyl.

But I think this is somewhat different.

I think the search for this, particularly among younger generations, speaks to a desire for tangible things, things they can hold in their hand.

Because if you think about their memories, for example, most of them are in a digital cloud.

Those might disappear.

They're not organized in the way that we used to organize our old-fashioned memories of whether they were put in a scrapbook or a photo album, something you could pick up and touch.

So I think that it speaks to a deeper impulse for those tangible objects.

I think it's also a desire to reintroduce into their lives something that technology took away.

And that's some friction.

Because in some sense, technology has made certain things so easy that we miss that pushback, that response we get from the world when we rub up against something the wrong way and have to figure it out ourselves.

So I see it all as a pretty hopeful expression of

not wanting to totally de-skill ourselves as human beings.

And we need friction to learn.

We need frustration to understand our own approach to things.

And in some small way, handwriting reintroduces that for some people.

And I think that's all for the good.

So it's interesting.

I think when we're all younger, it feels very conformist and oppressive to be told everyone's letters should look the same.