Why I Still Write by Hand and Talk to Strangers Like a Fucking Lunatic

An argument for slowness, connection, and staying beautifully human in a world gone sterile

I am an incurable Luddite. Not the kind that lights factories on fire, though that temptation burns in my core. I’m the kind that mourns what we’ve paved over, the little rituals that once tethered us to each other, and to ourselves. We didn’t just automate jobs, we outsourced our instincts. The warmth, the mess, the real, all fed into machines that spit back convenience and coldness.

We killed connection for speed, and we’re pretending it’s progress.

Before we bought our house, my wife and I lived in a city townhouse, right on the edge of what the locals call the gayborhood. You couldn’t swing a reusable bag without hitting a grocery store. Kroger around the corner, Whole Foods down the street, but my heart belonged to the tiny Mexican mercado just a short walk away.

That place was a time machine. No self-checkout, no digital voice yelling at you. You stood in line like a human being, watched strangers fidget with their carts, and guessed what kind of meal they were building from groceries on the conveyor. A quiet kind of theater. When it was your turn, a real person, with real hands, scanned your items like a magician, quick and precise. They looked you in the eye, gave you a total, and sent you off with a thank you that meant something.

What a goddamn rush. Like you’d passed some unspoken test of belonging.

And sometimes, if you hit the right hour, you’d get a grown adult at the register, someone older than me, the aunties with laser eyes and zero filter. They’d judge your groceries out loud, ask what you were making, give you unsolicited advice or ask if your mother ever taught you how to cook rice properly. You don’t get that kind of love from a kiosk.

One time, a cashier explained to me how Chinese gift card scams work. Right between bagging my peppers and scanning my beer. It was the kind of knowledge you can’t Google because it’s wrapped in humanity, passed like folklore across a counter.

Now, sometimes I have to go to Kroger. My mercado doesn't carry saffron or coconut milk or whatever rare item I’ve convinced myself I need for dinner. But every time I walk in, it feels like stepping into the future the tech industry promised, and I want a refund.

The place is barely staffed, almost by design. I have never seen a living, breathing cashier in there. Just rows of dead-eyed machines and one poor soul stuck running crowd control. You wait in line, get barked at by a robot voice that accuses you of theft before you’ve even touched your wallet, and the only human words you might hear are a strained, “Thank you,” as if to say, “Thanks for not making this harder than it already is.”

I load my groceries into my tiny green Fiat, which looks like a toy car someone accidentally registered at the DMV, and I spot something under the seat. A black fabric CD case, a zippered tomb full of burned discs and old sharpie-scrawled names. Every inch of its black nylon cover is crammed full of names and numbers. From back when summer camp meant sweaty phone calls to house landlines and praying your crush’s dad didn’t answer.

We talked for hours back then, about nothing. Beautiful, endless nothing. Conversations that wandered and looped and never tried to prove anything. They just existed.

Now, if I call someone, they assume I’ve been in an accident. My wife answers like there’s bad news coming, even when I just wanted to hear her voice. We’ve trained ourselves to panic when the phone rings, and we call that efficiency.

We’ve handed spontaneity over to texting, which is the bastard offspring of real conversation and corporate UX design. It lacks tone, lacks timing, lacks grace. It’s the communication equivalent of freeze-dried food. Yeah, it’ll do in a pinch, but it doesn’t feed your soul.

In a Guardian article titled “No, I’m Not Phoning to Say I’m Dying,” a Gen Z writer tried calling her friends for a week instead of texting. Most didn’t pick up. Some panicked. The ones who did talk? Those were the real connections. The good stuff. But even she admitted that texting was easier, cleaner, less terrifying.

We forget we are visual apes. We speak with our faces, our hands, our posture. Words are only part of the story. How the hell do Italians even text?

I went back to school late in life. Quit a good job, scared the hell out of my parents, and decided journalism was somehow a better gamble. Might as well have said I wanted to juggle knives on a street corner and marry a walrus.

First day of class, everyone walks into the computer lab, each desk already armed with a desktop monitor, and without missing a beat, they all pull out laptops. One screen wasn’t enough, apparently. They built digital bunkers, towers of glowing distraction. I pulled out a notebook. Spiral bound. Beige plastic cover. A5 size. Nothing fancy. Then I uncapped my Uni-Ball AIR micro, the best pen on Earth, and I wrote the name of the class like it was a ritual.

The ink hit the page, smooth and controlled, and I swear I felt more alive in that moment than I had in weeks. The texture of the paper under my wrist. The scratch of thought becoming matter. My brain, my body, my words, all moving at the same speed.

The class began to the sound of clackity clack. A hundred fingers on keyboards, rapid-fire noise with no rhythm. Meanwhile, I was in my own quiet rebellion, dragging ink across the grain, doodling little nonsense shapes in the margins like I always do to stay present. I don’t know how anyone takes notes without doodling. It’s half the damn point.

My handwriting still looks like a forgotten dialect of Sumerian, which means I get to decode it later like some ancient archaeologist of my own thoughts. It’s a second gift. A delayed surprise.

After class, I walked into the parking lot, sunlight bouncing off a sea of hot metal. I was starving. My wife, still at work, would be too. We’d go through the ritual, “What do you want to eat?” “I don’t know, what do you want?” until we landed in the sacred triangle of noodles, dumplings, or skewers.

When the food hits the tables around ours, you already know what happens. Phones out. Photos first. Documentation before digestion. Social media has become our museum, and every dinner is an exhibit.

But no one’s looking at the food anymore. They’re looking at the screen. Trying to capture proof that they were there, that it mattered. In her essay The Extinction of Experience, Christine Rosen says, “We’ve willingly exchanged the experience of the present moment for the guarantee of a future record of it.”

She’s right. We’re obsessed with the record, not the reality.

Behind those glowing rectangles, people are forgetting how to read each other. Eye contact is a threat. Facial expressions confuse us. Emojis are our new emotional prosthesis. Satire is dying because no one can detect tone. We’re all becoming these context-blind zombies, reacting to symbols instead of substance.

The great irony of social media is that it’s not social. Not really. There are no true connections, just interactions. Likes instead of laughter. Comments instead of conversation. We scroll, we post, we compare, and we call it community. But what we’re really doing is screaming into an abyss and hoping the algorithm winks back.

So I write by hand because it forces me to slow down and bleed my thoughts out one by one. I call my friends because I want to hear their dumb, beautiful voices, not guess how many exclamation points mean “happy.”

I avoid self-checkout because I’d rather talk to a stranger than scan a barcode in silence.

I resist, not because I hate technology, but because I fucking love being human.

The world will keep marching forward, arms locked with convenience and automation and sterilization. The Techbros are building their dreamland, a hyper-efficient playground where every interaction is tracked, monetized, and void of soul. But we don’t have to follow them.

We can slow down. We can linger. We can ask someone how their day was, and actually mean it.

I’ll die a Luddite if I have to, but I’ll die in the middle of a messy, loud, glorious world where people still talk to each other and write things down and make eye contact like maniacs.

And I won’t apologize for it.