Embracing the Tangible in the Digital Age

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching JT Chapman’s video essay, “The Importance of Permanence,” which discusses the topic of how having physical things is vital from the standpoint of both leaving something behind and being able to own things that aren’t walled off.

I got the hit of dopamine on a dreary day that I needed when he mentioned that one of the things he does is shoot analog 35mm film to document his life. As an analog film photographer, It immediately perked me up at this specific mention in a video that I wasn’t expecting it to feature at all.

A week later, one of the few gaming channels I follow—Mr. Fruit—also featured a video that I wasn’t expecting titled, “I Tried Learning How to Draw In 30 DAYS!.”

Fruit’s reasoning for why he did this and his discussion of each day’s work were delightful surprises. Even with all the frustration that he discusses (and as a professional creative… relatable), he found that this activity was a great addition to his life, and he’s going to continue to do it.

These two videos really got me thinking about the physical, the permanent, and the tangible aspects that we very much lack as things have gone digital at a breakneck pace.

Why do we have a growing fascination with tangible things when they are expensive to acquire, are becoming harder to find, and more challenging to use than our digital equivalents?

The Novel vs. The Real

Any time a new major trend appears, I’m generally skeptical about it. More often than not, it’s some digital fad that is artificially trumped up to sell us something half-baked. The metaverse, cryptocurrency, and—most recently—language learning models dressed up as “AI.”

This top-down trend usually becomes a fad as soon as people get their hands on it and realize it’s a single kernel of something interesting wrapped in a whole lot of nothing. In short, tech has become a bullshit factory.

Since the 90’s we’ve been so swept up in the tidal wave of the digital revolution making our lives easier and connecting us to each other and the vast wealth of knowledge that the world holds. It’s convenient, it’s novel, it’s genuinely changed everything in our lives.

But as that novelty has worn off, many people have a growing feeling of being disconnected. Having a world of digital convenience paired with a lack of social community just feels hollow to many. We lack spiritual and religious communities, replacing them with coworkers and bosses. and social media barrages us with the “best lives” that other people live, even though they are manufactured to appear that way and warp our view of reality.

This is mentally exhausting, and we’re being so overstimulated by so much information to process that all we can do is look for an outlet. And guess what? That outlet is usually also digital. And it’s been increasingly evident that the things we love are losing that ease of access we once enjoyed.

Games and media just disappear because it’s a tax write-off. The promise of a cable-free existence has increasingly looked like cable. As a society, we’re losing public places we can go, leading us right back to digital spaces to fill our social needs.

So now, our life of convenience has become less convenient. We’ve begun to hit a wall of our own making.

Losing Agency in the Digital

There have been a million takes on why vinyl records have returned, why film photography has had a resurgence, why it’s more important than ever to collect digital media and a whole host of other topics. But this is all missing the actual point. These are symptoms of something else: a lack of perceived agency in our lives.

Now, we rarely ever had actual agency in our lives. But, at least in the past, that was a little less apparent. Being connected to a near real-time stream of how the world is obviously out of our control, this overarching appearance shattered that illusion of agency.

Hell, even our cars can now lock us in them, trapping us.

Think about the last time the internet went out on you. Chances are, you had no idea what to do. This isn’t a flaw in the system; it’s literally the whole point. We’re so reliant on being connected that many have no idea what to do when that connection is severed.

We’ve seeded the things we can get personal enjoyment out of to massive companies where it’s in the interest of investor value that we continue that need. We’re renters by fiat now, not by choice.

Because of this, people are looking to find small ways to seem like they have control over a specific element of their lives without losing the agency to access it. 

Embrace the Tangible

For years, I stopped reading physical books, hated even the idea of watering a plant, and abandoned film photography to concentrate on my work as a designer and art director. Partially this was to keep my head above water, and later it was to master my craft. With only so much creative “gas” in the tank and only so much time to use it, I figured that I need to be wise with my time.

But all of the things I’ve created cannot be visited without the intermediary of a screen. They don’t really mean anything due to their incorporeal nature.

A decade of work and struggling to stay afloat really hasn’t left me with anything I can look back on or even have a desire to. Without that physical, tangible nature, these things might as well be as real to me as a breeze that just floated past.

About a year ago, I again took up film photography after about a decade away from it. I caught that bug in college in my first experience shooting and developing film for a photo course. With my trusty Canon Rebel 2000 in hand, I could take a photo and use chemicals to get the physical, unique image I wanted to work with.

The real magic came after you’ve selected your negative and turned it into a print. Seeing an image come to life under the red lights in the print room was like absolute magic.

That first print was a thing that I made. It was something tangible that you had right then. It had a quality even the best printers in our print labs couldn’t match. It was one of a kind, as even if I wanted to make multiple prints, the nature of light-sensitive materials meant that they all were unique to each other.

This is the same kind of feeling when I turn the page of a book, make notes in the margins, or dogear a page. Even the smell of a book is something that might only be rivaled by the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil. Just like that print, that book in my collection has my physical marks imprinted on it, making it unique from every other book in its print run.

In the same way, the physical work of snapping a photo, developing the film, and printing the final result mirrors why I love my modest patio garden. I can see in every step of the process, from the initial plantings to the maintenance and care resulting in flower blooms and the first pepper, the results of the things that I did to get it there.

With so much that we cannot control, with so much making us realize how small we are and how chaotic and unsure life is, it’s these tangible things that we do that many of us can find actual purpose in.

So go out and find something tangible to do.