Going Analog

Raleigh Adams, Logos

I. I didn’t go analog because I hate technology. I didn’t go analog because I think the past was purer, slower, or morally superior.

I went analog because something was wrong with my relationship to time.

Nothing dramatic or diagnosable. Nothing that would have shown up on a productivity chart. I was functioning. I was producing. I was responsive. I was, by every external measure, doing fine.

But I could no longer wait.

Not just in line, or for replies, or for results, but internally. I couldn’t sit with uncertainty without reaching for something. I couldn’t let a thought unfold without interrupting it. I couldn’t let desire remain unanswered long enough to see whether it was real.

Time felt hostile. Silence felt accusatory. Waiting felt like failure.

II. There was a time when waiting was not treated as a problem to be solved.

Letters took days. Photographs took hours to develop. Music required patience—rewinding, flipping sides, listening all the way through. None of this was framed as deprivation. It was simply the flow of life.

We have gained convenience at the cost of tolerance. 

We have lost the ability to wait without panic. To move slowly without apology. To remain inside a process that does not immediately reward us.

Waiting now feels suspect. If something takes time, we assume something has gone wrong. Delay is treated as inefficiency. Silence as absence. Friction as failure.

Waiting has become taboo because it refuses to justify itself.

III. Impatience, I’ve come to realize, isn’t just a feeling. It’s an ideology.

It tells us that whatever matters should be available now. That difficulty is evidence of error. That delay is an injustice.

Slowly, this becomes moral. We begin to believe that seriousness looks like speed. That care looks like responsiveness. That value must announce itself immediately or not at all.

I didn’t realize how deeply I’d absorbed this idea until I tried to stop.

The changes were small and almost embarrassing. I started writing by hand again. I stopped listening to music on shuffle. I printed things instead of keeping them open in tabs. I left my phone in another room—not forever, just longer than felt comfortable.

What surprised me wasn’t how hard it was.

It was how anxious it made me.

Slowness felt irresponsible. Silence felt like neglect. Waiting felt like I was falling behind something invisible.

That was the moment I understood: this wasn’t about efficiency. It was about discipline.

IV. Lent clarified this for me.

Lent is not primarily about self-denial. It is about time. About inhabiting it honestly. About refusing the fantasy that we can hurry our way to clarity, healing, or holiness.

Lent teaches you to wait when you would rather resolve. To sit with hunger rather than immediately satiate it. To let absence remain absence long enough to learn what it outlines. Ash Wednesday does not promise transformation by Easter afternoon. It marks you with the limited time of mortality and asks you to keep going anyway.

In a culture that treats immediacy as virtue, Lent gently insists on delay—not as punishment, but as formation.

V. Digital systems are designed to eliminate friction. Analog systems preserve it.

You can’t instantly revise a handwritten sentence without consequence. You can’t skip endlessly through a record without effort. You can’t immediately satisfy every curiosity.

Friction slows desire, purifying it. It creates space between impulse and action.

That space matters.

Because when desire is never delayed, it never matures. When waiting disappears, discernment goes with it. Everything becomes equally urgent, equally shallow, equally disposable.

VI. Going analog didn’t make me calmer at first. It made me more honest about how much I wanted to escape waiting altogether.

Lent exposed the same impulse. I wasn’t just avoiding boredom. I was avoiding formation.

Waiting is not inactivity.

It is endurance without spectacle. Attention without guarantee. Trust without control.

The most important things in life still require it.

Grief. Discernment. Healing. Maturity. Grace.

None of these can be rushed without distortion. None of them can be optimized into clarity. They unfold at God’s own pace, indifferent to our desire for immediacy.

Going analog, like Lent, reintroduces waiting as something you are allowed to do. It teaches you that time does not exist to serve you.

You exist inside it.

Speed promised me freedom. Relief from uncertainty. From boredom. From discomfort.

What it delivered was fragmentation.

Nothing settled. Nothing stayed long enough to deepen. Life became something I consumed rather than inhabited.

Analog life didn’t give me peace. It gave me weight.

Things took longer. They asked more. They resisted clarity. And strangely, that weight felt like honesty. 

VII. This isn’t about rejecting technology. It’s about refusing total mediation.

It’s about deciding that some parts of life—thought, memory, attention, formation—should not be optimized.

Going analog does not make life easier. Lent does not make life lighter. Both make life weightier.

To wait is to admit limits. To accept that some things unfold only in time. To stop asking immediacy to save you.

Going analog taught me how to wait again. Lent taught me why that waiting matters.

Not passively, but attentively. Not nostalgically, but honestly.

In a world that treats impatience as seriousness, choosing to wait becomes an intentional act—not because it is pure, but because it is real.