On one hand (heh) there’s apparently evidence to suggest that handwriting activates parts of the brain which aren’t typically activated by just typing something out. I can see how that would be the case and why it could sometimes be useful.
On the other, the idea of carrying a little notebook around to jot things down when I have a phone in my pocket, or using a fountain pen for longform text (trust me it would actually help you avoid hand cramps, aside from being less wasteful) all comes across as… intentionally inefficient? I struggle to see intentional inefficiency as anything but pretension. Like it’s all just fetishizing living a more analogue life.
It actually makes the techbro in me think there’s something to companies like Supernote and Boox and ReMarkable making e-ink tables that exist mainly so that what you do choose to write by hand can be digitized, stored and made searchable.
I suppose that’s actually exactly why people tend to journal in physical notebooks? Because what you put down in there will just disappear unless you crack open that notebook again.
…Meanwhile I’m pretty sure a lot of people feel that writing things by hand gets their creative juices flowing. That’s sort of interesting to me, because personally, by the time I’m finished writing a single sentence whatever I was thinking about is halfway gone. If I don’t get it down real quick my thoughts will drift to something else entirely, so when I had to handwrite essays in primary school I’d get completely stuck in a way I never do just typing things.
TL;DR someone who’s bad at empathy talks about handwriting as if everyone else experiences the world exactly the same way, please knock him off of his stupid pedestal
Honestly I find that making physical hand written notes better cements the ideas in my head. It may be because I’m older so I started with only pen and paper which means that’s how I best think, but for me writing and typing are two different tools and I tend to use both.
My wife is that way. If she’s making lists or planning a project or anything else that she really wants to remember she’ll hand write it. For flow, like writing a short story, she’ll type.
I meanwhile lack the handwriting gene entirely. It’s too slow for me and I lose my thought before I’ve had the chance to put it to paper.
Everyone is different! I like to think of them as different tools, so whatever works best for the job at hand.
I’m in my 20s and feel the exact same way, I was one of the only people that brought a notebook instead of a laptop to most my university classes, but I needed to handwrite notes in order to retain any information. On a related note, I also have a really hard time remembering people’s names unless I’ve written it down, which makes meeting new people difficult
I’m the same with note taking, I need to physically write the notes and somehow the information is retained better. Often my notes are illegible, so there must be something in the actual movement.
I’m also terrible at remembering names and it had never occurred to me to write them down. I’ll have to try it and see if it helps with retention!