this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I hate writing by hand. Typing in Standard Notes gets synced to the "cloud" and also I get daily backups sent to my email. In addition, it's end-to-end encrypted (supposedly, though I'm not knowledgeable enough to audit the source code, although a quick internet search doesn't reveal any scandals, and it has been recommended by many internet users and privacytools.io), and I can send the encrypted backups to multiple cloud services on the internet so the risk of losing my writings are almost impossible, unless there's a nuclear war. Honestly, I don't see why people still enjoy writing by hand, its just too much work for my hands to deal with. But each to their own, I guess. If you have writing on paper, and you don't want to lose it, you'd have to scan or take pictures of every page you want to backup, and you better have great handwriting or else you wouldn't be able to use OCR on it to make the text searchable.