All the Things We Keep Meaning to Do
On analog fall and the small distance between saving an idea and spending an afternoon with it.
By Kara Kasten-Olson, Director of Depot Hill Creative
The weather in Stoughton has very little interest in what any of us would prefer. You can have plans for the weekend and strong feelings about when it’s appropriate to turn on the heat. Fall will proceed anyway. There’s something I appreciate about that. Spend enough time online, where so much adjusts to what you’ve watched or liked, and it can feel good to deal with something that has no use for your preferences.
A feed can get very good at knowing what holds your attention. You open it to pass a few minutes, and an hour later you’ve learned that you’ve been cleaning your shower wrong, your jeans are apparently a problem, and someone thinks you should be earning a second income before breakfast. Some of it is useful. Some of it is funny. Still, it’s a lot of advice to receive when you were just sitting down for a minute.
Now some of that advice is about getting off your phone. “Analog summer” became a name for spending time with books, film cameras, crafts, and other things you can hold in your hands. People have been sharing what they pack in their “analog bags”: a paperback, a sketchbook, a knitting project to reach for instead of a screen. The idea carries easily into fall.
There’s something funny about scrolling through suggestions for how to stop scrolling. I can also see the usefulness of it. Someone shows you what they’re working on, and you remember that you’d like to try it. Or that you already have the supplies somewhere.
Someone who helps with our marketing was visiting Stoughton, and I invited her to take a pendant-making class at Depot Hill Creative so she could get some photos and videos for us. She brought her husband along. When he started pressing flowers into the clay, she found herself getting a little jealous. She wanted to put the camera down and do that, too.
What she enjoyed was being in a room full of people all concentrating on making something. She described it as a relief for her brain. Eventually, she joined in and finished one of her husband’s pendants.
Online, saving it for later is often as far as we get. A recipe, a project, a place to visit. You send something to a friend because you know they’d enjoy it, and they send something back. You can have a fairly active exchange about all the things you’d like to do together without ever choosing a day.
I wonder how much of what we call scrolling is that kind of unfinished business. There are things in those saved folders we actually want in our lives. We want to cook that meal, learn that stitch, spend an afternoon with the friend we sent it to. Then another suggestion arrives before we’ve done much with the first one.
You can learn quite a lot about a hobby this way. You recognize the tools, know whose work you like, and have an opinion about which materials you’d use. Yet your own supplies stay in the cupboard. Something you once enjoyed doing becomes something you used to do, without any particular decision to stop.
And the saved ideas keep accumulating. When you finally have a little time, there’s the small matter of finding the thing you wanted to try. Was it in a message? Did you save it, or just watch it? You open the app to look, and there’s something new.
That’s what interests me about an analog fall: giving one of those things we keep meaning to do an afternoon of its own.
I’d hate for “going analog” to become another thing we feel behind on. Even a hobby can start to look like it requires a new bag, better supplies, and a routine. There’s enough advice about improving ourselves coming through our phones already. I like the thought of an hour spent doing something simply because we’ve been wanting to.
Fall will change some of our routines whether we’ve made plans or not. Somewhere in those messages with a friend might be a perfectly good plan for a Saturday. We could scroll back far enough to find it, or just ask, “What was that thing we wanted to do?”