I’ll be honest the whole “return of analogue” conversation is starting to give me the biggest ick.

Not because the critique is wrong, but because it’s being turned into yet another thing to perform, another identity we need to co-opt, another aesthetic to make look beautiful and another way to signal that you’re doing life correctly.

And there are a few things that rarely get said out loud.

First: true analogue living doesn’t actually exist anymore.

We don’t live in the world our grandparents lived in. The systems, expectations, pace, labour demands and economic realities are completely different. Pretending we can opt back into some purer, simpler time by swapping tools is wishful thinking at best and misleading at worst.

Second: it’s deeply rose-tinted.

My grandparents’ lives weren’t easier because they didn’t own a TV or a phone. They were harder. There was less choice, less support, more physical labour, more rigidity and fewer safety nets. Simplicity didn’t equal ease, it often meant necessity.

So when analogue living is framed as a kind of lost paradise, it quietly erases a lot of struggle.

And then there’s the privilege piece.

Choosing analogue today assumes spare time to research, money to replace systems, space to store things, energy to tinker and repair and enough margin in life to opt out intentionally. For many people, that margin simply doesn’t exist.

What bothers me isn’t people choosing slower or simpler ways of living, I'm of course very pro that. It’s how quickly slow and simple living gets repackaged as a set of “better” choices people are expected to make and how often the responsibility for fixing systemic overwhelm gets handed straight back to individuals.

Slow living, for me, has never been about swapping formats or proving values through objects. It’s about creating lives that actually fit within the limits of time, money, energy, health and care.

Not everything needs to be reclaimed by the individual. Some things need to be made gentler by design.

And when a movement starts asking already tired people to do more, even in the name of resistance, that’s where it loses me.

Sometimes the most radical thing isn’t opting out. It’s refusing to take on one more thing.