ANALOG: Let's Build a More Human World

Last Friday, after dropping my kids at school, I drove an hour north, on the winding Saw Mill Parkway, with morning light flashing between the trees, to the charming town of Dobbs Ferry, New York, nestled on the bank of the Hudson River.?

My destination was the Climbing Wolf coffee shop, where I was meeting Chris and Panio, two co-founders of the Next Big Idea Club. In the next two hours, we got more done together than we have accomplished in weeks of zoom calls, ended it with hugs and high fives, and a refreshed sense of mission and purpose.?

By the time I arrived home, I had spent as much time driving as meeting with the team, but it was well worth it.?

Like so many other companies, we moved to fully remote work during the pandemic, and found that we liked it. Productivity, at least on paper, soared. Fewer interruptions, no commutes, more time with family. It felt like a win-win-win. And yet, in recent weeks, my vague sense of missing the office has turned into a compulsion to brave highways and coffee of unknown quality.?

Apparently I am not alone.?

According to Gallup, around 70 million Americans have jobs they could do entirely from home. But here’s the surprising thing. They don’t want to. Sixty percent of those remote-capable workers say their ideal work arrangement is a hybrid one. Why is that? I think it’s because people everywhere are craving the same thing I was when I drove up to Dobbs Ferry last week — analog human interaction.

For years, we’ve been told the future is going to be digital, that eventually computers will improve every single aspect of our lives. And then, thanks to the pandemic, that digital future was suddenly forced upon us. We traded offices for Zoom rooms, gyms for Pelotons, schools for YouTube videos, restaurants for takeout apps.

“It f**king sucked,” writes David Sax in his new book, The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World. “The digital future we worked to build our entire life finally arrived, and instead of finding ourselves thrust into the liberating, utopian place it had promised, we awoke in a luxurious, dystopian prison.”

The pandemic, David says, was an object lesson in the limitations of digital technology. Yes, it helped us stay in touch with friends, do our jobs, and go to school. But it left many of us longing for face-to-face interactions and real-world experiences. And this caused David to start noodling on a rather provocative question. What if the future isn’t digital at all — what if it’s analog?

The word “analog” conjures up mustachioed Brooklynites, fixed-gear bikes, and expensive audio equipment. But that’s not how David defines it. For him, analog is a catchall term for framing the difference between “the mediated world that we experience through computers and the real one we see, hear, feel, touch, taste and smell when we look beyond our screens.”

In The Future Is Analog, David dares to imagine what the world would look like if we stop fantasizing about technological possibilities and start focusing on what we actually need, because it turns out that what a lot of us need is decidedly lo-fi — a walk in the park, dinner and wine with friends, a few hours in a coffee shop trying to figure out how to build a business with people you care about.

Listen to the episode above, on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. Then jump over to the comments to join the discussion.

Episode Notes

?? Check out David's 5 key insights from The Future Is Analog

?? Get?your copy?of?The Future Is Analog

???Download?the Next Big Idea app