Analogue soul, digital life: what the analog revival is really about

There’s a reason the film camera came back. Not the convenience, because it has none. You get 24 or 36 shots. You can’t see them until they’re developed. Half of them might be ruined. And somehow that’s the appeal. You take the photo, then you let it go, and you stay in the moment instead of reviewing it.

A whole generation that grew up with infinite digital photos is paying more for fewer, slower ones. That tells you something.

The numbers are not small

The analog revival looks like a niche aesthetic until you look at the data.

Kodak reports that demand for 35mm film has doubled in the past five years. Film prices rose 9% in a single stretch of 2025 because supply couldn’t keep up. Vinyl records outsold CDs in 2022 for the first time since the 1980s, and sales have kept climbing every year since. On TikTok, the hashtag for analog photography has crossed 333 million views.

This is a sustained, growing movement led by the most online generation in history. Gen Z, the people accused of living inside their phones, are the ones buying the record players and the paper planners.

The Guardian reported that 46% of Gen Z now refuse to use AI tools at work. The same instinct is showing up everywhere: a quiet pushback against a world that became too frictionless, too automated, too fast.

What people are actually reaching for

Nobody misses rewinding cassette tapes. The analog revival isn’t really about the objects. It’s about three things the objects happen to carry.

Friction. A record makes you choose an album and listen to the whole thing. A film camera makes you wait. Friction forces attention. The effort is the point, because effort is what makes an experience feel real.

Presence. When you can’t instantly capture, edit, and post a moment, you’re more likely to actually live it. The analog object keeps you in the room. This is the same thing we lose when we reach for the phone in every quiet moment.

Permanence. A handwritten letter exists in one place. A printed photo sits on a shelf. In a world where everything is an endless, disposable feed, a physical thing you can hold feels like an anchor.

Friction, presence, permanence. Our phones quietly removed all three, and people are buying them back one vinyl record at a time.

You don’t have to throw your phone in a lake

Here’s where the analog movement gets complicated. Most of the people romanticizing it still need a smartphone for maps, banking, work, and staying in touch. The full retreat, the dumbphone fantasy, is real but hard to sustain.

So the question isn’t whether to go analog or digital. It’s whether you can keep an analog soul inside a digital life.

That phrase is the whole idea. You don’t reject the technology. You change your relationship to it. You bring the slowness, the friction, the intention of analog into the device you already carry.

It looks like this:

• Buying a real alarm clock so your phone sleeps in another room
• Writing the morning’s one intention on paper before you open a single app
• Putting a breath between you and the scroll instead of opening Instagram on reflex
• Reading three pages of a printed book at night instead of feeding your brain more content before sleep
• Noticing the small glimmers of an ordinary day instead of documenting them for an audience

None of these require giving up your phone. They just bring a little analog friction back to the parts of digital life that had none.

Friction is a feature, not a flaw

For twenty years, technology optimized for the removal of friction. One tap to buy. Infinite scroll. Autoplay. Everything instant, everything frictionless.

And it turns out frictionless is exhausting. When nothing asks anything of you, your attention has nothing to hold onto, and it fragments. The analog movement is a collective realization that some friction is good for us. The pause before the photo. The effort of the handwritten note. The wait for the song to finish.

This is why a breathing pause before an app works. It adds one small piece of friction back where the designers engineered it away, just enough that opening the app becomes a choice instead of a reflex.

A gentler kind of analog

You can love your phone and still want it to feel more human. You can keep the maps and the messages and still protect the parts of your day that deserve your full presence.

That’s what we’re building Dear Wander around. The warmth of a letter and the serenity of a breath, brought to the device that needed them most. An analog soul for your digital life.

If the film cameras and vinyl records are calling to you, follow that. But know that the thing you’re reaching for isn’t the object. It’s the friction, the presence, the slowness. And you can start bringing those back tonight, with the phone already in your hand.