I see his face (the Lord won’t mind)

If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re lucky if one person is interested in what we’re doing. (Often, that one person is ourselves, but not always!) Yet we’ve been trained for the past twenty years to broadcast nearly everything we do. Each thought becomes a tweet. Each meal an Instagram post. Each outrage a thinkpiece that we hold out for the world. For some reason, we’ve been promised that our own lives are intrinsically important to other people and have diligently held out our lives for inspection and approval.

Which brings me back to the first sentence: we’re lucky if one person is interested in what we’re doing. So we’re setting ourselves up for continuous disappointment—why doesn’t everybody pat me on the head and recognize my genius?!—while offering up our lives to be processed into the algorithms and AI training data.

Bad trade.

A month or so back, I joked that in the wake of The Dead Economy Theory, I lost subscribers every time I wrote about something other than AI or p(doom) scenarios. I tongue-in-cheek joked about a post on fountain pens and nice paper, just to winnow out people here who expect something not on the offer (or not exclusively on the offer, anyway). And, man: I found my people. Apparently, many folks are in for fountain pen and nice paper posts. Hell yeah.

I have some suggestions for exceptional (and affordable) pens and paper, which I’ll share below. Right now, I want to explore the rupture many of us feel in connection. With nearly unlimited ability to reach anybody else in the world, we have an epidemic of loneliness—a loneliness exacerbated exactly by the promise of unlimited connection.

But no: that’s not really what I mean. It’s true, somewhat obvious and banal at this point, but it’s not what I want to exhume. While we’ve been trained by our technology to think of ourselves as self-aware Truman Burbanks, performing for an adoring audience, we have allowed our lives to be colonized, our minds supplicants to algorithms, and voluntarily abdicated our weirdnesses for preconditioned ways of being. We perform, but don’t have audiences, an inverted Truman Show. We scream into the void, which simply swallows all sound.

That’s how I imagine most of us: hooked up to algorithms, feeding us For You suggestions, slowly drained of color, screaming shoulder-to-shoulder into a vast expanse.

I take a great amount of comfort knowing that, in the grand scheme of things, I matter so little that my life doesn’t even qualify as statistically insignificant. But—but!—to a few people, I matter quite a lot. Our age has promised all of us Great Person fantasies. Too many of us have been chasing those world-conquering dreams, or at least lusted after fame, the cheapest and most risible version of impact. This is pernicious not merely because achieving fame is disappointing in its own right (and basically no one achieves it, despite their omnipresence). That quest crowds out something better, something that has always been better.

A year ago, I ran an experiment. I solicited addresses and promised to write handwritten letters. “I have stamps and know how to use them.” The response was overwhelming. I’ve been writing letters weekly, often daily. I still haven’t reached the end of the list of people who sent me their addresses, and I beg their continued patience: I haven’t forgotten!

I sent the first letter, then another, and before I could finish the third, I had a reply in my mailbox. When is the last time you received actual, human-made, handwritten mail? The only copy of that thing that exists, and ever will exist? It is magical. Intoxicating. What followed was a complicated dance, with changing time signatures. One of the loveliest aspects of it was that I had to wait. The anticipation of a reply is nearly as delicious as the paper unfolding in your hand, words spooling out, written just for you.

Can I tell you how wonderful it is to write for an audience of one? To know that it will matter to someone? That you get to share a unique and individual connection with someone?

There’s a whole genre of unplug-from-the-matrix porn. Cliché, now. It’s mostly preachy moralizing. I’m not interested in any of that shit, but I can tell you that this experiment has introduced all kinds of fascinating randomness and weirdness into my life. Letters typed on old, salvaged typewriters and the stories that go along with that. Forthright discussions about health and mortality that would be nearly impossible in open digital spaces. Truly strange stories that I am not at liberty to even hint at.

It’s reminded me a bit of being a kid, when we all had strange obsessions—obsessions that we couldn’t help but talk about with anyone who would listen. I had a friend who could tell you, from memory, anything you ever wanted to know about light fixtures. Make, model, years in production, wattage, color options. He would talk about this shit for hours if you let him, and I did if only because of his enthusiasm. He held forth because he wanted you to love it as much as him. He wanted to share this super cool thing with you. I felt richer after talking with him.

We never lost the tools for real connection. Those tools are designed for the size of our lives, and the digital world we now live in has a financial motive to make us think our lives can—must—be larger than what we’re built to carry.

We’re lucky if one person cares about what we’re doing. One person can be enough.

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Okay, I promised some fountain pen and paper talk. I’m not a collector. I don’t have the nicest pens or the Crane Monarch sheets. You can find all kinds of guides on high-end stuff. Here are some suggestions for good-enough stuff that won’t make your eyes water.

(Note: I have smallish handwriting, so I default to fine-nibbed pens, which also affects my choices of notebooks. YMMV.)

My go-to pens are:

• The Pilot E95s in burgundy/ivory. This is my most recent pen, and I’ve fallen in love with it. It’s not wildly expensive, but it feels like it is. Its art deco styling is beautiful and it has wonderful weighting. The fine nib is excellent.
• The Pelikan M200 in marbled green. I’ve had this pen for ages and have used it consistently for the entire time. My dad gave me a Pelikan Souverän M400 when I was too young to appreciate what it was, and I lost it during a move. The Souverän is a great pen, but the M200 is a workhorse. My only complaint is that I have to refill it often. (Mine is pictured above.)
• The LAMY studio is a wonderful no-frills quality every day pen for under $100. Solid. Not much more to say.
• One last thing: I hate Watermans and find Mont Blancs and the like to be hilariously overpriced. More expensive does not always mean better when it comes to fountain pens. Some of the best pens I’ve written with are in the $150-250 range. That’s not cheap, granted, but that’s not a $12,000 Mont Blanc, either. The LAMY linked above is a great pen. You can get great kit without taking out a HELOC.

I’m going to try to be brief when it comes to inks, because this is truly a rabbit hole. There are so many cool inks. Here are my mainstays (I don’t write a whole lot with blue ink, and never with black ink, so that, ahem, colors my choices below):

• Sailor Shikiori Sasabune. This is one of my two most-used inks. It’s a really nice even-keeled green that’s dark enough to use consistently but light enough to have some character.
• Diamine Writer's Blood. My current favorite. Perfectly named, wonderful to write with. Technically a red, but it doesn’t feel like one when writing with it. Smooth, quick drying. Just a perfect ink.
• Sailor Shikiori Tokiwa-matsu. This ink is just really cool. Green and rust. Love it.
• Sailor Seiboku Pigmented Blue Black. The most conservative ink I regularly use. There’s enough movement in it to be appealing, but, you know, it’s a dark blue.
• Birmingham Pen Co Firebox. This is a local Pittsburgh company that makes wonderful ink. I’d forgotten about them when they moved offices (ironically, their new office is much closer to me now), and my friend Arleigh reminded me of them. (You should check out his substack, The Glittering Eye.) Anyway, this is a rich red that looks great bleeding onto book pages, if you are so inclined to take a knife to your books.

And, finally, paper:

• It took me ages to find my notebooks. When I was in college, the school bookstore stocked these marvelous hardcover quadrille notebooks, the paper a greenish-blue. Engineer’s notebooks. I haven’t been able to find them anywhere else. Their paper wouldn’t have been great for fountain pens, but I still yearn for them. In my search for the perfect writing notebook, I landed on the Yu-Sari A5 Grid Notebook. These a gorgeous notebooks that open flat and have thick-enough paper to marry with a fountain pen. Plus, the quadrille is tiny—perfect for my tiny writing.
• Midori MD A5 Grid. Another excellent option. The Japanese are the best in the world at this right now.
• For my personalized stationery, I default to American Stationery. It’s…good enough. I love the Yu-Sari and Midori notebooks. I like the stationery well enough. Good stationery gets wildly expensive, fast. And I’ve been writing a lot of letters! This gets the job done, and the paper is fine for fountain pens. (You can see the stationery above, with the photo of the Pelikan.)

Neal Stephenson has a great recent post on fountain pens and writing by hand. Check it out. He’s right: writing by hand is good for you!

We know the reason:

Honestly, I’m less concerned by p(doom) than p(WTF?!) or p(dystopia) type scenarios.