2026: I’m Not Anti-AI, and I Still Write Postcards in Cursive

It’s 2026, and I’m still writing postcards in cursive for my postcard club. Analog hobbies like this are getting renewed attention. They surged during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when people turned to gardening, baking, puzzles, crafts, and other offline activities to stay occupied. Now, as AI and automation become more embedded in everyday software, offline pastimes like journaling, gardening, letter writing, and birdwatching can feel more human and more intentional. I’ve also noticed how much more I’m cherishing my nature connection practice.

AI has been steadily infiltrating every facet of our lives. It went largely unnoticed to the untrained / non-techie eye until the past few years, when it began appearing in every nook and cranny of our digital lives, offering to do our thinking and our work for us.

My entire career has been tech-focused, and although I took a side quest to earn my PhD focused on nature and human health, I have always kept pace with trends. I’m a big fan of removing tedious, repetitive tasks so I can use my brain for more creative endeavours, but I have become frustrated that the choice of whether AI is in our software has largely been taken away from us. I’m not anti-AI, but I’m absolutely pro-autonomy and pro-agency. I want technology to support my choices, not make those choices for me.

I want technology to support my choices, not make those choices for me.

AI is polarizing with full adoption on one side, full rejection on the other, and neither extreme is where most of us actually live. What we need is balance: more agency to make intentional choices about how much AI we let into our personal lives, especially since our workplaces and society are already going full steam ahead with it whether we individually opt in or not.

Others navigating this intrusion have raised questions like, am I speaking to a human? And what will happen if I’m mean to this chatbot when the robots take over? It wouldn’t surprise me if we’re seeing increasing adoption of non-internet, analog interests as an escape, and as an assurance that a human is on the other end of the interaction, engaging authentically without algorithms or automation.

This isn’t the first time people have looked for something human amid rapid technological change.

My Analog Escape

My most consistent analog hobby has been being a member of a cursive-only postcard club for eight years. Every month I’m paired with someone somewhere in the world and I write them a postcard in cursive. We all take special care to find cool cards and it’s pretty much the only snail mail I receive that isn’t junk. As cursive isn’t taught enough in schools anymore, I feel like I’m contributing to keeping the skill alive.

A while back, I’m talking pre-AI life, Sean and I wrote a book about Interest-driven living. We never published it, but it’s been edited by a human and is pretty much ready to go. Hopefully we’ll put it out there, since pre-AI writing is a hot commodity now. That book was largely inspired by our friends from the maker and hackerspace world we were once deeply embedded in, and by my time working on connected learning research with Dr. Mimi Ito, who leads studies on how young people learn through their hobbies and peer communities.

As more young people turn to analog hobbies, it’s worth exploring why these offline activities appeal to them in a world dominated by screens and constant digital connectivity. This shift feels less like nostalgia and more like an escape from the growing presence of AI in everyday life.

The “Gen Z is engineering an analog future” piece I linked above captures 13- to 25-year-olds version of this shift. In 2025, more than 11.7 million Instagram posts used the hashtag #nostalgia, while searches for “90s movies” had doubled since 2015. The article describes this as anemoia, a longing for a past you never lived. As a Gen Xer, I find that both funny and easy to empathize with. Gen Z is nostalgic for the pre-digital experiences many of us remember: staying outside until the streetlights came on, drinking from the hose, talking on the phone for hours while the kids I was babysitting slept, making mixtapes from the radio, looking things up in an encyclopedia, using paper maps, and waiting for photos to be developed.

The Line My Son Drew

My teenage son drew his own line in the sand, clearly defining when he won’t use AI. He won’t use it for schoolwork (his school has been clear that they’ll expel students who do), and he won’t let it near his digital artwork. Building his 3D models is something he loves, takes pride in, and is still learning how to do. He recently modelled his own robot and then built it. I’ve documented his process so there’s no question he did it all himself, and so he can showcase his skills for future opportunities.

His stance isn’t quite the same as my postcard hobby, which is one way I unplug and recharge. His is a boundary and a deliberate refusal to let AI touch specific parts of his creative work, on principle, even in places where it’s allowed. Both are part of the same overarching pattern, but they’re not the same behaviour, and I don’t want to conflate them. With that distinction in mind, I wanted to look at the broader pattern.

Are Analog Hobbies Actually Rising in 2026?

We are now seven months into 2026, and I wanted to know whether search interest backs up what the Threads OP predicted back in 2025. I turned to Google Trends, comparing 2025 to 2026 search volume by hobby, in both Canada and the US (I’m a dual citizen, so I was curious about both.).

A quick note on the stats: Google search interest measures curiosity, not participation. Just because more people are Googling “pottery classes” doesn’t mean more people at a pottery wheel. So, this is a signal, not proof.

Analog hobbies with no phone and no tech

This compiled list comes from the comments on the Threads post, along with related Google trends searches. None of these activities are modern in any sense; you’d find the same activities pre-internet, or even during the Industrial Revolution. That’s interesting on its own: is there any innovation happening in analog hobbies, or have they generally stalled? Maybe analog hobbies aren’t stalled so much as evolving through new communities, formats, and combinations with technology.

Maybe analog hobbies aren’t stalled so much as evolving through new communities, formats, and combinations with technology.

Google Search, 2025 vs. 2026 in the U.S. and Canada

I did a quick search using Google Trends to get a rough sense of changing interest in these hobbies. This is not a thorough analysis or representative study, but simply a snapshot of search activity in the U.S. and Canada.

Hobby	Google Search 2025 vs 2026
Birdwatching	30%
Gardening	80%
Calligraphy	30%
Letter writing	20%
Journaling	90%
Pottery	10%
Sewing	20%
Painting	10%
Art workshops	70%
Film photography	100%
Listening to cassette tapes	30%
Listening to vinyl records	40%
Board games	30%
Puzzles	10%
Reading softback or hardcover books	60%
Making a zine	20%
Home repair	110%

The pattern isn’t a uniform escape, and I can’t claim that AI caused it. Economic conditions, home sales, or other factors may also be influencing these results. Still, skill-building hobbies in particular, including Home Repair, Gardening, Art Workshops, and Birdwatching, are up sharply. These activities reward practice and attention, whether it’s repairing something, growing something, making something, or learning to observe and identify birds. That’s more interesting than simply saying “analog is being massively adopted.” People aren’t just reaching for anything without a phone or tech. They’re reaching for activities that engage curiosity, creativity, and the satisfaction of making something real. Whether AI is the cause or simply part of the context, the desire for those experiences is worth paying attention to.

Being Human

That pull toward hands-on, self-directed activity isn’t new to me. In 2012, I wrote about the death of shop class in California schools, which had been cut because it wasn’t valued by university admissions requirements, even as companies like Boeing and Northrop Grumman struggled to find skilled tradespeople. That piece was one of the reasons I co-founded LA Makerspace, a hands-on space built because kids weren’t getting that exposure anywhere else.

Fourteen years later, the context has changed, but the response looks familiar. When AI takes over too much of the making, people lose the chance to remain in a co-creator role, and some of that creative self-efficacy drops away.

Maybe what looks like an escape from AI into the arms of analog experiences is really about control and the chance to decide what stays human.

When AI takes over too much of the making, people lose the chance to remain in a co-creator role.

AI Disclosure

The European Commission’s Article 50 transparency rules (effective August 2, 2026) require labeling for synthetic audio, images, video, text, deepfakes, and chatbot interactions. None of those apply here because these are my thoughts, my words, my personal photos, my screenshots, my life! But for transparency: Gemini compiled the hobby list from the Threads post, created a spreadsheet, and explored search terms, Perplexity sourced the EU rule citation and some of the articles, which I then read, Rank Math made SEO suggestions, ChatGPT formatted the references, and Claude made grammar suggestions which I largely ignored.

References