"Analogue living" has picked up enough momentum to be a phrase now, which means it's about two years from being on a scented candle. So it's worth pinning down what it means before it stops meaning anything.
It isn't anti-technology
The people genuinely doing this are not off-grid. They have phones and laptops and streaming subscriptions like everyone else. They're not preparing to leave.
What they've done is narrower and more interesting: they've taken back a handful of specific activities that used to be physical and let the rest stay digital. Reading, often. Writing things down. Photographs. Music, for some people. Cooking. Games and puzzles.
Not because the digital version is evil, but because the physical version is better at that particular thing — and the difference is usually attention. A book cannot notify you. That's not nostalgia, it's a design property.
Why now
Partly it's a correction. We spent about fifteen years moving everything onto one device on the assumption that convenience was the only axis that mattered, and now a lot of people are quietly noticing what that cost.
Partly it's ownership. A decade of things disappearing — libraries that got delisted, accounts that got closed, files locked behind a subscription that went up again — has made a certain kind of person want objects that stay put. A book on a shelf doesn't get a terms-of-service update.
And partly it's just that the internet became exhausting in a way it wasn't before, and people are looking for an hour where nothing is optimised for them.
What it looks like in an ordinary house
Less dramatic than the phrase suggests. A book where the phone used to be charged. A wall calendar that the whole household can see. Printed photographs somewhere other than a folder. A notebook that isn't backed up anywhere.
Nobody's churning butter. It's mostly small substitutions in the places where the digital version was never actually better — only easier to reach.
The part that's genuinely hard
Analogue things require you to decide in advance. The book has to be bought before the evening you want to read it. The film has to be developed. The letter has to be posted, and it arrives on a day you don't control.
That friction is the entire benefit and also the reason most people bounce off it. We're now unpractised at wanting something before we have it. It feels like an inconvenience rather than what it actually is, which is anticipation — a thing that had a real texture and that we've mostly traded away for instant.
Where it's probably going
Two directions at once, and they don't sit comfortably together.
One is genuine: more people keeping a real hour, buying fewer and better physical things, teaching children to be bored without a screen. That part is quiet and doesn't photograph well and will keep going regardless of whether the trend does.
The other is the aesthetic — analogue as a look. Grain filters. Products that photograph like the past but function like everything else. Some of that will be lovely and some of it will be a jacket with a fake patch on it, and the difference will be whether the object is actually used or just owned.
The test is whether the thing gets worn out. Real analogue objects develop a condition. They get thumbed, dog-eared, written in, stained by whatever you were drinking. If a year later it looks the same as the day it arrived, it was decoration.