The Need to Hold

& everyone's obsession with physical media

At first, I was going to call this The Need to Own. But that would be too mercantile, it would point toward possession as status or accumulation. What matters here is not ownership, but holding—the materiality of objects, their physical presence, the way they ask something of you.

Holding on to something. Rewinding the tape. Sliding a DVD back into its case after watching it. Taking pen to paper. Using your hands. Turning the page. Cracking the spine of a book for the first time. These everyday gestures bring me indescribable (almost..) happiness.

And I’m not alone. More and more people seem to feel this visceral pull toward objects, even when they take more time, more effort, more patience than their digital equivalents. Online, there’s a there is a lot of noise about “going analog,” about living as if it were the early 2000s again: journaling, collecting VHS tapes, shooting on film, reading real books. Some of this is about stepping away from screens, from doomscrolling, from the constant sense that time is slipping through your fingers while you stare into the void. It’s about reclaiming attention, about doing something that feels better, slower, more human. About having hobbies.

But for me, it goes further than that. It’s also about needing objects in my house.

When I buy CDs—when I spend hours drifting through cash express stores, flipping through plastic cases, hunting for something I didn’t know I was looking for—I’m already participating in a ritual. And when I finally get home, giddy with my loot, I slide the CD into the player, pry open the case, study the booklet, check for scratches. I’m taking hours instead of seconds to listen to music. And precisely because of that effort, I actually listen.

I’m not tapping pause on Spotify. I’m not distracted by an ad, or by another song recommended to me by the algorithm. I commit to the whole forty-five minutes. The record plays, and I stay.

Effort changes experience.

This connects, I think, to the growing chorus on TikTok telling people to “get real hobbies.” When you knit, you do the opposite of being productive. You spend money on yarn, patterns and needles just to spend hours producing a small square of fabric. It can take months to make a sweater. You are quite literally spending money to spend time.

And in the repetition of each stitch, in the ones you undo and redo, something happens. A technique survives. Your hands remember something your phone never could. At some point, you look down and realise you’ve made this, from scratch. You get that indescribable feeling of holding something that exists because you were patient.

You get to hold.

Why buy CDs and DVDs when everything is online? Because it’s online. It’s not in my hands. I don’t really have it. I can’t look at it properly, can’t feel its weight, can’t place it somewhere and see it again later.

“But it clutters your house.”

Everything I dream of is a cluttered house. Drip coffee on the counter. Yellow interiors. Bookshelves bending under the weight of books. Towers of CDs stacked a little too high. I want clutter. I want objects. I want my space to show evidence of time spent, of care taken, of things held onto rather than streamed through and forgotten.

In a world that asks us to be frictionless, efficient, endlessly accessible, I think this is what I’m really craving: resistance. Texture. The small, stubborn pleasure of holding something and knowing it will ask me to slow down.

And gladly, I will.